The OECD has come very close to predicting a depression for Europe unless EU leaders conjure up a lender-of-last resort very quickly, and somehow manage to make the world believe that the EFSF bail-out fund really exists. Even if disaster is avoided, the eurozone growth forecast is dreadful. Italy, Portugal, Greece will all contract through 2012, while Spain, France, Netherlands, and Germany will bounce alo ...

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of ...

A Europe-wide austerity drive can only be defeated if UK nurses join forces with Portuguese teachers and Greek bus drivers. Maria is a softly spoken teacher, but she's clearly furious. As far as she is concerned, she is being mugged by the economic and political elite. "I think they are stealing from us," she tells me. "It's theft." Maria Juan spoke to me in the centre of Lisbon as thousands of striking wor ...

The 400 workers of the “GREEK STEELWORKS” (Helliniki Halivourgia) industry, are on strike, united as one fist, for more than three weeks. And they continue! They do not move back, they have chosen the path of honor and dignity, to defend the bread and the future of their children. They do not return to work, in fire and iron, for 500€. They demand, their 34 colleagues, who were laid off, to return to work. ...

By Amie Ferris-Rotman for reuters.com ATHENS (Reuters) - For self-made businessman Dimitrios, the threats began with a phone call from a man who said they knew where his daughter was. At first the 57-year-old window installer kept quiet about the calls. When his car was torched in front of his house, he hid the blackened metal shell from his family. But when he awoke to his wife's screams at a huge banner t ...

While ordinary people fret about austerity and jobs, the eurozone's corridors of power have been undergoing a remarkable transformation.   The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has ...

For all the talk about a democratic crisis in euroland, politicians gave much of their sovereignty away in the past decade A novel sight was on display in southern Europe yesterday: voters actually choosing their next prime minister. Over the past month, the Greeks and Italians have seen their leaders tossed out of office and replaced with unelected technocrats. In the case of Spain, which went to the polls ...

A brief history of the racist/fascist/neonazi penetration of Greece’s new ‘technocratic’ government It will prove George Papandreou’s ugliest legacy: that his last-minute childish maneuvering to maximise his waning hold on power (while negotiating his eviction from the PM’s job), has brought into the new ‘national unity’ government four self-declared racists (some of whom are neo-Fascists and one a neo-Nazi ...

EPA photo The most important statistic that came out of Greece this week had nothing to do with the economy. The EU said that 300 migrants are illegally crossing the border from Turkey every single day. Frontex, the EU Border Control agency which has monitors on the Greek-Turkish border, said that the total number for the month of October was 9,600, representing "an absolute monthly record". It describes th ...

By George Friedman at  STRATFOR Everyone is wondering about the next disaster to befall Europe. Italy is one focus; Spain is also a possibility. But these crises are already under way. Instead, the next crisis will be political, not in the sense of what conventional politician is going to become prime minister, but in the deeper sense of whether Europe’s political elite can retain power, or whether new poli ...