The EU and ECB do much talking but do little in the way of action, meanwhile people continue to suffer in Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland. The EU/ECB are 5 years behind US and UK and 2 years behind Japan.The crisis has left Europe with three distinct problems: shaky public finances, crippling long-term unemployment, and limping banks. This summer’s news suggests they are coalescing to form Japanese-style vicious circle. The bond market turmoil was fixed by a dramatic intervention by the European Central Bank (ECB) in summer 2012. Interests rates for the most vulnerable economies – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain – are down to historic lows; too low, a pessimist might argue. But the price that Germany exacted for ECB president Mario Draghi’s rescue was exorbitant: Europe-wide acceptance of a punishing austerity agenda. Even in Germany itself, where the federal government has reached fiscal balance, the pressure is now on its states, the Länder, which are struggling to balance their books by 2018. Austerity proponents such as finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble insist that squeezing public expenditure will free up private investment. But Europe’s banks, with Deutsche Bank very much in the lead, remain in a state of shell shock. Whereas the US and the UK have moved rapidly to put in place new, confidence-boosting regulation, Germany has been dragging its feet over a European banking union. As the summer ends, the sense of impasse is inescapable. Germany cannot truly prosper without a growing Europe. Europe cannot prosper without ​exporting to a buoyant German economy. But with the Christian Democrats in charge of German fiscal policy, is there any hope of change?

The EU (the 4-th Reich in fact) instigated this thing in Ukraina with a coup d'état against Ukraine's former president - and from thereon we are rolling on into a quagmire of tit-for-tat sanctions and embargoes and ultimately, an invasion by Russia, not only of Ukraine, but, the EU and NATO countries as well!

Putin will not back down especially if the west figures they have him cornered against the wall, that's when his fangs and claws will come out and rip apart everything and everybody and every entity that is against him and, particularly against HIS Russia. Read up on Wolverines! That's what Russia will become! A Wolverine! Hell be Damned, it will be Hell for Leather!

There will be no winners here, but, I'll tell you one thing for sure, the EU and the western infiltrators/meddlers will get the FIRST bloody nose out of this!

I say let the 280 some Russian trucks of AID into east Ukraine carry on to their destination! Let them go with an 'appropriate crew' for each truck, not just the driver, as Ukraine is demanding! That's idiotic of Ukraine to limit the AID with just one driver per truck! Where is Ukraine's AID, where is the UN's AID, where is the EU's AID! There's none, because all that lot want is to annihilate the ethic Russian speaking MAJORITY in that Territory! Let that AID convoy proceed and if there happens to be a 'misstep' along the way 'by the Russians', then deal with it CAREFULLY and RATIONALLY with Ukraine's national security in mind! But watch your step, Ukraine, you and the whole world are on the Brink of a World War!

I can vividly sense the HATRED of the Russian Ethnic Peoples of east Ukraine!...The miscalculation was entirely that of the EU and the West they thought they could interfere in the affairs of a foreign country without any consequences. Totally provocative of the West to aid the original rebels and then send in the US Vice President ,head of the CIA and dear old Baroness Ashton to give finacial help and advice immediately after the democratically elcted President had been ousted.

Seven years after the start of the financial crisis, banking reform is still very much a work in progress. Or should that be regression?  The only constant is that the burden of regulatory requirement and diktat keeps on growing. Little good does it seem to be doing either. Yet “job only half done” remains very much the prevailing narrative among politicians and regulators. 

Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who gave his name to a new rule that limits commercial banks from using deposits for risky proprietary trading, once confided that his rule would only work if it were kept simple enough to be written on half a page.

In the event, the final version runs to 71 pages, with a further 900 of interpretation. Try making that your bedtime reading. It is even worse in Europe, where the EU is on a mission to superimpose its own particular mix of the absurd and outright destructive on already very full national reform programmes.

Underlying this growing regulatory quagmire is the belief that legislators have not yet properly got to grips with the “too big to fail” and “too complex to manage” issues. Even before the ink has dried on the last regulatory initiative, there will inevitably be another in the making. On and on it goes, like a metastasising cancer. The idea that banks "will never be entirely safe until equity capital is expanded to 30pc of lending" is as barking as any other estimate. Neither she, nor I, nor you, nor anyone else can predict the future and while 30% provides a better buffer than 29% or 28% it is not as 'safe' as 31% or 32%. Striving for a mythical 'safety' level is strictly for vote catching.

Given that 450+ US retail banks failed after 2008 it is not clear Why anyone still thinks they are not the casinos? While politicians still imagine that retail banks are safe but investment banks are unsafe they will not be able to understand the numbers and make the right decisions, however unpopular those are bound to be with their voting fodder.

Growth in the single currency region came to a halt between April and June, raising alarm bells about the impact of an escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.  Official figures showed that Germany’s economy  shrank by a worse than expected 0.2 per cent while France endured its second quarter of zero growth.  Meanwhile Italy, the eurozone’s third largest economy, fell back into recession for the third time since 2008, overshadowing improvements in Portugal and Spain.   Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said some of Germany’s problems may have been temporary but there was a risk of the eurozone sliding into a triple-dip recession as confidence was dented by worries about sanctions against Russia.  He added: “Not only will an escalating crisis hit risk appetite but sanctions are also likely to have some impact on Europe’s economies in coming months.”  The European Central Bank will now come under increasing pressure to step up stimulus measures by pumping money into the economy. France piled pressure on the European Central Bank to do more to boost growth on Thursday after news that economic activity across the 18-nation single currency area came to a halt in the second quarter. With France registering zero growth for a second successive quarter, Michel Sapin, the country's finance minister, halved his growth forecast for this year, abandoned the deficit reduction target and said it was up to the Frankfurt-based ECB to respond to an "exceptional situation of weak growth and weak inflation across the eurozone". Sapin's demand came as the latest figures from Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency, showed that problems in the single currency's Big Three economies – Germany, France and Italy – resulted in no increase in eurozone gross domestic product in the three months to June. That compares with an increase of 0.2% in the first quarter. However financial markets saw no immediate prospect of the ECB launching its own money creation (quantitative easing) programme until next year at the earliest, amid concerns that countries such as France and Italy would row back on structural reform if fresh growth-boosting stimulus policies were introduced. The interest rate – or yield – on 10-year German bonds briefly fell below 1% for the first time as dealers anticipated a protracted period of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates. Markets already knew that Italian output had contracted by 0.2% in the second quarter but were surprised by a similar-sized fall in Germany, which was hurt by a more challenging climate for its key export sector. France made it clear it blamed foot-dragging on the part of the ECB for the failure of the eurozone's second-biggest economy as it reduced its growth forecast for 2014 from 1% to 0.5% and ditched the 1.7% forecast for 2015, saying it would not expand by much more than 1%.

Word on the Street is Germany will allow PIIGS to deficit spend in order to prop up German economy for a couple of years, before the EZ is finally broken up.

They want to squeeze every last dime out of the suckers' pockets before ditching them...You know I could swear that somebody once said "the worst of the eurocrisis is behind us". Now who was it again ? Oh yes, Draghi, arch Eurolooney at the ECB. Maybe his crystal ball wasn't a CE approved model so he can blame that on his duff statement. The EZ should be referred to more accurately as GZ, the German Zone. Within the GZ there are areas being sacrificed on the alter of German economic superiority. The utter economic chaos in Spain, among the other broken economies of the GZ, has no chance whatsoever of recovering. Germans failed with Tiger tanks, but they have conquered with economic weapons that have secured their growth over the last several years, whilst others languish in decline. Germany is still the European menace, and there is a growing realisation that they have masterminded a piece of economic trickery, and continue to do so. The nations who fell for German economic idealism have themselves to blame, but how this utter financial mess will develop over time has many speaking of rebellion and revolution. Frankly, whatever happens there is only deeper chaos ahead...Spot on in € being a D-Mark and look what happened when locked in trading bands with that, In effect you must have your economic needs exactly the same otherwise you fail. People signed up to €, and in Spain, and maybe Portugal, Greece, they will stick with it as it's their defence against dictatorship. Franco was in charge till when, Greece abolished became a republic when, ditto Portugal. € membership gives them a seat at the 'top table p art of Worlds no.2 currency' for that they keep willing to pay what seems a crazy price...

While the great and good of the EU financial wizards make their plans and predictions regarding the Euro and banks and stability et al, they are ignorant, deliberately or otherwise, of a simple and economically uncomplicated set of facts.

While, Prima Face, the Europe Central Bank has not indulged in quantitative easing, the reality is that the individual banks and industrial companies have done. They have achieved this by the banks extending loans to businesses which in normal times would be unable to raise finance. Those businesses though add a multiplier effect.

Where in the UK, an SME business would normally work with one bank or two where there is a specific reason, in Europe, a company will work with ten, fifteen or twenty banks or more.

The problem in Europe lies in invoice/sales order/purchase order backed finance, especially related to export sales. It is not unusual to find a company raising finance against a customer order, then raising finance to purchase goods/material to fulfill that order with a separate bank and then, when shipped, to discount the invoice with another bank and then discount it again with another or even another still. The outcome is one order/sale boosting the money supply maybe two, three, four or five times the value of the order. And they are all at it because the culture within Clubmed is that it's all OK. The banks must be aware but are turning a blind eye.

Compound this further with a general move of banking facilities from long term to short term, replacing existing borrowings with more expensive new ones and the associated transactional costs paid for by the borrowing businesses; then the whole system is awash with short term debt that is based on collateral many times less than the money borrowed, so it doesn't take a genuis to work out what will happen when the merry-go-round finally, inevitably, grinds to a halt.

All the economists will be wrong footed by this and when the crash comes it will be epic. Nobody has asked the simple question; why has it been so easy for businesses in the Eurozone to access cash when the rest of the west has been at the opposite end of the scale and why have no European banks needed rescuing? The answer is that they are simply kicking the can down the street in a dwam of general stupidity. The nettle hasn't been grasped, the bullet is unbitten and the chickens are coming home to roost.