The advisory scientific committee to the ESRB has released a report on the European Banking sector here. (Link fixed.)
Moore Capital is shrinking – Louis Bacon is profiled here.
Landon Thomas outlines some of the reform ideas doing the rounds in policy circles and profiles some of the key participants in this NYT article. He includes the ESBies idea proposed by our euro-nomics group and a member of our group Markus Brunnermeier, as well as Daniel Gros and Graham Bishop.
I am not entirely sure if it belongs in a post with this title heading but Hans-Werner Sinn makes his own proposal in this FT op-ed.
Last week’s bond-stravaganza was very welcome and, for once, a relatively good news story. The effects of the return to the bond markets by Ireland can be seen below. In the figure below, country by country and relative one to the other, you’re looking at changes in indicative yields for 10 year bonds (Ireland actually has an 8 year bond, but let that pass) by European country. Green is bad on the horizontal, but good on the vertical, in terms of spread differential vs other countries (ht Eoin B for the clarification). Not much else to say really, except you should click on the image for a bigger and easier to read table.
I spent a few hours today revising and updating this paper, and was both astonished, and not surprised at all, to see the extent to which trust in the EU and its institutions collapsed in 2011. The figures below show the percentage of respondents in Eurobarometer surveys saying they trusted the institution in question, minus the percentage who said they didn’t trust it. The decline in 2011 is really quite dramatic. I am sure that the usual suspects will tell us that what Europe obviously needs is a better communications strategy. Personally, I think that less destructive economic policies would have a bigger impact.
(Source: Eurobarometer)