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Enrique Fuentes Quintana Award for the best doctoral thesis in Social Sciences
FUNCAS
The Enrique Fuentes Quintana Prize, awarded by FUNCAS, has been awarded for the first time in the social sciences category to the Economics Department of the University of Cantabria. Among the many candidates, the jury has agreed by majority to award the prize to the doctoral thesis ‘The role of International Financial Institutions. An analysis of the loan policy of the European Investment Bank’ by Dr. Ana Lara Gómez from the University of Cantabria. The thesis has been supervised by Judith Clifton and Daniel Díaz Fuentes, professors from the Economics Department of the University of Cantabria, and analyzes the loan policy carried out by the European Investment Bank since its creation. Given the lack of studies on this type of institutions, this is a pioneering research, which is highly relevant in the present context due to the importance of international financial institutions to face crisis.
Europe’s Struggling Political Parties Promise a Return to the Pre-Thatcherite Era
The Wall Street Journal
BERLIN—To win voters lost to an anti-globalization backlash, Europe’s mainstream parties are going back to the 1970s.
In Germany, the U.K, Denmark, France and Spain, these parties are aiming to reverse decades of pro-market policy and promising greater state control of business and the economy, more welfare benefits, bigger pensions and higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Some have discussed nationalizations and expropriations.
It could add up to the biggest shift in economic policy on the continent in decades.
European Investment Bank: the EU’s hidden giant
Financial Times
Safely hidden in the woods of Luxembourg sits one of the world’s biggest and most peculiar banks.
It issues more bonds than JPMorgan but is not supervised by any external regulator. As an EU institution, it spearheaded a €500bn plan to boost investment yet managed to shrink its loan book at the same time.
Created with a mission to lend in the public interest — to go where private banks do not care or dare — it rarely loses a cent on its bets. Only in 2006, after almost half a century of operations, did it write off a loan. Even today the bank will spend more on staff in a single year than it expects to lose on its entire €455bn loan book.
This is the strange world of the European Investment Bank, a huge, unsupervised leverage machine for Europe’s politicians that has comprehensively mastered the art of dodging risk.