One criticism that you not likely to hear about the Russian government is its lack of enthusiastic applications of new media technologies.  The Prime Minister posts his topless photos at a much more timely rate that the White House page is updated, the President has impressive blogs and video podcasts, they've got a school of bloggers to push the official government line and drown out online dissent, and now, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's envoy to NATO, has got himself a pretty robust Twitter feed in English and Russian going on right here.This is particularly fun stuff to read, and not just because Rogozin's essential professional function is to be like a Russian version of John Bolton before ...

Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and a long list of other former leaders of Eastern European states have penned an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama expressing their fears over what kinds of sacrifices to their sovereignty might come along with Washington's effort to improve relations with Russia.  Full text of the letter below from Gazeta Wyborcza, news coverage from Associated Press and Reuters.

An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe

by Valdas Adamkus, Martin Butora, Emil Constantinescu, Pavol Demes, Lubos Dobrovsky, Matyas Eorsi, Istvan Gyarmati, Vaclav Havel, Rastislav Kacer, Sandra Kalniete, Karel Schwarzenberg, Michal Kovac, Ivan Krastev, Alexander Kwasniewski, Mart Laar, Kadri Liik, Janos Martonyi. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Adam Rotfeld, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Alexandr Vondra, Lech Walesa.

We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers,

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /Two weeks ago a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-country-briefings/are-the-imf-and-the-ecb-lining-up-against-the-eu-commission-over-latvia/"I drew attention to a revealing press conference given by IMF First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky and European Central Bank governing council member Christian Noyer/a where it seemed a rather different posture was being taken on the Latvian question than that which is being transmitted from Brussels. Then a href="http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/the-european-union/is-the-latvia-intervention-team-assembling/"P O'Neill found a message on Twitter/a which suggested the topic of the Latvian budget had been unexpectedly added to the EcoFin agenda.br /br /Today a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601095amp;sid=aPlxlddcc8lI"Bloomberg report/a that Barclays Capital’s chief economist for emerging Europe Christian Keller thinks that the IMF's posture of continuing to withhold funds even after the approval of the spending cuts “signaled that the rift between the IMF and EU has widened” .br /br /Now I don't want to see connections were there are none, but it is a coincidence that Christian Keller works for ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /pa href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SlmdGD2bh-I/AAAAAAAAOoo/P8vnyB3RTno/s1600-h/bulgaria+population.png"img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 258px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357485959172294626" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SlmdGD2bh-I/AAAAAAAAOoo/P8vnyB3RTno/s400/bulgaria+population.png" //abr /br /br /The International Monetary Fund this week forecast the recession in Bulgaria would be deeper than it previously predicted. Such a decision should come as no surprise to anyone, since the country's economic dynamics in both the short and long term look extremely unstable, and Bulgaria is now almost certainly headed towards a series of more or less hair-raising roller-coaster rides. Even the briefest of glances at the population chart above should lead even the most sceptical among us to stop and think a little about the possible economic implications of such an appauling demographic outlook. As can be seen, the opening to the west brought a sharp outflow of people in the late 1980s (mainly ethnic Turks), but the important thing ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Well that so called investor "risk appetite" took a surprise hit yesterday (and from an unexpected quarter). It wasn't the worries about US fiscal deficits that caused the panic, but problems in the European banking system. a href="http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/06/16/57171/investor-fears-cut-risk-appetite/"Gwen Robinson reports/a:br /br /blockquoteRisk appetite suffered a sharp deterioration on Monday as fresh uncertainty about the global economy prompted investors to shift from equities, commodities and emerging market assets into the perceived safety of government bonds and the dollar. Markets were further unnerved by warnings on the economic outlook from the head of the IMF and an ECB report saying eurozone banks face another $283bn in writedowns on bad loans and securities this year and next./blockquotebr /As Izabella Kaminska notes, a href="http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=117027956538h=wHY-pu=bc40uref=nf"it is Southern Europe that is now getting all the attention/a.br /br /blockquoteThis time it’s the turn of 25 Spanish banks, all of whose senior ratings ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Official figures from the Federal Statistics Office this morning show that Germany's recession worsened considerably in the first quarter, with the economy shraning by 3.8 percent compared with the previous three-month period - that is equivalent to a 15.2% contraction as an annualised rate. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of contraction, and is the worst performance by the German economy since at least 1970 - when the German statistics office started the present time series. It is also the first time since reunification in 1990 that the German economy has experienced so many quarters of negative growth. GDP has was dragged down by the drop in export and and the consequent weakness in investment.br /br /br /pa href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/Sg1okeoxvFI/AAAAAAAAN6s/wHYQ9UkLoh0/s1600-h/german+GDP+2.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5336036109412580434" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/Sg1okeoxvFI/AAAAAAAAN6s/wHYQ9UkLoh0/s400/german+GDP+2.png" border="0" //abr /Year on year GDP fell by 6.7%, ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Italy's recession deepened at the start of 2009, with first-quarter gross domestic product falling to its worst level since at least 1980, confirming the impression that Europe's fourth-largest economy is now headed for its worst downturn since World War II. Preliminary data from the national statistics office (Istat) show that Italian GDP fell 2.4% in the first quarter when compared with the last quarter of 2008. This follows a downwardly revised 2.1% contraction in the fourth quarter of last year. Annualised this means a 9.6% contraction rate during the three months, which is very high indeed.br /br /pa href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/Sg0skEokxwI/AAAAAAAAN6U/_zHT8IVLSh4/s1600-h/italy+GDP+one.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5335970131734742786" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 229px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/Sg0skEokxwI/AAAAAAAAN6U/_zHT8IVLSh4/s400/italy+GDP+one.png" border="0" //abr /br /br /Year on year GDP fell by 5.9%, which was also the sharpest drop since Istat's most recent data series starts in 1980 - or for ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /According to preliminary estimates from the Spanish National Statistics Office published today, GDP contracted by 1.8% in the first three months of 2009 when compared with the last quarter on 2008. This follows a 1.0% drop in Q4 2008. This is equivalent to a 7.2% annualised rate of contraction, which is, of course, sharp.br /br /a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SgwM_W4NxhI/AAAAAAAAN5c/P1h2RPTzmDY/s1600-h/spain+gdp+one.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5335653941139850770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 209px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SgwM_W4NxhI/AAAAAAAAN5c/P1h2RPTzmDY/s400/spain+gdp+one.png" border="0" //abr /br /Over the first quarter of 2008 (that is year on year) GDP decreased by 2.9%, the sharpest decline recorded in almost 40 years. In fact you would need to go back to 1945 to find a year in which the Spanish economy contracted as strongly as it is likely to this year.br /br /The contraction was mainly caused by a very large slump in private ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /span style="font-family:arial;font-size:78%;"/spana href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SgiAR06lzrI/AAAAAAAAN1E/-NbHseEOV1Q/s1600-h/ecb+one.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5334654802370875058" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 399px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 264px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SgiAR06lzrI/AAAAAAAAN1E/-NbHseEOV1Q/s400/ecb+one.png" border="0" //abr /br /blockquote“The 60 billion euros they announced is peanuts for an economy the size of the euro zone,” economics professor and former Bank of England policy maker Willem Buiter said at a conference in Dublin yesterday. “I expect they will announce more or that the recession in the euro zone will be longer and deeper than would otherwise be necessary. They have a record of being somewhat behind the curve.” /blockquoteblockquoteEuropean car sales dropped 12 percent in April.... Bayerische Motoren Werke AG’s registrations dropped by almost one-third to 55,633 even as the German market expanded 19 percent, helped by the government’s 2,500 euro ($3,400) sales bonus .........Spain extended its auto-sales slump with a 46 percent plunge in registrations, the largest among the continent’s ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /The title to this post poses an interesting question I think, since the answer you give to it would seem to depend more on the meaning you attribute to the word "really" than on any consensually agreed objective fact. This is especially the case since Spain itself has at least two "official" unemployment numbers, so the backround to (and reason for my asking) the question is the apparent divergence between these two numbers (one from the national statistics office, and one from the employment office INEM), both of which were given extensive international press coverage recently, with the ensuing "spread" between one reading and the other causing general confusion and even leading some to question the very validity of the whole Spanish "headcount" process. br /br /As we shall see, what we have here is not necessarily a simple "fudging" of numbers, but rather ...