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Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Tuesday he expected the governor of Sicily to resign following a growing financial crisis that has pushed the autonomous region close to default. Monti said in a statement there were "grave concerns" that the island could default and he said he had written to the governor Raffaele Lombardo seeking confirmation that he would resign by the end of the month.

How bad is Europe’s economic climate? Switzerland, Germany and Denmark have negative 2 year sovereign yields. This means that investors are paying the governments to store their funds! Switzerland has been in negative territory for a while. Note the red line that is off the chart! Germany, the European “Big Dog,” has recently joined the negative yield club. And the Netherlands, where they serve mayonnaise on their french fries (I tried it), has also recently joined the negative yield club. And these are NOMINAL yields. Even the U.S. where the 2 year sovereign rate is 0.258% and the inflation rate...

Addressing the European Parliament yesterday (3 July) in Strasbourg, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso slammed British euroskeptics for their divisive behavior and taking pleasure in the eurozone's troubles. "Let me tell you that it is puzzling that you seem to delight in the difficulties of the euro area," Barroso told the British Tories, adding that this was in stark contrast with the position taken by Prime Minister David Cameron. Barroso was taking aim especially at Conservative MEP Martin Callanan, who has repeatedly criticized bank bailouts as wasting taxpayers' money and talked in favor of eurozone exits for some countries....

India will pledge an additional $ 10 billion to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) firewall against a eurozone financial conflagration. This was announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his opening speech at the Group of 20 summit in Mexico. The money will be part of an estimated $63-billion contribution by the BRICS countries, the emerging group og economies currently chaired by India, to the IMF’s $430-billion emergency fund. The BRICS countries, comprising Brazil Russia India China and South Africa, had earlier agreed that their contributions would be conditional on the IMF enhancing their voting rights and “that this recourse...

The eurozone crisis can be traced more to political than economic and financial causes, Emma Bonino, vice president of the Italian Senate and a former European Commissioner told EurActiv Italia. She says it is mostly a problem of governance. The EU Summit this week (28-29 June) is not a meeting as many others: “It’s a key date for the EU, almost a point of no return,” she said, reasserting the need for a United States of Europe. She spoke on the margin of a conference organized by European Movement Italy, ahead of the Rome mini-summit on 22 June. Bonino shares...

In a not-so-subtle rebuke of President Obama’s tendency to offer unsolicited recommendations on how Europeans should handle their debt crises on Sunday evening, Germany’s finance minister suggested that perhaps His Munificence should focus on his own problems before trying to fix everybody else’s. Wolfgang Schaeuble told public broadcaster ZDF in an interview late Sunday that “people are always very quick at giving others advice.”He says: “Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is higher than in the eurozone.” An unfortunate and embarrassing truth — the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is well over eighty percent,...

The Greek boss learns a few lessons about economics as he makes his rounds, on the very eve of the election… As a minor mob boss in the south, Greco had had some serious setbacks. His operation was crumbling around him, and he didn’t know what to do. Deep in hock to the big Mob Bosses in Brussels, Greco had gone back to the well for renegotiations again and again, and neither his bosses nor his grubber list seemed to understand his situation at all. No compassion, no understanding. What was the world coming to? But it was Saturday, and...

Ireland wants to renegotiate its rescue plan to benefit from the same treatment as Spain, which looks set to win a bailout for its banks without any broader economic reforms in return, European sources said on Saturday. "Ireland raised two issues: one is the need to ensure parity of the deal with Spain retroactively on its bailout from EFSF," one European government source told AFP, referring to the temporary rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility. Another European government source confirmed the information. Ireland secured an 85-billion-euro ($112 billion) rescue deal from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund...

Eurozone finance ministers agreed on Saturday to lend Spain up to €100 billion ($125 billion) to shore up its teetering banks, and Madrid said it would specify precisely how much it needs once independent audits report in just over a week. After a 2½-hour conference call of the 17 finance ministers, which several sources described as heated, the Eurogroup and Madrid said the amount of the bailout would be sufficiently large to banish any doubts. "The loan amount must cover estimated capital requirements with an additional safety margin, estimated as summing up to €100 billion in total," a Eurogroup statement...

Thursday may be the final test for the euro zone, Vincent Cignarella argues on Markets Hub. The simmering euro-zone crisis may reach full boil when Spain goes to the market to borrow bonds just one day after the ECB met.

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, has called for the eurozone to have “centralized control” over the budgets of all the countries using the euro. Rajoy has become the latest European politician to call for countries to, in effect, abandon their sovereignty in a last-ditch attempt to save the beleaguered currency. Rajoy said a new central authority would go a long way to alleviating Spain’s economic crisis as it would send a clear signal to investors that the single currency is an irreversible project. He said: “The European Union needs to reinforce its architecture. This entails moving towards more integration,...

It’s not just the US, which is a point that Barack Obama will likely seize in the same manner a drowning man clings (bitterly?) to a life preserver in a storm-tossed ocean. The EuroZone hit a 17-year high unemployment rate this spring at 11%, and the rate in the larger European Union rose to 10.3%: The jobless rate in the 17-nation euro zone reached 11 percent in March and April, the highest since the start of the data in 1995, Eurostat, the European statistical agency said in Luxembourg. The previous record had been 10.9 percent in February, Eurostat said, after...

The latest example is the prison in Corinth where after the supply stoppage from the nearby military camp, the prisoners are at the mercy of God because, as reported by prison staff, not even one grain of rice has been left in their warehouses. When a few days earlier the commander of the camp announced to the prison management the transportation stoppage, citing lack of food supplies even for the soldiers, he shut down the last source of supply for 84 prisoners. The response of some Corinth citizens was immediate as they took it upon themselves to support the prisoners,...

The damage caused by the global financial crisis requires additional federal intervention, according to the Obama Administration, which is launching a new program to “foster growth and stability at a time of increasing economic turmoil.” This particular endeavor, however, will focus its efforts on improving conditions in Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans, and the “newly independent states,” or NIS, of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is designing this Europe & Eurasia (E&E) regional project in order to “promote trade, investment and regulatory integration; enhance regional competitiveness, and support financial sector stability.” The agency did...

Greece handed 18 billion euros ($22.6 billion) to its four biggest banks on Monday, an official said, allowing the stricken lenders to regain access to European Central Bank funding. The long-awaited injection—via bonds from the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund—will boost the nearly depleted capital base of National Bank, Alpha , Eurobank and Piraeus Bank.

Dismissing the propaganda-like vision of growth and jobs that is now at the forefront of any and every word from the status-quo seekers that are the European Elite, England's Nigel Farage notes the hypocrisy of the forthcoming summit's agenda. The Euro itself was supposed to create growth and jobs and yet it is actively destroying both of those things - more of the same - as the medicine is killing the patient. He attacks the idea that the world will end if Greece were to exit the Euro - "European leaders say if Greece leaves the sky will fall in...

We were lamenting just the other day, yesterday in fact, that California’s 11.0 percent unemployment rate was identical to Ghana’s, that sub-Saharan economic stalwart. Today we awoke to the good news. California’s unemployment rate has plunged to (drum roll please) 10.9 percent! That’s as good as the unemployment rate in the euro zone, where people out of work also account for 10.9 percent of the working population, a new high for those folks...

Tomorrow brings the opening of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the 65th anniversary. But signs of economic reality are everywhere. Even though Tuesday before Cannes is quiet, today was more than unusually not busy. The best indicators are in hotel lobbies and out front of the main palaces like the Majestic and Carlton. At the latter, the entryway is cleverly adorned completely in ads for “The Dictator.” But there’s very little else going on so far. The hotel has only one large billboard affixed to its facade–for an upcoming Tom Cruise movie. Otherwise, the hub-bub was at minimum today. The...

The French economy did not grow at all in first three months of 2012 and the previous quarter's growth was cut, in a blow to new president Francois Hollande. Official figures released on Tuesday showed that French GDP growth was 0pc in the three months through March . Growth in the last quarter of 2011 was revised to 0.1pc from 0.2pc. Official statistics agency INSEE said the economy grew by 1.7pc overall in 2011. Inflation rose 0.1pc on a monthly basis after a jump of 0.8pc in March. Year-on-year inflation dipped to 2.1pc, back to the level seen in mid-2011....

Athens has the highest rate of empty office space in Europe, according to data for the year’s first quarter presented by BNP Paribas Real Estate. Its report on the course of the European office market showed that the availability rate in the Greek capital soared to 20 percent in the January-March period from 15.5 percent in the same period last year.