Category: Focus

“Brexit means Brexit”[1]. For Theresa May, soft Brexit does not exist: an exit from the European Union necessarily means an exit from the European single market. Brexit therefore means hard Brexit for the British government. Within our GEAB bulletin no 103, we have already stated the possibility that the City might find itself “on the […]

Each year in December, we release an assessment of our trend expectations presented last January. This time, we end up with a final score of 27 out of 36, meaning a 75% success, exactly the same percentage as in 2016. Currencies Dollar – End of the exceptional status: 1 « As we saw two months ago, […]

– 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, […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 tiny financial centres of the Eurozone have been rubbing their hands since the British chose to leave the EU, positioning themselves in order to recuperate significant market shares of the City’s activity. A recent study made by the Brussels think-tank Bruegel proposes two scenarios of possible gains for a number of financial centres, depending […]

Here and there[1] we may read some optimistic analyses on the European property market, saying either that the “revival” is here, that the sector is in good health, and so on. As our readers might guess, we are less enthusiastic and suggest the utmost caution in this regard, although the outlook is not uniformly and […]

Every year, LEAP/E2020 is offering you a short overview of the up and down[1] trends of the year which is starting. In addition to the intellectual interest of this contribution of LEAP/E2020, which of course reflects many of our researchers’ analyses over the past few months, it aims at providing a better perception of priorities […]

Each year in December, we evaluate our trend anticipations made in January. This month, we come across a final score of 25.5 out of 34, meaning a 75% success rate; two points more than last year. The year 2014 and the great turmoil caused by the Euro-Russian shock that drove us below the 70% success […]

The editorial GEAB team decided to share, exceptionally, with its readers an excerpt of the as yet unpublished document entitled “Community or Empire”; a book written by Franck Biancheri in 1992. This excerpt evokes the importance for the EU’s endowing with a forecasting capacity to adapt its governance to the challenges of its reopening to […]

The United States has been voluntarily isolating itself from the rest of the world, and not just from a geopolitical point of view. This terrible isolation can only get worse, whatever the result of the presidential election: if Trump wins, it will be due to a lack of foreign policy; in the case of Clinton, […]

It seems that everything is going wrong for regional integrations. South America’s MERCOSUR trading bloc has completely stopped functioning, due to the marginalisation of Venezuela which currently holds the presidency of the Common Market, but that no one is following anymore. Another alliance currently chaired by Venezuela, the much less known NAM (Non-Aligned Movement), is […]

Everyone remembers the images picturing floods, hail storms, mudslides, tornadoes and other disasters that have swept Europe, Germany, France, and Belgium recently, but also those of other continents (America, Australia, and Canada, where huge fires are still raging in Alberta). The estimated damage is reported to be in billions of Euros: 1.4 billion estimated in […]

As part of our series of articles on the United States, knowing the elections are almost here, and deep socio-political changes are most probably on the way in this country, we will dedicate some time to study what the crisis in Puerto Rico says about the solidarity of the US union system. We will show […]

Who will benefit from the striking perspectives offered by the construction market in emerging countries? If we had to trust the forecasts, the period 2020-2030 will be the new golden age of the construction and civil engineering companies… (read more in the GEAB 104) Western real estate: a market of contrasts We have already pointed […]