Still the “pivot”: Russia’s self-conception and view of the euro crisis as perceived in public opinion and the Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 2011-12. EU Centre in Singapore Working Paper No. 8, August 2012

In his influential and disputed 1904 lecture, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Halford Mackinder argued that the Russian heartland was the fulcrum of many historical and geostrategic currents across Eurasian space. While the thesis has been thought surpassed by recent technological advances in transportation, it serves as a useful heuristic device to open certain thematic lines of analysis apparent in the presentation of the ongoing “EUrocrisis” by the country’s newspaper of record, the Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

Banking Union with a Sovereign Virus. The self-serving regulatory treatment of sovereign debt in the euro area. CEPS Policy Brief No. 289, 27 March 2013

In many eurozone countries, domestic banks often hold more than 20% of domestic public debt, which is an unsatisfactory situation given that banks are highly leveraged and that sovereign debt is inherently subject to default risk within the euro area. This paper by Daniel Gros finds, however, that the relative concentration of public debt on bank balance sheets is not just a result of the euro crisis, for there are strong additional incentives for banks in some countries to increase their sovereign. His contribution discusses a number of these regulatory incentives – the most important of which is specific to the euro area – and explores ways in which euro area banks can be weaned from massive investments in government bonds.