Press

"I don't see any reason why Hollande, if elected, would create problems for Franco-British defence collaboration," says Charles Grant, director of the CER. "On defence, Germany is not as reliable a partner for France as the British are."

Tomas Valasek, of the CER said: "This shows that countries outside the US are now taking cyber seriously."  He added that NATO had suffered security breaches in the past and that it needed to protect itself. "It is an obvious target as it is a military alliance included in a shooting war in Afghanistan and has peace building operations in Kosovo and off the coast of Somalia. One has to assume bad guys are after it," he said.

"The ECB's December move to provide massively greater liquidity to the banking system was the single most important thing to happen in the eurozone last year," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the CER. "This has bought time by easing the pressures on the banks, who in turn have bought more government debt – at least in Italy and Spain – than had looked likely."

As Philip Whyte of the CER points out, "to propose such reforms as an answer to Europe's immediate growth problem is to miss the point: it is to provide a long-term [supply-side] answer to a short-term [demand-side] problem.

Getting the EU economy back on track is not all about bailouts and quick fixes. It's about leadership and direction said Simon Tilford of the CER. In his opinion, the problem is made far worse because of differences of opinion within the EU leadership about how the crisis started and more importantly how to fix it.

"What the Greek economy is going through basically is a massive demand shock," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the CER. "Unless they help the Greek economy back to growth, then I don't think there's any chance of the Greeks being able to abide by the terms of this bailout."

Philip Whyte, senior research fellow at the CER, describes the standoff between Greece and its creditors - which also includes the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank - as a bluffing game. "The social strains in Greece are increasing by the day. ... At the same time, there's a complete loss of trust amongst the troika [EU, IMF and ECB] in Greece's willingness and ability to push through the sort of reforms that everyone expects the Greeks to push through. ... There is a growing view among certain countries in northern Europe that this game can't go on. ...

"The IMF has never approached a country like this," said Simon Tilford of the CER. "With this much austerity, it would always have a huge devaluation, too." But Greece cannot devalue its currency because it uses the euro, so "Greece has been asked to do something the IMF has never asked another country to do."

As Simon Tilford of the CER has noted, as a share of its economy Italy's manufacturing sector is as big as Germany's, while France's industrial base is as small as Britain's.