Tag: Europe

President Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to have told aides “if France loses its triple A rating, I’m dead”. A few days later France lost that status; a few months later, Mr Sarkozy was out of office.

Money is a confidence game; its value depends entirely on the willingness of other people to accept it.

Globally, the Bank of England has been the main source of fresh and sceptical thinking on the future of the financial sector. While this has won it few friends in the City of London, such unpopularity is a mark of success not failure.

Corporation tax is a tax on corporate activity and on shareholders, and it is not well designed to achieve either purpose.

The inability of democratic politics to handle the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has threatened to undermine the apparent consensus on liberal democracy and lightly regulated capitalism that emerged following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The belief that the right response to the failures of Basel I and II is a more elaborate version of the same global regime is a triumph of hope over experience.

Confronted with the specifics, rather than the principle, of constitutional change, many voters revert to the status quo.

Ireland accounts for a share of global profit disproportionate to the size of the Irish economy. Not because business in Ireland is particularly successful but because reporting profits in Ireland is particularly attractive.

What would an independent Scotland actually be like? The only sensible answer is that no one really knows.

To pass the watchtowers and barbed-wire fences on the Finnish-Russian border is to be reminded of how fragile, and how recent, are the stability and security we take for granted today.