In case you have not noticed it, the euro crisis is over. It must be because EU Commission President Jos Manuel Barroso, ECB President Mario Draghi and French President Franois Hollande all said so over the past six months. Read more

Dear Insights subscriber, This is the last issue of Insights for 2012 before we break for the Christmas and New Year holidays, so please excuse me from deviating from the normal format of this newsletter. Every Friday for the past six months, we have been delivering you three short opinion articles along with links to our favourite stories on the web – whether outrageous, important, interesting or just funny. Read more

Not just since Silvio Berlusconi’s announcement to run once more for the top job in Italian politics has Italy been a perplexing country. In any other nation, the prospect of a 76-year-old convicted tax evader re-entering politics would be laughed at – especially if, like Berlusconi, he was with one foot in prison, had a dubious personal reputation and a poor political track record. Read more

According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on 21 December this year. It’s not clear, though, whether this was the motivation for the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to cut interest rates to 3% doomsday levels. Read more

One of the most oft-quoted sayings in economics is Herbert Stein’s famous dictum that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. It is so often quoted because it is logically true. Read more

Negotiations on an extension of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade agreement meant to liberalise economic relations across the Pacific, are to go into their fifteenth round next week. Proponents of the TPP hope it will improve conditions for foreign direct investment (FDI). Read more

It was a different era: Vague prospects of making money on the internet were enough to mobilise billions of dollars. Political scientists still believed in the end of history and the final triumph of liberal democracy. Read more

Does watching TV change your life? And in particular, do TV commercials change your consumption habits? Read more

When will we finally get a lasting solution to the Greek problem? Not a stop-gap measure, but one that actually puts the country on a sustainable path towards recovery? Read more

As the European Union is mobilising hundreds of billions of euros to save the continent’s currency, it would be reassuring to know that it can be trusted with money. After last week’s annual report from the European Court of Auditors, there is little reason for such optimism. Read more

No one should ever compile a cost-benefit analysis of the United States elections. After a campaign that lasted about 18 months (and felt even longer), and having spent an estimated US$6 billion promoting both candidates, nothing has changed. Read more

A latent state of emergency has become Europe’s new normal. Even professional optimists such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel believe that the euro crisis will be with the continent for at least another five years. Read more

When political announcements consist of motherhood statements that nobody could possibly disagree with, they often make little sense. Or at least they don’t tell us anything new. Read more

How would you feel if you suddenly discovered that you were much wealthier than you thought? Well great, obviously. Read more