All Commentaries

The word from Asia is music to the ears of Germany, the largest country in Europe's economic and monetary union and the one that is particularly in favour of cracking the whip over errant members of the single currency zone...

Can the euro maintain its position as a world currency after the sovereign-debt crisis? Only if the euro area ceases to be a free-wheeling collection of states and is more closely controlled by the creditor nations of northern Europe, led by Germany...

For two years momentum has been building for a German – Axel Weber, the Bundesbank president – to become the next head of the European Central Bank when Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet retires in the autumn of next year. The idea is a thoroughly bad one...

Cashing in on intervention. Should central banks try to make a profit from their intervention operations? The near-universal answer is no, but it certainly helps their own confidence if they do...

"Simply put, export growth leads to job growth and economic growth," President Barack Obama said as he set up an industry panel to help him achieve his ambitious target of doubling American exports over the next five years...

If even more evidence was needed that German and American economic thinking operates on completely different wavelengths, the last fortnight has brought it. President Barack Obama has piled on the pressure for Germany to do more to boost domestic growth ...

After the birth of the euro in 1999, Wim Duisenberg, the first president of the European Central Bank, spent too much time playing golf in his first years in office -- and didn't do enough to force discipline on errant members of the single currency...

When Josef Joffe, then foreign editor of the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote a 4,000-word article at end-1997 attacking the planned formation of the European single currency, his essay was published first, in English, in the New York Review of Books ...

A sea-change in British politics looks likely on general election day on 6 May. But it’s not to everyone’s liking. The apparently sharp increase in voting popularity of the UK Liberal Democratic Party – the perpetual “third force” in British politics – has thrown up a specter for the bond markets ...

ean-Claude Trichet’s crisis-fighting credentials have been put sorely to the test during rising tension over Greek debt. The European Central Bank president has had a generally impressive couple of years since financial disruption broke out in August 2007 ...