Located in the Fennoscandian region of northern Europe, Finland shines as one of the most successful democracies in the world, coming first in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders. The Nordic country has very good economic indicators and was classified by The Heritage Foundation as the world’s 16th country in terms of economic freedom.
MADRID | The Corner | Euro area industrial production, the BoE Inflation Report and UK labour market data will be watched closely today. Barclays analysts expect euro area production to rise 0.7% m/m in September, partially offsetting August’s sharp drop. The Inflation Report is likely to shed light on recent BoE policy decisions, including possible downward revisions of its inflation and unemployment forecasts. UK consumer inflation fell to 1.2 per cent in September, a hefty 0.5 percentage point lower than the BoE expected just three months ago.
MADRID | By Sean Duffy | This weekend´s controversial “non-binding consultation” has caused quite the stir in international media over the past number of days. Reports asserted that 80 % of Catalans had voted in favour of Catalonia becoming an independent state. Yet that figure ignores almost 60% of the electorate who chose not to take part in Sunday´s vote. Those numbers point to a rather more nuanced narrative than the one currently being posited by the Catalan independence movement and many reporters.
VIENNA | By Keith Weiner via Truman | I proposed seven drivers of financial implosion in my dissertation. My recent writing has focused on two of them. One is the falling rate of interest on the 10-year government bond. As interest falls, the burden of debt rises. Since the falling rate incentivized more and more people to borrow, the number of indebted people, businesses, corporations, and of course governments is large. When the rate gets to zero, the burden of debt becomes theoretically infinite.
BEIJING | By Qin Min via Caixin | Companies like Huawei and Lenovo are using Facebook and sponsorship deals with sports teams to introduce devices to foreigners.
By UBS Global Macro Team | Our proprietary surprise indices for growth and inflation are still enjoying very tight correlations with the prices of a wide range of global financial assets. The gyrations of our global and regional growth indices for instance closely track equity markets, both developed and emerging. Global growth surprises (excluding the US) closely track – and often lead – the US dollar and oil prices. Eurozone growth surprises closely track – and often lead – the euro. And global inflation surprises closely track the price of gold.
The Communist Party slows down Beijing to ensure a pollution-free capital during the APEC Summit (Nov 9-11). Information about the world’s second economy is often distorted due to a lack of understanding of China and the nuances within. With the attention of the international community and foreign media on the country, the APEC Summit constitutes a golden opportunity for the country.
WASHINGTON | BNP Paribas analysts | Republicans won control of US Congress this week. Latest projections suggest the GOP has taken over the Senate. Given that the Republicans are very likely to retain a working majority in the House, we can expect the party to control both houses of Congress at least until the end of 2016. A severe budget showdown is unlikely.
MADRID | By Ofelia Marín-Lozano | The Spanish banking system got positive grades in the stress tests for two main reasons: the discrepancy between the accounts published by the end of 2013 and its (minimum) revision by the ECB’s inspectors. According to the asset quality revision (AQR), carried out before the stress tests, the capital ratio of the Spanish banks was only reduced by 20 bases points after the ECB’s revision. This is a minimum adjustment, slightly below the French or German banking system, but well below the Italian, Belgian or Dutch banking. It is certainly well below the big discrepancies detected in Greek and Portuguese banks.