Apologies for the long absence. The past few weeks have been extraordinarily busy on several fronts. I think I'll be able to get this p...

Felix Salmon nails it in a post titled "All bank regulators are captured": The fact of the matter, however, is that all regula...

Matt Yglesias , who usually is not crazy: Ben Bernanke isn’t the most important central banker in the world. Jean-Claude Trichet is.  Tha...

Ryan Avent reports on some research from the SanFran Fed that includes the above figure: [I]t's clear what was going on; the ECB stood ...

My post yesterday on how the German banking sector can likely withstand a restructuring of Greek debt touched on, but did not dwell on, ano...

First, the ECB is quarreling with Berlin : The cold war between Berlin and Frankfurt reached a new high last week. Should Germany implement ...

Remember when I said that, by ignoring its legal mandate to not be the lender of last resort , the ECB was the only thing holding the EMU ...

I found Krugman's NYTimes mag article on the economics of the eurozone to be solid. Of course at this point the economics are well-unde...

The question in the title refers to the fact that central bank independence usually refers to the isolation from the political process that...

Wow. Paul Krugman almost had a Eureka! moment : A number of commenters have pointed out that unemployment has been falling in Germany over t...

It has been fashionable over the past few years to examine historical events looking for parallels to the current financial crisis. For obvi...

Felix Salmon is worried about the eurozone: Will Greece be giving up fiscal independence in return for bailout funds or German guarantees? ...

We've talked about the dire situation in Greece here before , and now the situation has come to a head: Greece has chosen austerity, muc...

Now that things have slowed down a bit, regular posting should resume. There's been a lot going on in the past few weeks, but I'm go...

This is a shocking sentence : It has come to this: Germany will almost certainly have a bigger budget deficit next year than Italy will. In ...

Last fall Dr. Oatley told me not to freak out about deflation as price indices fell despite the fact the Fed had dropped interest rates pr...

We've been mostly focusing on the domestic aspects of the financial crisis, but it's important to remember that this is a global cri...

Standard theories of monetary union suggest that they work best when the participating countries experience the same shocks. They work least...

While the US struggles to manage the sub-prime problem, Europeans are beginning to feel unwell. A story in The Daily Telegraph (UK) nice...

The European Central Bank is one of the most politically independent central banks in the world. In designing this institution, governments ...