Lowering of sovereign credit rating ‘would be one more difficulty but not insurmountable’, French president tells Le Monde

Speaking on the second day of the CDU’s party congress in Leipzig yesterday, Volker Kauder, leader of the party’s parliamentary faction and close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, criticised the UK for seeking to only further its own interests and singled out the UK’s opposition to the proposed financial transaction tax (FTT) in particular.

Whilst I welcome the release by Wikileaks of 250,000 ‘top secret’ US diplomatic cables, I have some niggles about how the media outlets Julian Assange gifted the cables too, are using them. The newspapers which published them almost simultaneously, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, NYT, and The Guardian, whilst authoritative are hardly known for being radical, even the latter which attem...

In an opinion piece for Le Monde, Nicolas-Jean Brehon from the Robert Schuman Foundation looks at the upcoming negotiations on the EU budget and argues: “If member states do not want to pay more or accept a new [EU] tax, then, in order to launch new policies, one will need to review the structure of the [EU] budget and trim the ‘money-eating’ items, i.

by Liam MacUaid This is unbelievable. The French Parliament, on the eve of Bastille Day, voted 335 in favour of preventing Muslim women wearing a full face covering veil in public. There was only 1 dissenter . Le Monde reports that the new law was strongly supported by the right. The gutless Socialist, Communist and Green

In an interview with Le Monde, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet has said that EU surveillance over member states’ budgets needs to be “radically improved”, adding: “We are a monetary federation. Now we need the equivalent of a budgetary federation in terms of the control and surveillance of the application of public finance policy”.

Writing in Le Monde yesterday, the economist Michel Aglietta looked at the long-term implications of the Greek bailout. His assessment was damning. And it shows what a precarious situation we are all in.

Le Monde said Angela Merkel had purely domestic political reasons for including the agency in a rescue operation while Libération judged the involvement a 'humiliation' for the eurozone

In case you wouldn’t have noticed, another crisis has come on top of the big one. For those who understand French, read carefully this article in the March 5 edition of French daily “Le Monde” . A former German finance vice-minister buries the euro as it is now and advises all Southern-Europe economies (including France) to

In an article in El País Jean-Marie Colombani, former Editor of Le Monde, has criticised the Lisbon Treaty for making the EU more complex, regarding the combination of the full-time EU President and rotating EU Presidency for member states. He writes, “What a strange thing, this two-headed presidency!” He continues, “Put ourselves in the place of European citizens, who wer...