After what seemed to be an everlasting series of meetings and 11th hour negotiations, Greece finally defaulted on its debt to the IMF this Tuesday. The European Union, set up to secure peace and prosperity across the continent, is experiencing quite the opposite. The IMF’s exhausted patience and Greece’s exhausting funds have created more chaos.… [Read More]
British banking has escaped disruption or any real dose of creative destruction for an astonishingly long time. Even after the financial crisis, five banks continue to dominate the financial market comfortably. Their size allows them to make mistakes (e.g. miss-selling PPI) with little real market repercussions. Battered reputations and low customer satisfaction rarely impact business,… [Read More]
A minority of EU Outers are presenting views online and in the papers that could be read as gloating over Greece. Greece’s imminent default and likely exit from the single currency is an all-too-tempting chance to say ‘I told you so!’ The events that brought Greece to this position are held up, variously, as proof… [Read More]
A crucial Eurogroup meeting last Saturday crushed hopes of a deal before tomorrow’s deadline to unlock the remaining €7.2bn of Greece’s bailout programme. This last tranche of funding would enable Greece to repay €1.6bn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday. Without the lifeline of the ECB’s emergency funding, a Greek default has now become… [Read More]
Prime Minister David Cameron’s much anticipated speech on his renegotiation demands for Britain’s EU membership took a back seat to dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis at an EU summit last night. The talks concluded with an agreement to allow EU member states to opt into reallocating migrants, and the scheme will be finalised by the… [Read More]
Following the demise of communist rule in the bloodless Velvet Revolution of 1989, tension within federal Czechoslovakia grew between Czechs and Slovaks. Both saw the rise of nationalist parties which came to a head when President Václav Havel stood for re-election unopposed, but was blocked by Slovak deputies in their chamber of parliament. The Slovak… [Read More]
Justice Collins’ ruling that an electronic tag must be removed from a 39-year old Somali imam is another step in the direction of judicial supremacism at the expense of parliamentary democracy. DD, as the court called him, is believed to have helped the terrorist group al-Shabaab to recruit vulnerable young people. Justice Collins ruled that… [Read More]
Another round of Greek bailout negotiations has been agreed for next Monday after talks broke down yesterday. Greece has less than two weeks to pay back an IMF loan of €1.6bn, or risk default. The troika of the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission, are unwilling to hand out more loans unless Greece agrees to… [Read More]
London is widely regarded as the tech capital of Europe with very good reason. It has seen a phenomenal boom of activity over the past decade. According to Douglas McWilliam’s book, The Flat White Economy, which details the rise of tech start-ups alongside London’s advertising and media sectors, more than 32,000 new businesses have been… [Read More]
Sunday saw another City announcement on Brexit’s danger for the financial services industry, the starkest warning so far. The Sunday Times reported that London’s biggest fund managers, which control trillions in assets and thousands of highly paid jobs, would be ‘forced to quit’ the capital if Britain left the EU. This followed interventions from Deutsche… [Read More]