Philippe Legrain

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

I debated the future of the euro with Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, on the Riz Khan show on Al Jazeera English on 20 May 2010.

I was interviewed on RTE Radio 1′s Today with Pat Kenny show today about Aftershock and prospects for Ireland’s economy. Listen to it here.

Sky News are reporting that a secret study commissioned by some of Britain’s biggest banks warns that tighter banking regulation could provoke a  double-dip recession. Yet again, the big banks are attempting to blackmail the rest of the country in order to protect their licence to gamble and make monopoly profits with government guarantees. Of [...]

Goldman’s use of intelligence drawn from its unrivalled pool of market sources to trade on its own and its clients’ behalf – a strategy championed by Mr Blankfein – has been a competitive advantage. Bank executives speak of its ability to manage – even “embrace” – conflicts of interest that arise from its position at [...]

It is outrageous that governments bailed out failed banks. There were better alternatives. But given that mistake, it is understandable that governments – and taxpayers – want to get their money back. The IMF has therefore proposed that G20 countries levy a tax on banks’ balance sheets, to pay for future bailouts or the recent [...]

This is a more technical post. When financial panic spread even to sound emerging economies after Lehman collapsed in September 2008, the Fed responded by extending swap lines to central banks in Brazil, Korea, Mexico and Singapore, while the ECB provided them to Hungary and Poland. These unprecedented moves played a key role in quelling [...]

Oliver Kamm at The Times, a man I respect a lot, argues in his blog that banks are not a “vested interest”. But unless I have misunderstood him, I think he is being too charitable to the banks. He argues that “the banks are not some unaccountable lobby seeking to superimpose itself on the public interest: they [...]

Money quote: To this day it is hard to find fault with the conceptual framework of our [financial risk management] models as far as they go. Of course not.

Britain’s banks aren’t lending, which is strangling the economy. The package of measures to support lending to smaller businesses which the government announced yesterday will do some good. But it is not enough. As I have argued previously, the government should direct nationalised Northern Rock to step into the breach. Anatole Kaletsky endorses this position [...]

In recent years, Western governments have voiced concerns about Asian governments’ vast sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) investing in Western companies. Some called this "investment protectionism" But as Western banks faced collapse, they were delighted to receive capital injections from Asian SWFs – and Western governments didn’t object. In a crisis, needs must. Now, though, Asia’s [...]