Timothy Geithner

US vote: Who you gonna call? ECB, not Brussels

November 6, 2012 10:55 am by Peter Spiegel

Geithner, left, has been in frequent touch with ECB's Draghi and his predecessor, Trichet.

A joint election party co-hosted by Democrats and Republicans Abroad at the Renaissance Hotel in Brussels this evening is scheduled to go until 3am in anticipation of a long night ahead for any eurocrats waiting to get first word on who has won the US presidential contest.

Looking for something to do in the interim? For his part, French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the influential Brussels think tank Bruegel, scoured the recently-released calendars of US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner to find out which of the American’s EU counterparts he talked to most frequently since the eurozone crisis broke nearly three years ago.

Perhaps not surprisingly, by far his most frequent phone calls have gone to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. Pisani-Ferry counts 114 contacts with either IMF chief Christine Lagarde or her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or their deputies.

What is a surprise is that Geithner’s most frequent interlocutor on this side of the Atlantic has not been in Brussels, Paris or Berlin. Instead, it was Frankfurt, where he contacted European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and his predecessor, Jean-Claude Trichet, 58 times in the 30 months examined. Read more

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Posted in EU, Euro, Foreign policy |

Geithner to EU: Increase your bailout fund

March 20, 2012 10:49 am by Peter Spiegel

US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner

Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, has occasionally irked his European counterparts with attempts to influence the eurozone’s crisis policymaking, but European officials will be closely listening to him as the clock ticks down to next month’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund.

European Union leaders hope to get non-eurozone backing to double the IMF’s funding to $1tn at the gathering. Although the US won’t contribute, Washington is the IMF’s largest shareholder and is widely believed to be behind the insistence of Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, that no increase will be forthcoming unless the eurozone increases the size of its own €500bn rescue system.

Those interested in tea leaf reading will get their chance today, when Geithner testifies on Capital Hill on the eurozone crisis. The House financial services committee, where Geithner will appear, helpfully released his testimony last night, and it makes clear Geithner is in no mood to back down. Read more

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Posted in Economic governance, Economic growth, EU, Euro |

The not-so-quiet Americans

September 19, 2011 12:32 pm by Peter Spiegel

In a new article, George Soros warns German voters that they risk another Depression.

The Fed pumped dollars into European banks, Timothy Geithner pleaded with EU finance ministers to take quick action, and in today’s FT former Obama administration economic major-domo Larry Summers warned that incrementalism in the eurozone is akin to the slow bleeding of the Vietnam war.

It seems like the week the Americans jumped into the crisis surrounding the euro with both feet.

Now comes a compelling treatise from yet another major American economic thinker, financier George Soros, who has written in the New York Review of Books echoing Summers’ concerns about incrementalism and predicting that a common eurozone treasury is imminent – and may be the only solution to the crisis. Read more

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Posted in Euro, Fiscal policy, Further reading |

Is US stimulating a fight over European austerity?

October 7, 2010 2:36 pm by Peter Spiegel

Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, made headlines Wednesday after he warned of the potential for a currency war – or, to be more precise, a “competitive non-appreciation” – if China did not allow the renminbi to appreciate more freely.

What was less noticed in his address was some equally tough talk for Europe, where he seems to see a danger of continent-wide austerity measures stifling the nascent global economic rebound. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Fiscal policy |