What’s at stake: Inequality is again a hot topic in the blogosphere. While the early focus of that debate was about the role of inequality in fostering financial crises (see this review from 2011), the debate moved away from short-term macroeconomic issues for some time with the discussion about capital-biased technical change and the rise of robots (see here). That time was short, however, as the latest round of discussion has been about the role that inequality might play in holding back the recovery. Read more
Bruegel blog
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Blogs review: Inequality and the recovery
1st February 2013
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(Slowly) back to normal in the Eurozone?
31st January 2013
Private capital is returning to the distressed Eurozone countries and sovereign bonds. 2012 might be remembered as the year in which two “ends of the world” were luckily averted: one, thanks to the wrong intuition of a Mayan forecaster; the other one, thanks to the right intuition of a European central banker. Read more
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Charts of the week: funding costs keep coming down in the wave of euro optimism
31st January 2013
Funding costs in the euro area have continued to decrease since Mario Draghi’s July announcement. This blog post updates our previous data covering the insurance cost of the 5 major financial and non-financial corporations and the governments of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Read more
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„Flexibilität geht vor Größe“
30th January 2013
Interview mit Bruegel-Forscherin Benedicta Marzinotto über das künftige EU-Rahmenbudget. Read more
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Kein schmerzfreier Ausweg
30th January 2013
Das fiskalische Kliff in den USA können wir vergessen. Das eigentliche Problem ist der Schuldenberg - in Amerika, aber auch in Europa. Die Aufgabe, die öffentliche Verschuldung in den entwickelten Länder auf ein verkraftbares Niveau zu verringern, wirkt geradezu entmutigend. Read more
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Wie alles anfing
30th January 2013
„Ich habe mich nicht für jede französische, deutsche, oder deutsch-französische Initiative begeistert, aber diese hier war die Unterstützung wert“. Mit diesen für ihn typischen Worten stellte der erste Chairman Mario Monti den Thinktank Bruegel am 18. Januar 2005 der Presse vor. Read more
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UPS-TNT: the eternal struggle between harm and efficiencies
30th January 2013
After Olympic/Aegean and Deutsche Börse/NYSE, today’s decision on UPS/TNT is Joaquin Almunia’s third merger prohibition since he became the European Union's competition chief in 2010. Mr Almunia’s predecessor as competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, ended her five-year mandate having barred two mergers. Read more
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Will Europe pay for Japan?
28th January 2013
As the Bank of Japan is rolling out its new programme of quantitative easing, a significant debate about the impact on Europe is emerging. Is Japan engaging in a “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy? Is Europe paying the price as other central banks are responding? Jean-Claude Juncker has already announced that the euro is overvalued while Jens Weidmann sees global central bank independence endangered. Let’s first look at the facts. Read more
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Yen at war
25th January 2013
Talks about currency wars have resurged since the recently elected Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared war on deflation, using the heavy armament of fiscal stimulus and monetary easing. His moves have given rise to much controversy; see eg the recent Bruegel blog review and a video interview with Professor Mitsuhiro Fukao from Keio University. As a result, the yen has depreciated sharply recent weeks. But how do the current yen exchange rates look like in a historical perspective? Figure 1 shows that even after a sharp recent depreciation of the yen, its rates against some major currencies are not weak compared to the past two decades. The 25 January 2013 rate of 91 against the US dollar is still… Read more
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Blogs review: A bird’s eye view on Bruegel’s research in the crisis
25th January 2013
What’s at stake: On 22 January 2003, the idea of setting up what would become Bruegel had been given a strong impetus by the Chirac-Schröder declaration issued on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty. Ten years after that first impulse, Bruegel has been ranked as 1st think-tank in Western Europe, 2nd outside the US, and 1st worldwide in International Economic Policy in the 2012 Global Go To Think Tanks Report. In the spirit of the Stability and Growth Pact, we decided to grant an exception the rules governing our blogs review and survey some of our very own publications for those of you (especially in the blogosphere since we were pretty late at joining the dance) who may have missed these. Read more