It should be a time for celebration. The Lisbon Treaty has come into force, a new European Commission has been convincingly approved by the Parliament, the European Council has a permanent president and a European foreign policy structure has been created.
Yet it feels as if Europe’s clock has been turned back ten years, to the [...]

We’ve heard a lot about banks that are “too big to fail”. Perhaps a more immediate question is whether the sovereign nation of Greece is too big to fail. The risk of default and the threat of Greece quitting the eurozone would have profound implications for Europe’s monetary union, for other European countries wrestling with [...]

In his first major initiative since taking up his new role on January 1 2010, European Council president Herman Van Rompuy has convened a summit for February 11 to prepare for the 2020 Strategy, a ten year programme for creating a more competitive Europe. But can these plans really achieve anything? Only if they lay [...]

At last a touch of balance in Britain’s Daily Telegraph over the nomination of Michel Barnier to the internal market portfolio, with responsibility for financial services! I guess it’s no coincidence that the writer, eurosceptic Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, was the newspaper’s correspondent in Brussels from 1999 until 2004 – the same time span as Barnier’s former [...]

People have been grumbling over the last year or so that Barroso’s presidency of the European Commission has been too much influenced by hope of a second term, and that he has leant over backwards not to upset the big member states. I’m not convinced of the evidence for that, but the Commission president has [...]

Don’t pile up new decisions, but execute what has already been decided. That’s the basic approach of ECB President Trichet as expressed in Sunday’s interviews with Japanese newspapers. He thinks the policy-makers have done what it takes to restore global growth, but, he warns, it won’t happen until 2010.
Some commentators had complained that the ECB [...]

Let’s accentuate the positive! The G-20 meeting in London did achieve a much wider consensus and more far-reaching decisions than most people thought possible.  Merkel, Sarkozy, Barroso and Obama all said so. The summit was also remarkable for its recognition of the realities of a changing world economy and the ability of its disparate players [...]

The European Competitiveness summit should look very different this year. The March 19-20 meeting will be struggling to finalise an EU position for the April 2 crisis meeting of the G20 in London on the basis of the Commission’s Communication.
Negotiations will take place against a profoundly uncertain economic backdrop where there are major potential risks [...]

In the next few days the European Commission will tell us how Europe’s regulatory regime for financial services should be reformed in the aftermath of the credit crisis. As a starting point the Commission has the report from Jacques de Larosière’s taskforce, which was commissioned by President Barroso last October and published earlier this week.
No [...]

On January 16 the euro replaced the koruna as the official currency of Slovakia, bringing to sixteen the number of countries of the eurozone.  It was the first country in the former Soviet bloc to adopt the single currency – and just 20 years after the Fall of the Wall.  What a great way to [...]