Press quotes

  • Britons want European Union to assert itself on the global stage
    The Guardian, 26 December 2010

    Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, said institutions such as the European commission, the Council of Ministers and the European parliament had always been unpopular because they were "inherently unlovable. But it is encouraging that that the British people do appear to realise that one middle-sized European country can actually achieve more in many areas of policy if it acts with its neighbours than if it tries to go it alone", said Grant.

  • How Europe’s new goals will pay off
    Newsweek, 24 December 2010

    "The problems are without precedent," says Centre for European Reform's Charles Grant, who predicts five years of "ghastly mess" for Europe, fraught with further political and financial tensions over debt, before the continent's economic renaissance emerges.

  • Election violence set to push Minsk back towards Moscow
    The Moscow News, 20 December 2010

    "He [Lukashenko] needs to pay close attention to someone, the Belarusian economy is something of a miracle when you compare it to its [former soviet republic] neighbours, such as Moldova. That’s all of foreign provenance", Tomas Valasek from the CER told The Moscow News.

  • Closer fiscal union: a collective guarantee
    The Wall Street Journal, 17 December 2010

    "This is a political crisis, not an economic one, because European governments could put this crisis to bed", says Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform. "If you take the aggregate picture, the eurozone doesn't have a problem," he says.

  • The euro: a crisis that defies answers
    BBC, 16 December 2010

    Others like Simon Tilford from the Centre for European Reform have long argued that the only true remedy is fiscal union. However, he concedes, the "political obstacles to such a union appear insurmountable". Ultimately he believes the euro is unlikely to crack. "EU leaders," he says "will do whatever it takes to save the euro, short of setting up a fiscal union".

  • Putin in the public glare
    The Moscow News, 14 December 2010

    Putin is shrewd at exploiting the power of the media and combines political grandstanding with more image conscious messages, says Katinka Barysch, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform in London. "You can either give a speech or strip your shirt off and stand in a river, he does both," she said. "He strikes me very much as the second leader of the media age, because Gorbachev was very media savvy as well. He also realised that images speak more than a thousand words," says Barysch.

  • Slovak remark renews eurozone break-up talk
    NPR, 14 December 2010

    "Slovakia is an interesting case," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the London-based Centre for European Reform. As a small economy that is not yet massively integrated with the rest of the eurozone, Slovakia could envision bringing back its koruna without massive disruption to the rest of the eurozone, he said. "If Spain was forced out, the eurozone would have a huge problem," he said, referring to the far-larger Spanish economy.

  • Berlusconi pleads for support ahead of confidence vote
    International Herald Tribune, 14 December 2010

    "There is no doubt that Italy is now vulnerable to a deterioration of investor sentiment", said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the CER in London. "If they were to have a period of instability and less prudent management of the country's public finances, that could well prompt more investors to look more askance." ..."Depending on what happens with Spain, Italy can make contagion more likely and more rapid by mismanaging its fiscal position." Indeed, whatever the political outcome here on Tuesday, Mr Tilford added, "Italy isn’t out of the woods."

  • The cuts that hurt the council will also scar the continent
    The Observer, 12 December 2010

    But as Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a strong believer in the eurozone, puts it: "The German medicine for the eurozone crisis - austerity and structural reform - is not enough. The problem countries will not be able to grow their way out of debt deflation."

  • Tougher EU bank tests could ease crisis
    Bismarck Tribune, 10 December 2010

    "The problem of the European responses since the start of the year has been that they have always been slightly behind the curve," said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.