The huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the EU drown by the boatload in the Mediterranean. They languish in detention centers in Greece and elsewhere. They’re maligned, hounded, sometimes killed. But it’s getting cheaper and easier f…
Since it acceded to the EU in 2004 and the Eurozone in 2008, Cyprus has gone on a phenomenal binge with dizzying bubbles: a bank-deposit…
Austria would fight to maintain bank secrecy, declared uppity Finance Minister Maria Fekter. She is worried. After squashing Cyprus, gutting its offshore financial and money laundering center,…
Bailouts start out small. At first, Cyprus just had a funding crisis; the markets had gotten smart, after years of dousing the country with cheap…
Eurozone countries are falling like dominos. Next: Slovenia. But bailouts – by taxpayers in other countries – keep banks from collapsing, governments form defaulting, and…
In March, six years after inception, the first ECB-organized Eurozone-wide household-wealth survey results were trickling out. But when the Bundesbank refused to publish the German…
Everyone learned a lesson from the “bail-in” of the Cypriot banks: Russian account holders who’d laundered and stored their money on the sunny island; bank…
Bank bailouts in the Eurozone, like bank bailouts elsewhere, have made owners of otherwise worthless bank debt whole through a circuitous process where, in the…
Russia’s booming underground economy and “endemic corruption” with its dizzying flows of illicit money, fed largely by oil and gas, is at the core of…
The state-sponsored chorus about the end of the debt crisis in the Eurozone has been deafening. It even has feel-good metrics: the Euro Breakup Index for January…
