Companies & Regulation

Until now, the debt crisis seemed to spare the biggest European economy. But the country everybody is relying on starts to meet difficulties to refund its debt. The sale of German benchmark bonds on Wednesday turned to a disaster and the Bundesbank has been forced to hold on to record amounts (39% of the €6 billion Germany had hoped to sell) to ensure the auction did not fail. However, this is not so surprising if one takes a look on German 10-year real bond yield that turns to be negative:

Do fiscal decisions of incumbent mayors affect their probability of being re-elected? Do they consider the fiscal decisions of the neighboring mayors when they face an election? And do these…

William A. Niskanen, chairman emeritus and a distinguished senior economist at the Cato Institute, has died at the age of 78. Niskanen was the chairman of the Cato Institute for…

The Coalition for Tax Competition asked members of the US Congress to cut the $100 million taxpayer subsidy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Citing the OECD’s record as an opponent of tax competition, the letter released by the coaltion argues that US taxpayers should not be funding an organization which works against their interests by promoting a statist agenda.

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.

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.

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.

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…