European governments are under pressure to shore up the banking sector in the face of growing worries about the industry’s capital levels, access to funding and earning power in the context of global crisis. Indeed, weakened by their bad sovereign debt holdings, several banks are scrutinized by the credit rating agencies and two of them, the French Société Générale and Crédit Agricole have recently been downgraded by Moody’s.
Yesterday, the US President Obama announced a new debt plan built on taxes on rich. He called for $1.5 trillion in new taxes on upper income taxpayers. His plan would end Bush-era tax cuts for top earners and would limit their deductions. This proposal is following the public debate on the issue of high-income taxes, launched by the investor Warren Buffet few weeks ago. In the following paper, Toni Mascaró reminds us why this approach to taxes and deficits is wrong.
The eurozone’s third-largest economy is being sucked deeper into the sovereign debt crisis, since one of the major credit rating agencies downgraded yesterday its credit rating. S&P downgraded Italy to “A/A-1” from a “A+/A-1+” grade because of “Italy’s weakening economic growth prospects”, with a negative outlook, meaning further downgrades are possible. The move – S&P’s first downgrade of Italy since 2006 – places S&P’s rating on Italy three notches below that of Moody’s, the rating agency that many had expected to cut first.
The French Minister of Finance, François Baroin, concluded the G7 meeting in Marseille with a statement that an equilibrium had been found between the necessity for fiscal consolidation and the necessity to avoid a recession. What kind of equilibrium is he talking about and is this equilibrium stable?
The discussions in Marseille started on a fairly correct assessment of the situation: one needs to tackle the sovereign debts crisis and the global economy (and in particular western economies) is slowing down.
According to the New York Times, President Obama will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year. The investor Warren Buffett inspired…
Suspected to be too vulnerable because of their “Greec holdings” two of the biggest French banks, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole have been downgraded by the credit rating agency Moody’s.
The French bank BNP Paribas published a disclaimer to this article signed by our Director of development Nicolas Lecaussin and published in the Wall Street Journal. The paper is mentioning the difficulties of some of the French banks, including BNP.
IREF’s Director for Europe Pierre Garello has been invited to speek about public debt on Bloomberg TV. You can see the interview here.
is the number of new regulatory actions in the works in the United States. Even before those 4,257 new regulations go into effect, the Federal Register shows more than 81,000…
It seems that the forecast of a 3.5% decrease in Greece GDP in 2011 was too optimistic. The finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said last week that the output is likely…
