Friday, April 17, 2015

My New Book - Is The Euro Crisis Really Over?

The euro zone crisis is not back --, at least not yet it isn’t.

Despite the great progress which has been made over the last few years, the latest bout of market tensions over Greece serve to illustrate the degree of uncertainty which still hangs over the future of monetary union - will a so-called Grexit scenario will finally occur?

Certainly the most notable feature of the current Greece crisis is the way in which bond yields in the other Euro periphery countries have continued to head downwards, leading many to conclude that the “contagion” threat is now a thing of the past. But doubts remain: how much of this bond yield stability is due to the ECB QE programme? And what will happen if the ECB eventually terminates the bond purchases, or even tries to end them early under a Federal Reserve type “tapering” process? What will happen to bond spreads then? And what about the growing political instability in the region, as unemployment remains unacceptably high despite the apparent recovery.


More details here.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Brief Bio

"Economists hitherto have tried hard enough and often enough to change the world, the real difficulty however is to understand it." 

"In a world where expectations are (nearly) everything, to change our understanding is already to change our reality. Not only that, changing things this way is the most plausible, most cost effective and least destructive way of doing so" 

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Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Speaking Engagements

European Identity and The Euro Crisis: Fiscal Limitations For Federalist Aspirations – ‘Sovereignty Formulas between Autonomy and Independence: Towards a Reconfiguration of Europe?’ Workshop on the Dynamics of Nationalist Evolution in Contemporary Europe,Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool, 14-15 May 2015

The Demographic Challenges Facing Greece, A New Growth Model For the Greek Economy, 3 June 2015, Conference (here) organised by the Greek Chamber of Commerce and the Greek Parliamentary Budget Office

List of speaking engagements continued here

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Is The Crisis Now History In Spain?

Mariano Rajoy is a man who is not shy when it comes to being controversial, as the storm surrounding his stance over the recent Greek bailout negotiations clearly illustrates (and here). So it is perhaps not surprising that he did not notably blush when he informed a Madrid audience recently that "In many ways, the crisis is history." Such was the storm that followed that he was forced to at least partially retract the offending phrase after a meeting with union officials some four days later. "In many ways the crisis is history, but its consequences are not," he clarified.

Of course all of this is mainly political rhetoric at the start of what is set to be an election year, but still, it does raise interesting questions. Where exactly is Spain? What is the outlook for the future? Is the country still in crisis, or is it, as Rajoy 2.0 suggests simply suffering from the legacy of an earlier one? These questions are not as easy to answer as they seem at first sight, nonetheless in what follows I will take a shot at it.
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