Between the lines

The APEC Honolulu meeting has ended with as little ‘hard-wired’ policy agreement as achieved during the endless stream of Eurozone meetings. The outcome? Who will blink and be the first to lose their gross Hawaiian shirt? There’s enough images available in the media of the APEC leaders posing for photo opps in customary shirts in […]

Watching Silvio Berlusconi surrender his power and position, without trying to lay a glove on his opponents, is puzzling and troubling in equal measures. It’s as if Silvio finally decided there’s nothing left worth fighting for. It’s impossible to put forward an argument that any of his premiership terms moved Italy forward economically or socially,

“For India, China and many of the other new powers, they don’t see simply a crisis of the euro zone. They see a crisis of the rich world and it makes them even more confident that their time has come” – Kleine-Brokhoff at the George Marshall Foundation of the United States… It’d be difficult to

Italian writer and politician Giuseppe Mazzini called for the creation of a federation of European republics in 1843. This set the stage for perhaps the best known early proposal for peaceful unification, through cooperation and equality of membership, made by the pacifist Victor Hugo in 1847. Hugo used the term ‘United States of Europe’ (États-Unis

Whilst all eyes are on Italy’s bond crisis, Greece’s potential default and France ultimately being ordained into the dishonorable members of the inglorious PIIGS (finally putting the f in the ‘efin PIIGS) a real bombshell was dropped by one of the European Central Bank council members Jens Weidmann on Tuesday afternoon when he reminded the ‘inglorious insolvents’

I thought this Between The Lines blog entry would be a light hearted joke given ‘the Mark’ relates to money, you know the script; 666, Berlusconi (beast), Rome, “muhahahahaha” etc. Then the parallels got a bit scary once I engaged in a bit of fact finding research. The rise of a supranational currency in the

It’s been bonfire “weekend” in the UK. Lots of the festivities and many of the organized displays now have funfairs running alongside. Not so great as parents, as your pockets get emptied, but if indirectly the proceeds go to the organizers then all’s good given many of the shows are put together by volunteers and charities, many local events

An estimated 200 million people live at or below subsistence levels in China, spending 20 billion euros on them, instead of buying some form of Eurozone bond as part of the EFSF bail out package, would raise their standard of living by half for a year calculations by research firm High Frequency Economics show. The

Nicolas Sarkozy can’t watch a film released in May exploring why his wife left him on the same day he was elected as he needs to “protect his sanity”. The film, La Conquete, (The Conquest) covers Sarkozy’s second divorce from Cecilia Attias and his rise to power until his election in 2007. It showed at

There is a sub text to the threatened Papa G referendum that’s been missed by the mainstream media and it’s not the obvious fact that he’s actually an American and may have another agenda. He was born George Papandreou in 1952 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States and didn’t repatriate to Greece until 1974. George