"Any chance I can get some gloves, too?"
With markets, economists and analysts in a decidedly twitchy state as the Latvian government fiddles with it budget (hopefully not in the Nero sense) the tiniest scrap of information might be enough to act as a tipping point, sending the country and the region either to the abyss or onto a rose-scented road of recovery.
So here’s an exclusive that I am sure is of deep, deep significance. On Monday I saw EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs in Riga. He wasn’t addressing any conferences and he wasn’t having talks (officially at least) with the great and the good or even the Tautas Party, for which he performed a star turn recently.
No, the EU’s top energy bod – responsible for things like electricity, gas and oil – was in Riga Plaza shopping centre. More precisely, he was in German clothes store Peek and Cloppenburg. More precisely still, he was in the menswear department trying on warm winter coats.
You can work the rest out for yourself and I fully expect the markets to go haywire when they hear this scoop.
Baltic Features 