"Instead of being limited to a monetary stability policy, ECB President Mario Draghi is trying to outsmart the financial and economic policy field like a socialist government." It's no secret that the Germans are negative to further financial support of the weak euro countries. Germany's current strategy is inaction to the calls of introducing Eurobonds or Germany to leave the Euro. What they dread is the other option - that a weak country would leave the euro and...

Thomas Herndon, the UMass Amherst PHD student who discovered an Excel coding flaw in the famous paper by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, which had claimed that when a country's debt surpasses 90% of GDP, then growth slows precipitously, was the man of the week. Thomas Herndon, the UMass Amherst PHD student who discovered an Excel coding flaw in the famous paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, which had claimed...

EU member states must not use the economic crisis as a pretext to force austerity upon the EU until 2020, MEPs warned in a debate on Wednesday. EU member states must not use the economic crisis as a pretext to force austerity upon the EU until 2020, MEPs warned in a debate on Wednesday. The EU needs a budget that is flexible enough to cope with unforeseen events and is funded from new sources, they added. The debate with Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Ireland's...

They are letting the local branch managers make all the decisions about lending. Imagine that? A bank, new to Britain, is expanding rapidly across the UK.  Its name is Handelsbanken and it is from Sweden. However, it is about to open its 150th branch in the UK.Decision Making read more

For the past four years, the political leaders and bankers have made enormous efforts to save the financial industry, clean up the banks, and reform regulation in order to restore trust and confidence in the financial system. This hasn’t worked. Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers...

Sweden’s economy is faring better than that of many of its peers: the nation has low public debt and a current-account surplus, and since the early 1990s its growth rate has outpaced that of other members of the EU-15 and the United States. The 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report Growth and renewal in the Swedish economy shows that the nation can’t afford to coast on its achievements. Sweden’s economic growth mainly reflects productivity gains in the areas most exposed to...

Ha ha - The Treasury has the ability to mint a coin in any denomination, deposit it into its Federal Reserve account and use it to pay off its debts... The theory of the one trillion dollar platinum coin has been around a few years. But recently Krugman decided to take a stance pro-coin. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/be-ready-to-mint-that-coin/ Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to force America into default?...

Asymptotix appeared in CIO Mag 2012 in Luxembourg. Have a look at page 83!       Asymptotix presents itself in the CIO Mag 2012

Less than 36 hours remain now before a package of painful tax hikes and spending cuts start to kick in. Even if a deal is struck, it will have to be passed by both the Democrat-controlled Senate and then the GOP-held House — running the gauntlet of a gridlocked Washington on new year’s eve.

Christmas message by José Manuel Barroso to staff of the European Commission