Philippe Legrain

My piece for CapX

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Philippe Legrain, an economist and former adviser to then European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, described the tests as a “whitewash”. “The ECB singles out less important banks in less important countries and gives the German banks a clear bill of health,” Mr Legrain said. Read more here http://m.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5bdcfe20-5cfc-11e4-9753-00144feabdc0.html Others were less convinced by the […]

The “comprehensive” assessment of the health of eurozone banks – the ECB’s long-awaited asset-quality review (AQR) of eurozone banks and latest European Banking Authority (EBA) stress tests – concludes that eurozone banks had a capital shortfall of only €24.6 billion as of end-2013 and only €9.5 billion as of now. That is ludicrously overoptimistic. Independent assessments, for example by Professor […]

I was interviewed by Sebastian Stodolak for Obserwatorfinansowy.pl ahead of my speaking at the European Financial Congress in Sopot, Poland on 23 June 2014.

I was interviewed by Andrew Cave in the Sunday Telegraph on 11 May 2014

Financial Times, 29 April 2014. Peripheral bond yield rally is reaching bubble proportions

Interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box on 16 April 2014

Project Syndicate, 14 April 2014. The eurozone’s bogus banking union is a recipe for entrenching economic and political division.

My interview with La Tribune  on the capture of eurozone governments by their banks, and other things.

I debated the fiasco at the summit of EU leaders on 8-9 December on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight with Angela Knight, former Conservative minister and now lobbyist for the British Banking Association. Listen here

EuroIntelligence, 11 January 2011.

The debate in the UK about whether to tax bank bonuses (Labour) or balance-sheets (Conservative) is a sideshow. Both are stopgap measures. The key issue is that banks need to be broken up on competition grounds so they don’t earn huge profits in the first place.

Pat Kenny interviewed me on RTE1’s The Frontline on 29 December 2010 about the EU/IMF “bailout” and Ireland’s banking and debt crisis. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I was interviewed on the BBC World Service’s Business Daily programme about Ireland, the euro and Europe’s banking and sovereign debt crisis. You can listen to the interview here.

I was interviewed on BBC World News on 25 November 2010 by George Alagiah about the euro-zone crisis and whether Portugal and Spain might be affected next.

I spent a fantastic weekend in Kilkenny, at Kilkenomics, Ireland’s first economics (and comedy) festival. Despite (and because of) the crisis, it was a sell-out. Congrats to Richard Cook and David McWilliams for putting on a superb event, hopefully the first of many. The Irish government now appears to be in talks with the EU […]

Please can we kill, once and for all, the lie that Barclays survived without government aid. It benefited from government guarantees, the bailout of its counterparties and deposit insurance.

1. No wonder France is deporting the Roma. How could a country of 60 million people possibly cope with 15,000 Roma migrants? Interesting article in the New York Times on how the Roma are testing the EU’s open borders policy. 2. Vince Cable says the UK government’s immigration cap is costing jobs and harming the […]

I debated the issue on BBC’s Hardtalk with Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson Institute and Italian politician Emma Bonino. Interview by Zeinab Badawi. Watch it on BBC iPlayer For those outside the UK who cannot access BBC iPlayer, watch it on YouTube. Part 2 Part 3