Category: finance

Currently, the media is marking 10 years of a crisis they didn’t see coming in the first place and questioning experts they did not listen to at the time (at best) or who became experts after its advent (at worst). Hence, it’s time to recall that LEAP/E2020 and the GEAB were among the very few who first forecasted the crisis – in the midst of complete media indifference – with a degree of detail that was barely equalled…

Europe’s out-of-time love for low-cost air carriers Europe is in love with low-cost air transport. Over the past few years the low-budget end of air transport has boomed, globally and in Europe alike. The sector grows as fast as few others. More people than ever choose air transport over railways, despite the fact, that Europe […]

While the wave of buzz and hype around cryptocurrencies, or virtual currencies, is running out of steam among people in general,[1] the movement that has emerged remains robust. The versatility of the technology, its deployment in a digital context which can quickly reach millions of people, its potentially anonymous character and the place it could […]

Following the removal of the last of the bolts imposed by the previous world order[1], and in line with our anticipations, vast amounts of until now restrained transforming energy are now being released along paths that have long been marked out but were previously forbidden. The challenges raised by this transition are immense, but the […]

At the beginning of February, the US stock markets, followed by the financial markets of the rest of the world, experienced a violent correction. In two days, the Dow Jones Index erased its January gains and entered a downward spiral. Since then, the financial world has been looking feverish. The correction developed its own momentum, […]

“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 […]

As happens every year, LEAP/E2020 presents in January a panorama of the “up & down” main trends[1] of the coming year. Besides the intellectual added value of this contribution, which of course reflects many of the analyses our researchers made over the last few months, LEAP/E2020 aims to enable a better perception of priorities within […]

To preface our up & down trends presented in this issue, here are the orientations which we consider structuring for 2018. This panorama, combined with the 33 up & down trends, presents a vision of the landscape we see for this year.  In our latest bulletin, we took record of the end of the “global […]

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 […]

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], […]

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 […]

Without Kissinger to negotiate the petrodollar and put the US currency back to the centre of the global game after the shock of Nixon’s announcement in 1971 to halt the convertibility of the dollar to gold, the greenback would never have been the world benchmark since more than 40 years. Will Trump really know how […]

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 […]

Crypto-currencies, of which Bitcoin is the most popular, are “virtual” currencies devoid of any physical reality, possessing an electronic form and functioning by using cryptographic methods. They are used specially as a means of payment in an innovative decentralised peer-to-peer system. With the Bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies, one can buy everything from food products, […]

As we have already discussed and explained before, the crisis is now taking a more geopolitical form. Does this mean that the economic-financial crisis is over? No one will accuse us of having pretended that. If need be, we can confirm that the crisis is always there, always vivid, and it is in perfect shape […]

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, […]