History will say that the two criteria of the Maastricht Treaty were improvised by a group of economists during a long night and never seriously analyzed. While I have no problem with the indebtedness limit of 60 percent, since it is the result of a multi-year series of public finance...

With the announcement that the attempts by the Democrats to form a government have been derailed by what the Economist characterizes as two clowns, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo, the situation in Italy gets more dangerous.

With an indebtedness of 2 trillion...

Europe has crossed the red line of the sanctity of insured deposits by making them subject to a partial confiscation.

It is pure extortion of bank deposits that the European Union has asked Cyprus to proceed with.

This action has huge long-term and short term consequences.

Yes, it is about time that Washington (and I lump together the White House, the House, the Senate, The GOP and the Democrats) realizes that pointing fingers to each other is totally irrelevant.

The world watches this absurd show of impotence with incredulity. So, the most important country in the...

I should probably start by disclosing that I am a Roman Catholic, born and raised in the Church, and was even for two years a Dominican friar. Like many European Catholics, I had placed hopes in the Vatican II Council: In 1968, when the encyclical Humanae Vitae was published, making...

In 2011, the Deutsche Boerse Group launched an offer on the New York Stock Exchange. Everybody expected that the U.S. authorities would object to this foreign acquisition of the most iconic Stock Exchange in the United States, and arguably in the world. Not only did it not happen, but very...

Over the past decade, America behaved in front of the world in a deeply disturbing ethical way. For those of us who travel around the world, there is no doubt that, while admired for many other reasons, the United States of America is increasingly losing the moral ground that it...

For two years, U.S. economists and market specialists have been announcing the collapse of the Euro. In a famous post in the New York Times, Paul Krugman announced in May the Eurodammerung. He was referring and added the famous scene of Wagner's opera, the Goetterdammerung (the crepuscule of...

I happen to know something about Congo, Rwanda and Kivu, a province on the Eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that has become the center of "rebel activities." The movement of March 23, 2009, hence its name of M23, is in fact armed, managed and financed by...

As polling stations are gradually closing, before the results start coming in, we need to take a last look at this campaign and reflect on what I perceive to be a vibrant election and a deplorable electoral process. Three aspects of the 2012 elections are simply shocking.

The...

Thank you for showing us passion, Mr. President.

We needed to be reassured that you were passionate about the values you defend and that you are not willing to let the debate being polluted by arrogant and nasty negative lies. We needed you back as our leader and, more importantly,...

Whoever prepped you for this debate should be ashamed of themselves. They managed to extricate from you everything we need from you. Everything we always saw in you.

No, we did not care about the numbers in the debate: there is such a huge difference of approach to economic...

Judging by the media frenzy and the smear campaign messages, any observer might be wondering if the United States electorate is trying to find out who is the most hate-able candidate. We have completely lost track of the fact that we are electing the next president and not trying to...

Whether it is the futile past and maybe future Quantitative Easing in the United States and the United Kingdom, or the new unlimited commitment of the European Central Bank to purchase Italian and Spanish Bonds, recent decisions of central banks around the world have transformed them from a monetary institution...

I know: foreign policy does not matter in a presidential election. But what about money? What if we realized that one-third of our indebtedness (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone did cost $4 trillion or 26 percent of the U.S. public debt) comes from war and other...

This week, the amount of government debt of Italy at the end of June was published: 1,972 billion euros. By this time it must have exceeded 2,000 billion euros ($2.4 trillion).

Mario Monti, the Prime Minister cum Minister of Finance, toured the capitals of Europe to obtain support...

The President of the European Central bank, Mario Draghi, told investors last week in London that the ECB would do everything possible, within its mandate, to support the Euro and the Eurozone and that it had the means to do so. Today, the ECB announced that,...

As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to...

The cover of Time qualifies Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh as "the underachiever". As expected, this cover has completely infuriated the partisans of the ruling Congress party, who displayed their usual sense of denial. Everybody who wants to play a role on behalf of the party in...

A few days after the Russian National Council on Corporate Governance gathered at the end of May in Moscow to hold its Third International Conference, dozens of demonstrators were arrested for challenging Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, who had just signed a new anti-protest law.