Georges Ugeux

Governments have a unique way to talk about things they don't know, put political content in it, and pretend it is a solution. The political Eurobonds discussed at the Brussels informal Summit this week are based on a political request for more solidarity to the Northern from Southern countries of...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been in the red ten of the past 11 trading days. The explanation that seems to summarize the market mood is: the Greek situation.

Far from considering the European situation with complacency or benevolent negligence, there is no rationale in attaching...

For the record, I am not French but Belgo-American. My mother tongue and my culture are French. I live in New York since 1996 and became an American citizen as soon as it was possible to do so without losing my Belgian nationality.

My viewpoint is therefore non-partisan and...

The results of the primaries of the French presidential elections are not a huge surprise in as much as the two expected candidates will be present in the second round, and that the Socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, is likely to be the next President of the...

Reading most of the pundits and comments about Europe in the United States, there seems to be a fashion: Euro-bashing has become a way for look smart and ridiculing the continent is conventional wisdom.

The dangers of that approach are obvious: turning fashion into conventional wisdom, and ultimately self-fulfilling...

As President Obama participates to the Nuclear Security Summit in Korea, it might be appropriate to take a fresh look at Korea. Before coming to Seoul, he announced the US candidate to the presidency of the World Bank, the Korean-born Jim Yong Kim, President of Dartmouth College and...

The recent weeks have been extraordinary. After considering that Europe was going to bankrupt and that the economy was in recession, investors and market participants have decided to be optimistic. As always, they disregard the dangers and prefer to believe that the recovery is happening. One of the elements of...

I spent a nerve-racking night a block away from the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt until the news came at 6 am that 85% of the 177 billion euros ($233 billion) was voluntarily presented by private investors for conversion in the largest sovereign debt restructuring in history....

Recent astonishing debates about the responsibility of the President of the United States Barack Obama -- on the recent increase of the price of a gallon at or above 4 dollars -- seem to ignite some presidential candidates. It is simply not true.

The price of a gallon at the...

In a few days, European Banks will be given the opportunity to borrow an unlimited amount of money from the European Central Bank (ECB). The maturity of the loans is 3 years and the rate of interest is... 1 percent while banks borrow above the Euribor rate close to 2...

Among the nine European sovereign down ratings announced by Standard & Poor's last Friday, France's lost of its precious AAA is the most significant. While it did not come unannounced (S&P had recently warned the governments that it was reviewing the Eurozone ratings) and was widely anticipated, it is a...

As the United States see its unemployment rate drop from 9.5 percent to 8.5 percent having created approximately 1.6 million part- and full-time jobs in 2011, a slow but steady growth path seems to open up for 2012 with a forecast of 2.5-3 percent growth for the country as well...

What happened last week in Brussels is a division that should not have been tolerated by either party. The summit was supposed to prepare a Treaty that would have introduced fiscal consolidation in the Eurozone. In short, the topic was budgetary discipline including preapprovals and monitoring indebtedness. It was a...

Over the 14 ½ Summits of the European leadership since the beginning of the Greek crisis, very little has been actually decided, let alone implemented. In order to avoid a further and catastrophic deterioration of the precarious situation of its public finance, action must be the absolute priority.

With remarkable courage, European governments have managed to spend nearly two years attempting to resolve the crisis of over-indebted European countries, particularly Greece, only to come to the table with solutions that primarily concern banks! And most worrying, is the fact that said European governments will not put...

The vote by the U.S. Senate to proceed with sanctions to "punish" China for its currency policy is hypocritical and is a further sign of Washington's inability to deal with U.S. economic problems. It is the tendency of our politicians to blame foreign countries for corporate America's inability to compete...

As I was participating in the meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington last weekend, it appeared increasingly that the understanding of the European crisis was often superficial, leading to Armageddon scenarios.

The Eurozone is clearly in crisis. Some of its members have turned their backs to their...

At a conference in New York at the end of 2008, Obama's economic advisor, Larry Summers made a prophetic remark at an event organized by the Economist. He told an audience of Wall Street executives that we should never assume that bankers ever learn from their own mistakes. "We, as...

For the past few weeks, I have been observing reactions (from all sides) about Europe's debt crisis, and its responsibility for the U.S. market decrease. It has made me wonder: could a worsening of the European crisis drag the United States and the world into a catastrophe worse than the...

Standard & Poor's tried to justify its decision of the downgrading of the note of the United States through a press conference run by Ayatollah David Beers, the head of S&P's sovereign ratings, the supreme judge of the conduct of nations, attending -- as Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO...