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From Deauville to Meseberg or How Euro Area Reform Is Evolving*

On 15 September, it will be 10 years since the crash of Lehman Brothers which marked the beginning of the severest global financial crisis since the Great Depression, which had the potential to ruin the euro area and hence the EU. In the past decade the world has radically changed. The financial ...

Bulgaria Entered a Schengen Mode for the Eurozone Too

The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) of the European Commission proved an obstacle not only for Bulgaria's membership in Schengen but the euro area, too. The July Eurogroup discussed Bulgaria's application for membership in the common currency and changed for the first time its ...

Normalisation of Growth in the Euro Area or Dark Clouds?

It is growingly evident that by June, when the deadline of Donald Tusk's Leaders' Agenda expires, there will be not even an 'r' left of the euro area reforms. The question is, though, whether circumstances would push the member states, again, to be more active. And the circumstances are a weaken ...

Isn't It Time to Admit that the Window of Opportunity for a Eurozone Reform Is Closed?

In less than a year, the plans for a reform of the euro area went through several physical conditions. After Emmanuel Macron's election as president of France in the end of last spring, preparations started bubbling up for an almost quantum leap in the deepening of euro area integration. Integra ...

March 4th - the First Major Political Quake in EU in 2018

While the Bulgarians will be getting sober on 4 March after the March 3 celebrations of Independence Day - some celebrating that Putin did not comet this time round and others that, after all, the holiday was honoured by his spiritual hand, Patriarch Kirill, amid the Bulgarian EU ...

The Foretold Election of Mario Centeno as Eurogroup President

On December 4, eurozone finance ministers chose their new president for the next two and a half years - Portuguese Finance Minister Mario Centeno. With the election of the successor to the current chairman, Jeroen Dijsselbloem (the Netherlands, Socialists and Democrats), the so-called Eurogroup ...

ESM To Transform into a European Monetary Fund

This year is on its way to repeat the ambition of 2012 when the construction of the banking union started and when the permanent rescue fund of the euro area was created. That was the year when a big step in the euro area integration was made and in the EU at large. After a five-year deadlock in ...

Member States Are Cautious Regarding Commission Ideas about Euro Area Future

At the end of May, the European Commission presented one of its key reflection papers from a whole series covering a wide range of topics - from common defence to globalisation. Word is about the document on the future of the euro area. The European Commission is of the opinion th ...

The Euro Area Train Is Leaving, Non-Euro Passengers Are Invited Onboard

If Marine Le Pen had won the French presidential election, Brussels and Frankfurt would already be discussing crisis plans for saving the euro in the likelihood of a Frexit. But the Elysee Palace is now occupied by Emmanuel Macron, who won the elections with a pro-European programme an ...

Mario Draghi: Do Not Forget To Complete The Euro Area!

The regular monetary dialogue in the economic committee of the European Parliament with the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, on November 28 practically marked the end of forecasting and predictability. There were more “we do not knows” and “it cannot b ...

Bulgaria Is Testing the Ground for Euro Area Accession

Bulgaria is cautiously preparing to join the euro area. This was confirmed by Prime Minister Boyko Borissov after it became evident last week from his letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg, EPP) that there are ongoing negotiations. In the letter, which euinside ...

Eurozone: Stop Putting the Cart Before the Horse!

The Brexit threw the future of the euro area into uncertainty. This becomes evident from reactions after the referendum in Great Britain of June 23rd, which rekindled discussions of the future of the EU and the 19-member currency block in particular. There is no doubt that integration ...

Is the Euro Area Ready to Handle a Brexit?

The euro area is recovering slowly, but surely. So surely, that Economic and Monetary Policy Commissioner Pierre Moscovici (France, Socialists and Democrats) definitively announced the end of austerianism in favour of a looser fiscal policy. Supporting his call, the European Commission abdicated ...

It's not the Monetary Policy, ... Wolfgang!

Some EU member states are starting to suffer from Euroscepticism because of migration – internal within the EU and the coming from outside the Union. Others are losing faith in the European project because of certain common policies, mostly linked to economics, third – because of E ...

It Is Too Early for a Euro Area Budget

The drama, surrounding the British question returned once more the talk about an increase of euro area integration back on the agenda – a conversation that has been going on mostly on a theoretical level after the presentation of the second roadmap for deepening of integration within ...

Staying Outside the Euro Area Has a Price

During the debt crisis years in the euro area expansion of the currency club was not the fashion, although towards the end of the crisis two Baltic states joined it – Latvia and Lithuania. So far, there is no new expansion visible on the horizon, mainly because there are no taker ...

EP and Commission in a Row over the Future of the Euro Area, Council Is Indifferent

The long awaited concrete legislative proposals of the European Commission for deepening of integration in the euro area following the model, set in the five presidents’ report in June of this year, turned out to be nothing more than intentions for the EU to be buried b ...

Euro Area vs. the Rest

The future of the euro area is not a debate that is easy to push, but European Council President Donald Tusk is set on squeezing in the subject onto the agenda of the October EU summit, which will commence in the afternoon of October 15th. This was stated by a high-placed EU source. In the ...

The Five Presidents' Report Is Starting To Separate the Euro Area from the EU

Only a couple of months ago it looked highly unlikely not only that there will be any significant steps towards deeper integration within the euro area, but also that hardly anyone were going to look into another vision about its future that is the five presidents’ report, presented&n ...

The Deepening of Euro Area Integration - Let's Not Put the Cart Before the Horse

The political autumn has begun with a flying start in the EU with the first serious discussions on the future of the euro area, sketched in the five presidents’ report, presented for the first time at the June summit. Preliminary expectations were that the report will d ...

The Major Eurozone Reform To Start after the UK Referendum

The new report of the five presidents – the bosses of the Eurogroup, ECB, Euro Summit, European Commission, and European Parliament – reheats some leftover dishes but has some new ideas too. The most important changes that would require opening up of the founding treaties are suggest ...

European Parliament backed the creation of ESM

On the eve of the European Council in Brussels the MEPs backed EU treaty changes needed to allow for the establishment of a permanent rescue fund for the euro area - the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). As it was agreed by the EU leaders on their meeting in December 2010, in Article 136 of th ...

Who will rescue the Eurozone rescue fund?

The EU financial ministers agreed on the creation of a European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to replace the temporary rescue fund for the euro area after 2013. Although certain parameters of the future safety net are clear, important details about its financing and functioning remain to be decided ...

Hans im Glück vs. Clever Peter

I have never been a fan of national psychology theories, especially in their simplistic versions implying the "Germans are disciplined", "Bulgarians are cheap cheats" ,"Englishmen are snobs" and "Frenchmen are spoiled". I have always believed that modern society evolution should not be determine ...

The debt crisis as a Brussels’ croissant

It is difficult to perceive the dept crisis as a towering tsunami while having breakfast of fresh croissants accompanied by 15 types of cheese and fragrant coffee. These were my thoughts while I was waiting for my next interlocutor to discuss the latest decisions of European politicians concerni ...

The eurozone informal Council - a weissbier for Ms Merkel

The leaders of the eurozone have agreed an important compromise regarding the rescue fund for the euro area, which will from now on be able to lend at a lower price and will be able to buy up government bonds at the primary market places. The leaders have also endorsed a Pact for the Euro, altho ...

Spain is the new big concern of the eurozone

On the eve of the eurozone summit Spain received a heavy blow to its already endangered image as the credit rating agency Moody's downgraded the country from Aa1 to Aa2. The reason is that, according to the agency, the cost of banking restructuring substantially exceeds the estimates of the gove ...

Europe from Helsinki against Europe from Athens

On the eve of the euro area summit on 11 March, the two major political families in the EU (the European People's Party, EPP and the Party of European Socialists, PES) held their own summits, with quite opposite final results. Of course, this is expected and understandable given the ideological ...

A return to the era of the beast

Two information lines occupy my mind these days. Furthermore, they very closely intertwine and the consequences of this interweaving are still too early to predict. The first line is the tension in the South China Sea which provoked many analysts in the end of last year to talk about a new arms ...

The end of the long lunch

I do not know whether it is fashion or an atavistic reflex, but more and more frequently I stumble upon comments devoted to the European Union, strongly criticising the despotic Brussels and blame Germany for being thirsty for power, and on top of that these comments suggest a sympathetic attitu ...

The biggest loser from the currency wars is the eurozone

The more one goes in depth into the genesis of the global currency conflict, the more it becomes clear that the main culprit is the US, accompanied by the UK. The chief economist of the pro-European think-tank Centre for European Reform (based in London) and the liberal Carnegie Endowment for In ...

Commission: Bulgaria must continue with structural reforms

The European Commission published on Wednesday an assessment of the Convergence programmes of 14 EU member states, including Bulgaria. The Convergence programmes are governments' plans to fulfill the Stability and Growth Pact criteria, or to put it in another way - the criteria for good fiscal b ...

Without reforms there is no urgent exit from the crisis, according to Gheorghi Stoev

The Bulgarian government approved on the 27th of January 2010 the Convergence programme of Bulgaria for the period 2009-2012. The programme is being updated each year and is presented to the European Commission which, on its hand, in April publishes separate Convergence report. The programme con ...

Bulgaria started lobbying for the euro area

Bulgarian deputy prime minister and minister of finance Simeon Dyankov has started a tour around the euro area, aimed at gathering support for Bulgaria's admission to the single currency. His first meeting was today with the prime minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker who is also a presiden ...

Will Greece cause a domino effect?

The management of the Greek economic crisis raises some disturbing parallels with the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war, writes in an analysis for the Financial Times the economic issues columnist of the daily Wolfgang Münchau. The war ended in 404BC, when the victorious Spartans imposed on Ath ...

Bulgaria could join the eurozone but only after removing corruption

"Joining the ERM II, practically is a political issue", the senior economist at the Open Society Institute Georgi Angelov said, asked by euinside co comment on the report of the Greek Eurobank about the stability of the currency board of Bulgaria. He also explained that technically, our country ...

Poland will again miss the euro

The planned target - 2012 for Poland to introduce the single European currency will again be missed, the Polish deputy finance minister Ludwik Kotecki said yesterday, quoted by the FT. He said this during a debate on the amendment of the budget for 2009 in the upper chamber of parliament, by add ...

It would be offensive to set dates for Eurozone membership, economists said

"Every attempt of Bulgaria to set a date is, literally, an insult for the Eurozone. We cannot talk about any dates, we have enough work to do here in Bulgaria and only then we could try and look toward Frankfurt". This is what the programme director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, the econ ...

The Euro areas as political exchange coin for beginners

The knowledge about what the euro area is would be quite useful nowadays for 2 reasons: one is that in Bulgaria the euro area turned into a unifying issue of the economic platforms of parties from left to right through the political centre and, second, today the EU leaders discuss in Brussels at ...

10 years Euro Area

This year is the 10th anniversary of the euro. The years are 10 because the single European currency has been for the first time introduced to the financial markets in 1998. It enters into circulation in 2002. Of course, in spite of the feeling of the people in the Eurozone member states that th ...