The world is entering into a major recession. Global economic growth will go down to less than 2 percent in 2009, with USA and Europe the most affected regions, and most of the Asian and African countries the least hurt.
This recession, which follows the global unleashing of the US banking disaster, will be not much [...]

Negotiating free trade areas seems to be the latest hobby of trade policy officials.
The USA has started the ball rolling under the Bush Administration, irrespective of the ongoing Doha Round. From Chile to Morocco, Singapore, Jordan and Korea, the list is impressive, especially for the major advocate of multilateral trade rules, which until the 1980s [...]

Europe will pass through a difficult period during the coming 12-24 months. Unemployment will be up, as economic growth will come to a grinding halt. This is bound to lead to social tensions that cannot be in Europe’s common interest.
It is therefore time to act in view of minimising the negative impact of [...]

President Bush will chair his last international meeting in Washington November 15. Responding to EU pressure, he has invited the 20 heads of government for a review of the ground-rules and monitoring procedures of the international financial markets, in view of imposing stricter discipline on financial institutions to help prevent another financial cataclysm.
That may be [...]

On the side-lines of last week’s European Council meeting, essentially devoted to resolving the financial crisis, heads of government clashed on EU climate policy.
Some heads of government tried to renege the 20 percent C02 reduction target for 2020 with the outrageous argument that they had not attended the March 2007 European Council Meeting, when [...]

The global financial crisis has also revealed that ministers of finance and journalists mean different things when talking about big numbers. When the US finance minister summarises his very latest financial package he arrives at more than $ 2000 billion. His continental European counterparts define the same amount as $ 2000 milliard. In continental European [...]

Crises always have their positive by-effects. Who would have thought only a few months ago that the EU is able to play an effective role in the international arena outside its traditional competence for international trade!
And here we see the EU rising to the challenge of three major crises the world is confronted with.

Its immediate [...]

Humanity is living through its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression 1929-33.
A decade of complacency, self-deceit and appalling flaws of government regulation and oversight, above all in the USA but also in Europe, have been at the root of the financial disaster that has been unfolding for the past 18 months.
It has taken several [...]

There is only one issue of concern these days in Brussels and other capitals: the widening of the financial crisis into a recession! The speed at which the crisis, which has started some 15 months ago in US mortgage financing, has accelerated in the last three weeks is awe-inspiring. Governments have failed to realise the [...]

1. The EU is likely to approve its second climate package by March 2009. This will constitute a huge step forward for the EU and for the world. It will be the most comprehensive piece of climate policy ever adopted so far, whatever its shortcomings may be. The EU will have the legal and administrative means [...]