LATE one night in September 2008, as the financial world trembled,Josef Ackermannreceived an urgent call from Berlin. On the line was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She needed his help — now. A big German bank was about to collapse, much the way Lehman Brothers had only days before. It was 12:45 a.m. and shaky financial markets were about to open across Asia. Fear was in the air. Mrs. Merkel asked wh ...

By Mathieu von Rohr and Helene Zuber Any real revolution in Paris has to include the storming of the Bastille. Which explains why 200 young demonstrators are sitting in the shade of the trees at Place de la Bastille on this Thursday evening, wondering how to go about staging such a revolution. Their numbers had already swelled to more than 2,000 by the Sunday before, when they had occupied the entrance to t ...

By Jérôme E. Roos In just three years, Iceland went from collapse to revolution and back to growth. What can Spain and Greece learn from the Icelandic experience and its embrace of direct democracy? Just two or three years after its economy and government collapsed, Iceland is bouncing back with remarkable strength. This week, the small island nation earned praise from foreign investors despite allowing its ...

By Vidya Ram London, Dec. 10 With all the focus on the crisis in the euro zone and whether Spain and Portugal could follow Ireland and Greece in turning to the International Monetary Fund, it is easy to forget about one of the first nations to fall victim to the financial crisis – Iceland. For a while the country was the symbol of the financial crisis, as it allowed its banking system, lumbered under huge f ...

I was just asked to prepare a shortened version (600 words) of the Modest Proposal for publication in the UK Government Gazette. Since some of you may be interested in a handier, punchier version, here it is: It is now abundantly clear that each and every response by the eurozone to the galloping sovereign debt crisis has been consistently underwhelming. The reason is simple: The eurozone is facing an escal ...

‎"...But the reality is just the opposite: creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game". Learn more.   The latest economic data have dashed any hope of a quick end to America’s job drou ...

Today is the deadline for nominations in the race for the IMF leadership, and I have put forward a radically alternative candidate to do the job: me. I am a French economics lecturer and have been the co-chair of the association Attac, an international organisation and network in the global justice movement, for four years. Attac is present in more than 40 countries worldwide, and has tens of thousands of a ...

Investment analyst Marc Faber explains in short the implications of sovereign debt for economies and societies worldwide: http://bit.ly/jynblm "Usually before countries default they'll print money. Then you'll have hyperinflation and that destroys essentially the middle class and the working class and benefits, say...I don't want to pick on Goldman Sachs, but it benefits the financial wizards, the speculato ...

I am not quite sure if this is an exageration but definitely it is worth reading it. My non Greek friends, I apologise, but the article is in Greek. Are we having a coup? ...

EUI Working Paper, 2010 - "...Europe therefore needs a new political debate about how much it wants to allow markets to determine the fate of its citizens and countries". Learn more. http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/14674/RSCAS_2010_77.pdf ...