If there is a lesson from this week’s resignations of two scandal-tainted European ministers it’s this: Once a leader loses trust, it’s best to exit quickly. France’s now departed foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, and Germany’s departed defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg,...

SHE MAKES FUN, in private, of the way he walks and talks, of his rapid, jerky gestures and facial grimaces. He mocks her deliberation, her reluctance, her matronly caution. She has compared him to Mr. Bean and to the French comic Louis de Funès, with his curly hair and large nose. He sometimes calls...

AS 2010 DRAWS to a close, things are looking up for the U.S. economy. Economists have raised their growth forecasts for 2011, in part because of the tax deal between President Obama and Senate Republicans. The long-term outlook still depends on the federal and state government debt burden. Then there’s...

Talk about a takeover with a twist: few would believe that a debt-heavy construction conglomerate that relies on the stagnating Spanish economy for most of its revenue could take over a 137-year-old, cash-rich German blue chip. But such is the intent of Grupo A.C.S., a Spanish construction and building...

THE euro has been good for German exporters, and seems likely to get even better in the coming year. It has also been good for the Netherlands, which was the fourth-largest exporter in the euro zone in 2000 and now ranks second. But France and Italy suffered during the last decade as their shares...

Even as Europe struggles to contain its latest debt crisis, fresh fissures are emerging that show the euro zone diverging into two — or even three — different economic parts that threaten to compound the problems even further. After publication of new figures Monday, a senior European Union official...

When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess. An Irish bond market already in free fall plunged further after Ireland announced...

The British economist John Maynard Keynes may live on in popular legend as the world’s most influential economist. But in much of Europe, and most acutely here in the land of his birth, his view that deficit spending by governments is crucial to avoiding a long recession has lately been willfully...

China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of some of those same materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday. The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial...