LONDON | By London analysts | Since the end of the most recent recession, US consumer confidence has remained on an upward trend, despite several negative shocks from government policy. Given this track record, we expect the fall in confidence related to the federal shutdown to be short-lived.
BEIJING | By Caixin Magazine | The third plenum of the Communist Party’s 18th Central Committee will start on November 9. Hopes are high that significant reform measures will be unveiled after the meeting. Here is what Zhu Haibin, chief China economist at investment bank JPMorgan, expects to see. He also explains why the success of the meeting will be determined by what comes next.
LONDON | By The Economist Staff via Presseurop | According to the British newspaper, Great Britain “faces a choice between comfortable isolation and bracing openness. Go for openness. Asked to name the European country with the most turbulent future, many would pick Greece or Italy, both struggling with economic collapse. A few might finger France, which has yet to come to terms with the failure of its statist model. Hardly anybody would plump for Britain, which has muddled through the crisis moderately well.”
LONDON | By Barclays analysts | In a surprise move, the ECB cut the refi rate by 25bp to 0.25% and left the deposit rate unchanged at zero. It also extended its fixed-rate, full-allotment facility to all refinancing operations by one year, at least until mid 2015. The ECB clearly signalled that it is concerned about persistently low inflation, even if deflation risks are contained. We will only know more about how long the ECB thinks low inflation will last next month when it publishes its macroeconomic forecasts. We see euro area inflation in 2014 dropping to 1.0% from the forecast 1.4% this year.
FRANKFURT | By Hendrik Kafsack at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung via Presseurop | Germany is going down the green energy road, Poland is drilling for shale gas, and the United Kingdom has announced the building of new nuclear plants: when it comes to energy supply and security, the Europeans are hauling in different directions. It’s in their own interest, though, to adopt a common strategy.
NEW YORK | By Ana Fuentes | Micro-blogging star Twitter made its debut at NYSE on Thursday, opening at $45.10 a share, well above the $26 set by the firm and its bankers. Indeed, it was a big day for the New York stock, more than for the company itself, since what we saw on the floor was a mere game of offer and demand, nothing to do with the company’s real value. Outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, many find it hard to get excited about this IPO.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor | Telecom Italia needs to reorganise its balance sheet via a capital increase, a dividend cut or a sale of assets. Spanish Telefónica, which has a 22.4% stake of the Italian firm through Telco, may be willing to help the company by a convertible securities issue or the participation in that capital increase.
THE CORNER TEAM | Put the champagne in the freezer. Against most expectations, the ECB lowered its main refinancing rate to 0.25 percent on Thursday in order to encourage the eurozone’s recovery. Mario Draghi took this measure responding to a slump in inflation that has sparked fears the economy could stall, years after financial crisis broke and years after most other central banks did the same thing.
MADRID | By Ilan Brat and Christopher Bjork at The Wall Street Journal via Presseurop | It has puzzled Spanish bank analysts for years: Why did the country’s mortgage delinquency rate rise so slowly even as unemployment soared above 26%? A big part of the answer—revealed by a spate of bank earnings reports in recent days—is that Spanish lenders had been making their loan books look healthier than they really were by refinancing big numbers of loans to struggling homeowners and businesses.
MEXICO CITY | By David Brunat | Latin America is on its way to give a lesson to the European Union in terms of employment. By the end of the year the subcontinent is to hit a 6.2% jobless rate, a record low, according to a shared report issued by the Economic Comission for Latin America and the Caribben (ECLAC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The region has already reached a 6.6% rate in the third quarter, while in the EU Spain, Portugal and Greece are approaching a staggering 30%. Latin America’s jobless rate is even lower than that of the United States (7.3%).