Lorenzo Bini Smaghi

LBS’s many fans on this Blog will want to read about the controversy surrounding his continued membership of the ECB’s Executive Board. If he does not step down Nicolas Sarkozy is threatening to block Mario Draghi’s accession to the Presidency. The Financial Times account is here. Silvio Berlusconi has called on him to step down, although no definite decision […]

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi: Ireland’s Taxpayers Must Share the Pain

LBS writes in the FT : article is here.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi on the Impact of Basel III

Readers of this Blog will want to keep up with LBS’s thinking on how the new banking rules will affect the real economy. See his recent address to an Italian conference here.  (Surely the correlation coefficient of +0.95 for Ireland in slide 18 is a mistake?)  Overall, it seems, there will be little adverse effect […]

Bini-Smaghi: Whither Europe after the Crisis?

Lorenzo sure is busy giving speeches these days. Here‘s his latest. Some highlights: Recently, a former Irish Prime Minister has even had the honour of front page headlines when he reproached the ECB for not having sufficiently monitored the Irish banking system when it is well known that in Europe the powers of prudential supervision […]

Bini-Smaghi on Sovereign Risk and the Crisis

The interesting set of slides from his London Business School talk is here.