Tag Archives: Portugal

Via GEFIRA, Some say that the common currency prevents less productive economies from cheating by weakening their national currencies and forces them to become more efficient and competitive. Industrial production data shows that it is not the case. Italy, France, Greece and Portugal have not only stopped producing more; they are producing now less than in 1990! The decay started immediately after the introduction of...

Via GEFIRA, Some say that the common currency prevents less productive economies from cheating by weakening their national currencies and forces them to become more efficient and competitive. Industrial production data shows that it is not the case. Italy, France, Greece and Portugal have not only stopped producing more; they are producing now less than in 1990! The decay started immediately after the introduction of...

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com The European Central Bank (ECB), creator of the Euro, currently claims to hold 504.8 tonnes of gold reserves. These gold holdings are reflected on the ECB balance sheet and arose from transfers made to the ECB by Euro member national central banks, mainly in January 1999 at the birth of the Euro. As of the end of December 2015, these ECB gold reserves were valued on the ECB...

Summary: DBRS reviews its investment grade rating of Portugal on Oct 21. A cut in its rating would have far reaching implications. A cut in the outlook is more likely than a cut the rating. Many observers continue to tout Italian risks as the greatest in the euro area into the year end. The constitutional referendum that would emasculate the Senate, and end the perfect bicameralism that has contributed to...

The Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund released a critical report on IMF supported policies in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. It questions the legitimacy of certain decisions. The executive summary states that [t]he IMF’s pre-crisis surveillance mostly identified the right issues but did not foresee the magnitude of the risks … missed the build-up of banking system risks … shared the widely-held “Europe is different” mindset … Following the onset of the...

Werner’s main points: The “EU Movement” has been created by the US Government and their secret services in order centralise their influence over Europe. Big business, banks, central banks and the IMF want to excercise their power through unelected officials. The free trade area with the EU is beneficial and will surely be maintained, even in the Brexit case. The election outcome is not so clear as it seems to the...

Authored by Adam Withnall, originally posted at The Independent, The world is becoming a more dangerous place and there are now just 10 countries which can be considered completely free from conflict, according to authors of the 10th annual Global Peace Index. The worsening conflict in the Middle East, the lack of a solution to the refugee crisis and an increase in deaths from major terrorist incidents have all...

Earlier we introduced the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest and deepest tunnel in the world. The 35 mile long tunnel which cuts underneath the Alps helps remove natural barriers to trade and tourism, and is undoubtedly a testament to Swiss precision engineering. Interestingly, as Bloomberg reports, the tunnel that was 17 years in the making and had workers on three shifts working around the clock to build, was built primarily by foreigners. Only 14 percent of the workers were from...

Submitted by Patrick Watson via MauldinEconomics.com, Central bankers use low or negative interest rates so that it leads to more investment. For them interest rates are a consequence of the currently very low inflation rates. Patrick Watson argues in the exactly opposite way: Falling prices are a consequence of low interest rates and not the opposite: We see two reasons why this can be true: High, maybe excessive investment is happening in China (alas not in Europe). Cheap costs of...

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog, Cash is a proxy for the freedom to maintain some privacy in an era of Big Brother repression, surveillance and the suppression of dissent. I've covered the war on cash i.e. the proposed elimination of cash, a number of times, for example, The War On Cash: Officially Sanctioned Theft (June 13, 2015) Our first question should be: just how big a share of our financial universe is cash? The answer is: vanishingly small. Look at this chart...