On August 24^th, the Atlantic Council’s Global Business and Economics Program hosted a conference call with Dr. Thomas Mayer, Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank Group, and Managing Director of Deutsche Bank Research, on the evolving sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

Last Thursday’s bailout of Greece by the principal actors in the sovereign debt crisis –France, Germany, and the European Central Bank – has buoyed the spirits of European credit and stock markets. But the agreement does little more than paper over Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.

Maybe it’s the heat here in Washington, but the news from Brussels and down the street from Congress leaves my mind baffled and my blood boiling.

The long-awaited NATO Strategic Concept, revealed last month at the Lisbon Summit, had very little impact on global financial markets. In the latest installment of the New Atlanticist Podcast Series Atlantic Council senior fellow Sarwar Kashmeri interviews Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman to discuss this issue, China's financial leverage on the US, and the Euro's future.

From Reuters:  Allowing Turkey to join the European Union would make the bloc more relevant, but Germany and France feel threatened by the Muslim-majority nation's bid, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan said on Wednesday.

This week brings a critical test for the transatlantic security partnership. The European Parliament will vote on a revised agreement with the United States on tracking terrorist finances using financial data unique to the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). The vote is about more than restoring data-sharing.

The United States and the European Union have signed a bank data-transfer agreement that will give U.S. authorities access to EU bank transfer data, under EU supervision, in an effort to combat terrorism. In an e-mail interview, Kurt Volker, Atlantic Council senior adviser, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and managing director of the Center on Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, explains the importance of a U.S.-EU bank-data transfer agreement.

From the Christian Science Monitor:  NATO is years overdue for a major review of its purpose. The last time the transatlantic military alliance looked in the mirror was 1999 – before 9/11, before widespread cyberattacks, before Russia veered from the democratic path under Vladimir Putin.