 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Sign up to receive automatic updates to RealTime Economic Issues Watch.
A website forum in which senior fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics discuss and debate their responses to global economic and financial developments as they occur each day and offer insights that others might overlook.
In the days following publication by the European Union of the long-awaited stress tests of its banking sector, the market reaction—judged by the evolution of the euro, bank stocks, and peripheral spreads—has looked positive. This makes sense. The hundreds of pages of analysis of the impact of the stress tests [...]
On Monday, July 26, a memorable exercise in market power and the power of persuasion of those who favor financial market transparency took place. It came in the form of the last 7 remaining EU banks out of the total of 91 participating in the stress test reluctantly releasing [...]
The European banking stress test results announced on July 23 combined encouraging features with disappointing ones, which explains the paradoxical mix of reactions: Markets rose, even as many analysts denounced what they saw as a sham. Their publication is unlikely to single-handedly bring the interbank market back to soundness. But [...]
On Friday, July 23, the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), along with national EU bank regulators and—crucially—most of the affected individual banks, finally released new data to the public regarding the stress testing of the European banking system.
What have we learned?
Appearances [...]
This week Ireland became the latest “eurozone peripheral economy” to see its sovereign credit rating downgraded by the credit rating agencies. This follows similar earlier downgrades of Portugal, Spain, and of course Greece. But this downgrading trend is actually good news for the European economy as a whole and truly [...]