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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled last Thursday that e-books are not allowed to enjoy the lower VAT that “normal” books enjoy in some EU states, and that they have to be taxed at the standard (much higher) rate of other goods. The ECJ’s justification sounds strange and very counter-intuitive. Worse still, it discourages technological progress and greener methods of production.

If you are playing for time, you have to swamp your creditors with proposals how you are going to improve. “This time it’ll work, honest, guv.” So the Greek government is now proposing a secret tax police, where ordinary citizens would be wired with cameras and microphones to catch tax evaders. It’s a terrible idea, especially when there are easier alternatives.

We are continuing our assessments of monthly packages of legal actions initiated by the European Commission against member states. Unfortunately, no information was made available by the EC since our November assessment until the current February package. At the beginning of December, the next had been scheduled for December 16th, but there is no trace of either the December ’14 or the January ’15 packages.

The French government is hoping to help consumers – and increase growth – by making it illegal to manufacture products with artificially shortened lifetime. We argue that proving such case will be nearly impossible in modern technology and the ban will act as a tax, with consequences even worse than the status quo. If governments want to artificially boost production, they should in fact subsidise products with shortened lifetime, instead of banning them.

The Greek bankruptcy of 2010 was the latest impetus for reviving the debate on robustness of governments’ budgets in the Eurozone. It became clear that in order to assess the long-term fiscal health, it is not enough to look at the much used public debt-to-GDP ratio. Additional indicators need to be considered which take a broader picture.

Negative interest rates here, there, everywhere. What used to be taught as “impossible” in textbook is now a reality throughout the EU. And for the first time it even affects corporate bonds, not just “safe” sovereign ones. Why would anyone lend more than they receive, when they can just hang on to cash? We explain.

The poorest poor in Croatia are having their debts wiped out by the government. The motivation may be noble, but the apportioning of the costs is despicable. Once again, government’s power and reach grows, yet it keeps this fact under the carpet. Who’s next?

Earlier this week, Russian borrowers with Euro or Dollar mortgages called upon Putin to relieve them of their now increased interest payments. Banks should bear the costs, whilst the borrowers bore the benefits until now. We show that this bailout is just a repeated story of bank and government bailouts of recent years.

Greece is said to be suffering under crippling burden of debt servicing. However, the official debt servicing is already lower than in other EU countries with much smaller debts. Furthermore, the actual interest payments payable by Greece are close to those that Germany is having to make on its incomparably healthier debt. When the general public learn about these relations, political support for any renegotiation of Greek debt is likely to fall even further.

Transatlantic Trade and Investment negotiations are resuming. Popular support varies across Europe, we identify four distinct groups. Removing trade protectionism will generally benefit ordinary people. However, some protectionism may increase, especially in investment chapters. If governments rather give in to corporations than risk being sued by them frivolously, corporatism will strengthen, not weaken.