By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 4th, 2012 Michel Barnier is viewed with a mixture of fear and loathing in the City of London. In the Square Mile the Frenchman is variously regarded as a bogeyman, a champion of dirigisme, and even as the ringleader of a sinister Franco-German plot to undermine London’s position and ensure [...]
November 23rd, 2011 Updated November 24th: This handy interactive infographic shows how sovereign debt has exploded in European countries in recent years. According to the figures, the country with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio for each and every year from 1980 to 2010 was Belgium – and it was only overtaken by Greece in 2011. The [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 6th, 2011 Nicolas Sarkozy had hoped to use his time as head of the G20 to achieve lofty goals like rethinking the global financial system and tackling commodity price volatility. But the French president has ended up doing little other than fire-fighting and his tenure may yet [...]
August 22nd, 2011 There are eerie parallels between the continuing precipitous falls in the shares of European and UK banks and the stomach-churning gyrations seen in September and October 2008. And it’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest fallers, Barclays, bought Lehman Brothers before superimposing its own investment banking logo on the failed [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: August 12th, 2011 The temporary short selling bans imposed by Belgium, France, Italy and Spain in the hope of rooting out perceived market abuse and trying to restore a semblance of calm to volatile financial markets have gone down like a lead balloon in the markets. Investors, industry bodies and academics [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: July 26th, 2011 The package of measures thrashed out by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European policymakers at their emergency summit on July 21 was immediately hailed for its boldness. After months of prevarication the continent’s leaders seemed to have pulled out all the [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 17th, 2011 There aren’t many signs of national bankruptcy in Siena. There is the odd boarded-up shop and the occasional “everything under 99c” store but the cafes are full and la dolce vita goes on. So it came as a shock to find that Italy is being lined [...]
June 17th, 2011 Jim Rogers, the plain-speaking, Singapore-based investor, always talks sense about the debt blindness that continues to afflict the West. In this interview on CNN Money, Rogers tells Poppy Harlow: “Greece is bankrupt and the sooner we recognise that and do something about it the better … Eventually we’re going to have to bite [...]
June 1st, 2011 In wake of the resignation of “le seducteur extraordinaire” Dominique Strass-Kahn, we are in desperate need for some fresh thinking on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Yet the EU is determined to impose the French finance minister and former corporate lawyer Christine Lagarde as the IMF’s next boss (and she has been touring BRICs [...]
May 22nd, 2011 Even several days after the story first broke, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair beggars belief. One of the most powerful men in the world, on whose input it is argued the very future of eurozone depends — and someone who could easily have become the next president of France – stands accused of sexually [...]