Lawrence McDonald

Article by BBC News The EU’s 27 leaders are discussing how to create jobs and growth amid calls to go beyond enforcing budget discipline. The EU has more than 23 million unemployed people and there are fears that wide-ranging budget cuts will harm enterprise and training. The eurozone crisis is dominating the EU summit in [...]

Article by Austen Sherman and Sara Eisen, Bloomberg Whether or not Greece is able to reach an agreement on the restructuring of its debt, the country is set to “implode” as the economy contracts, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Steve Hanke. “The game is completely over,” Hanke, professor of applied economics, said at the Bloomberg Sovereign Debt Crisis [...]

Article by Paul Dobson, Emma Charlton and Lucy Meakin, Bloomberg European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s unlimited three-year loans to euro-region banks may give Italy and Spain only temporary respite from the region’s debt crisis. Two-year Italian and Spanish notes rallied since the ECB said Dec. 8 that it planned to offer as much liquidity as [...]

Article by Lucia Mutikani, Reuters The number of Americans filing for new jobless benefits dropped to an almost four-year low last week, and factory activity in the mid-Atlantic expanded moderately, suggesting the economy carried some momentum into the new year. But the pace of growth probably will slow. Analysts cautioned the drop in jobless claims [...]

Article by Simon Kennedy, Bloomberg The International Monetary Fund is proposing to raise its lending capacity by $500 billion to insulate the global economy against any worsening of Europe’s debt crisis, according to a person familiar with the talks. The Washington-based lender currently has about $385 billion available to lend and wants to lift that to $885 [...]

Former Lehman Brothers V.P. Larry McDonald on the S&P downgrades in Europe and their impact on U.S. banks. Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

Article By CNBC.com and Reuters Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s credit rating, French TV reported Friday, while several other euro zone countries face the same fate later in the day, according to reports. Germany and the Netherlands aren’t among those facing a downgrade, a senior euro zone government source told Reuters. Another source confirmed [...]

Article By Jeff Black and Jana Randow, Bloomberg Germany may be on the brink of recession after the sovereign debt crisis caused the economy to contract in the final quarter of 2011. Europe’s largest economy shrank “roughly” 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter from the third, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today in an [...]

Article By Gabi Thesing, Bloomberg The European Central Bank took a record amount of overnight deposits yesterday as the region’s financial institutions entrusted funds amassed from emergency lending operations. Euro-area banks parked 455.3 billion euros ($582 billion) with the Frankfurt-based ECB, the most since the euro’s introduction in 1999 and up from 443.7 billion euros reported yesterday. [...]

Article By Sumeet Chatterjee, Reuters A collapse of the euro and break-up of the European Union would have catastrophic consequences for the global financial system, billionaire investor George Soros was quoted as saying. “Today, the euro is potentially endangering the political cohesion of the European Union,” the Business Line newspaper cited Soros as saying in [...]