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Shares in Greek banks crashed by more than a quarter yesterday as Athens urged Berlin not to go on humiliating a ‘proud nation’. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new finance minister, issued an extraordinary defiant statement invoking the rise of the Nazis when Germany was crippled by debts between the wars. After a tense meeting with his German counterpart in Berlin, Wolfgang Schaeuble, he declared: ‘We didn’t even agree to disagree.’

Just what the market had hoped would not happen... *ECB SAYS IT LIFTS WAIVER ON GREEK GOVERNMENT DEBT AS COLLATERAL *ECB SAYS IT CAN'T ASSUME SUCCESSFUL CONCLUSION OF GREECE REVIEW What this means simply is that since Greek banks are now unable to pledge Greek bonds as collateral and fund themselves, and liquidity is about to evaporate, the ECB has just given a green light for Greek bank runs... and all the worst parts of the bible (or merely a negotiating move to let Greece see just what kind of chaos this will create). And now finally, after many years...

My breakfast companion looked gloomy. He’d flown into Washington from Vienna the day before. When he deplaned, he found a shocking email waiting for him: a demand from his banker for immediate payment of €12,000. Although a resident of Austria, he had taken a home mortgage in Swiss francs, which carried a lower interest rate than mortgages in euros. But 48 hours before he had arrived in the United States, the Swiss franc had surged by 20 percent against the euro. That currency appreciation had wiped out his equity in the house. His frightened banker wanted a new infusion of...

The eurozone experienced negative inflation for the second month in a row, according to a flash estimate published today (30 January) by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office. Inflation is expected to be at −0.6%, with consumer prices falling further than economists had forecast. The fall represents the biggest decline in prices in the history of the euro. […] The drop was driven by the fall in energy prices (−8.9%, compared with −6.3% in December). […] The deflationary spiral comes as Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), is trying to tackle deflation with a policy of...

Hundreds of thousands of people marched through Madrid on Saturday in a show of strength by a fledgling radical leftist party, which hopes to emulate the success of Greece's Syriza party in the Spanish general election later this year. Podemos supporters from across Spain converged around the Cibeles fountain Saturday before packing the avenue leading to Puerta del Sol square in what was the party's largest rally to date.

A top German body has called for a clear mechanism to force Greece out of the euro if the left-wing Syriza government repudiates the terms of the country’s €245bn rescue. “Financial support must be cut off if Greece does not comply with its reform commitments,” said the Institute of German Economic Research (IW). "If Greece is going to take a tough line, then Europe will take a tough line as well." IW is the second German institute in two days to issue a blunt warning to the new Greek premier, Alexis Tsipras, who has vowed to halt debt payments and...

The long-anticipated collapse of the euro is here. When European Central Bank president Mario Draghi unveiled an open-ended quantitative easing program worth at least 60 billion euros a month on Thursday, stocks soared but the euro plummeted like a rock. It hit an 11 year low of $1.13, and many analysts believe that it is going much, much lower than this. The speed at which the euro has been falling in recent months has been absolutely stunning. Less than a year ago it was hovering near $1.40. But since that time the crippling economic problems in southern Europe have gone...

The new Greece of Alexis Tsipras will run out of money by early March. It will then face a series of escalating crunch points that will end in default and a return to the drachma unless it can reach a deal with EU creditors. Greece must repay €3.4bn to the International Monetary Fund in February and March. Tax revenues have collapsed as Greeks preempt what they hope will be a repeal of austerity taxes. “There is only €1.9bn left in the cash kitty, and the government has spending costs of $2.5bn coming up. Somebody needs to lend the country money...

Greek radicals sought on Monday to redraw the political map of Europe, forming a coalition government of left and right, united only by their desire to defy the European financial establishment and shrug off the constraints of austerity. The coalition, led by 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, was expected to dispatch its new finance minister to Brussels in the next few days to seek a fundamental renegotiation of Greece’s economic bailout package, vowing that “the end of humiliation has come”. Tsipras and his Syriza party have promised to replace the austerity programmes imposed by Greece’s international creditors with policies aimed at helping...

5 years into the euro zone crisis the ECB announces a €1.1 trillion quantitative easing programme to boost economy. Bolder than expected. Draghi Commits ECB to Trillion-Euro Asset-Purchase Plan to Fight Deflation Mario Draghi led the European Central Bank into a new era, committing to a quantitative easing program worth at least 1.1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) to counter the threat of a deflationary spiral. The ECB president shrugged off determined opposition led by German officials with a pledge to buy 60 billion euros every month through September next year in a once-and-for-all push to put more cash into circulation...

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) - The global economic outlook just got brighter after this week's big stimulus from the European Central Bank, leading policymakers from around the world said Saturday. In a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, they said a perkier Europe, coupled with a prolonged period of low oil prices, could help shore up the global economy following a period of underperformance that has prompted many forecasters to reduce their growth forecasts. "Lower oil prices and the big decision by ECB could further improve world economic outlook," said Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan.

Rip up your euro forecasts. A day after the European Central Bank unveiled its bond-buying program, the single currency still was in free fall, blowing past analysts’ expectations for how low the euro can go. Some investors now say the euro could fall to the point where it is on equal footing with the U.S. dollar for the first time since it climbed above the buck in late 2002. “If you would have asked me a few months ago, I would’ve said that parity could be in the cards in the years ahead. Now, we can’t rule it out anymore...

Tyler Durden 01/23/2015 Submitted by John Rubino via Dollar Collapse blog Yesterday the European Central Bank acknowledged that the currency it manages is being sucked into a deflationary vortex. It responded in the usual way with, in effect, a massive devaluation. Eurozone citizens have also responded predictably, by converting their unbacked, make-believe, soon-to-be-worth-a-lot-less paper money into something tangible. They’re bidding gold up dramatically.(snip)

FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank said on Thursday that it would begin buying hundreds of billions of euros worth of government bonds in an ambitious — though some say belated — attempt to prevent the eurozone from becoming trapped in long-term economic stagnation. The bank’s president, Mario Draghi, said the central bank would begin buying bonds worth 60 billion euros, or about $69.7 billion, a month. That is more spending than the €50 billion a month that many analysts had been expecting. The long-awaited program, known as quantitative easing, comes after inflation in the 19 countries of the eurozone...

European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi announced the launch of an open-ended, expanded monthly 60 billion euro ($70 billion) private and public bond-buying program on Thursday. The long-anticipated introduction of euro zone government bond purchases will bring the ECB's buying program into line with the U.S. Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE). The program will be open-ended, lasting until at least 2016, Draghi told reporters at his regular media conference on Thursday, and will start in March this year. The hope is that it will boost the region's painfully low inflation rate, which came in at an annual minus 0.2...

First Swiss Franc, now Euro... RBC TO CHARGE NEGATIVE INTEREST ON EURO-DENOMINATED BALANCES — Russian Market (@russian_market) January 21, 2015 Opinion: Think negative interest rates can’t happen here? Think again In the last week, the markets have had to get used to the idea of the negative interest rate, where you actually get charged for keeping money in the bank rather than going out and spending it. So far, that is restricted to two relatively small economies, both of which are struggling with the likely launch of a massive program of quantitative easing this week in the eurozone. But what...

Here’s something I didn’t know about the Swiss National Bank: “Many economists believe that balance sheet losses are irrelevant for a central bank, so they should play no role in policy. But the SNB is 45 per cent owned by private shareholders, many of whom are individuals, who receive dividends from the SNB. The rest is owned by the cantons, which have been complaining recently about insufficient cash transfers from the SNB.This ownership structure contrasts sharply with most other central banks, which are in effect government departments, wholly owned by the treasury and therefore the taxpayer. The Swiss set-up makes...

Investors are so nervous that they are basically willing to lose money when they buy some government bonds. It's part of the latest fad in finance that's all the rage: "going negative." The yields on government bonds in Europe and Japan have dipped into the uncharted waters of negative territory. That means buyers of those bonds are essentially taking a loss just to hold onto those assets. They think their money is better off losing a few cents than putting it elsewhere. "It's basically a fee for fear," said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx. "Fear of deflation, fear...

The Swiss National Bank has lost control. It is the latest in a list of venerable central banks to be overwhelmed by deflationary forces and global economic disorder. The country is already in deflation. The Swiss franc ended Thursday 13pc higher after the SNB abandoned its three-year efforts to defend a currency floor of 1.20 to the euro. “We have a free exchange rate once again,” said the SNB’s president, Thomas Jordan. Indeed, but nobody is fooled by the SNB’s attempt to spin this as benign. “This is a huge hit to their credibility,” said Deutsche Bank. The official statement...