Archives
– Iran … Germany, France and Norway have signed a series of contracts with Iran. They are not the only ones in Europe[1], despite the warnings and the risks which potential North American sanctions pose to European companies contravening the US policy[2]. The amounts of those contracts are significant and they refer to diverse sectors, […]
End 2017/early 2018, all major Western Central Banks will be putting a final stop to the 2008 crisis-related unconventional monetary policies, namely the famous quantitative easing policies (QEs) which enabled to provide liquidity to those banks which saw their mutual confidence for borrowing collapse in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Fiscal QE in rich […]
The end of the year will be rich in surprises and escalation risks, as we have been saying for the last two months. Currently, all eyes are on the Middle East, the world’s powder keg, and on the tensions emerging around Lebanon, involving nothing less than protagonists like the United States, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia […]
More than three years after the Ukraine-related Euro-Russian catastrophe, there is no hope of an end to this crisis. On the contrary, the tension inexorably keeps climbing: Donbass still at war, annexation of Crimea by Russia not recognised by the international community,… the eyes are now turning to the Baltic Sea where demonstrations of military […]
General Recommendation – Alert: Large zone of turbulence by the end of the year It is of course impossible to guess what the end of the year will precisely look like. Nevertheless, we wish to draw our readers’ attention to the fact that the whole planet is currently in a general and simultaneous repositioning phase. […]
We anticipated this in May[1]: good news abounds in the eurozone, notably for the economic matters, with a “recovery” making Mr. Trump and Mrs. May jealous[2]. This even encourages the ECB to consider reducing its quantitative easing programme earlier than expected, namely in January[3], before halting it in September 2018. Investments go up, unemployment declines[4], […]
The “peer-to-peer economy” has increased extensively and suffered transformations due to the development of giant commercial players such as Airbnb. The growth of this tourist property-renting website between individuals is indeed quite impressive. Figure 1 – Number of travellers who use Airbnb each summer, 2010-2015. Source: Airbnb. Despite this dizzying curve as well as the […]
Here after, we will try to sketch out the landscape of a series of elections awaiting us until the end of 2017 (in chronological order). Each of these elections reflects the challenges facing Europe by 2019; challenges which come not just from national or regional voters. The success to reconcile voters’ expectations, government bets and […]
Qatar, North Korea, the Baltic Sea, risk of a World War III… and all the military ranting mentioned in the media lately, are issues going hand in hand with the programmed and imminent advent of the catastrophic scenario for the dollar as a unique world reference currency: the Petro-Yuan will be in place at the […]
Regarding the latest events occurring in the Balkans, the Westerners seem to be winning the game against Russia. Thus, in Macedonia the new government of Zoran Zaev is not far from finding a solution on the dispute which opposed it to Greece and blocked its candidacies for NATO and the EU[1]; Montenegro joined NATO on […]
To strengthen the eurozone, the European Commission has just launched the idea of creating products backed by European sovereign debt, a proposal which could be more an alternative than a precedent for the Eurobonds. On May 31, 2017, the European Commission presented its analysis on the “deepening of the Economic and Monetary Union”[1], which had […]
Our loyal readers will not have been surprised by the result of Theresa May’s early election. Not only had we put in perspective a defeat of Theresa May, despite the favourable outcome given to her by the polls; but, from Greece to the United Kingdom, we keep repeating that there is no exit from Europe, […]
Since the Second World War, the moral domination of the West over the rest of the world has been largely based on the undeniable quality of its media, guarantors of representative information of world realities and public debates concerning them. This is not to idealise a system of course far from perfect, but to remember […]
May 19 – Iran: presidential election A serious opponent is now threatening the chances of re-election of the reformist Hassan Rohani. This man is the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raissi, reinforced by the great geopolitical tensions surrounding Iran: war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, involvement in the Syrian conflict, Israeli threats of aggression, risk of questioning the […]
The voice of France in the world seemed to have disappeared (at least since 2007), which is a far cry from the brilliance of French diplomacy in 2003 when the country opposed the war in Iraq. And yet, just when we think that the influence of this country was dead and buried, the French presidential […]
In the GEAB no 109 of November 2016 we wondered if “the euro would survive beyond the year 2017”. Five months later, we wish to deepen and complete our analysis. One reason for the weakness of the euro comes from the political anaemia of the euro zone, which is ultimately far too un-integrated to afford […]
The financial crisis followed by the debt crisis has led to a substantial change in the mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) and to more political provisions. The ECB has acquired implicit mandates to safeguard the euro but also an economic policy which all go far beyond the original objective of price stability. The […]
This expression “chaotic recomposition” seems best to summarise the phase where we currently are with regards to the development of the crisis, a step indicated here as extending over four years and which will include distinct progression phases. It is quite clear that efforts to reorganise the world on a transnational logic have all failed […]