Peter Goves, MFS Investment Management | Despite acknowledging the uncertainty stemming from the Ukraine conflict, the ECB policy decision had a hawkish tilt. Indeed, the ECB chose to wind down the APP schedule more quickly than the December guidance and revised its rate guidance. The ECB also tweaked its guidance and removed a previous dovish bias which referenced the prospect of rates remaining at present or lower levels. The market…
Morgan Stanley | ArcelorMittal has announced the acquisition of the steel recycling firm, John Lawrie Metals, for an as yet undisclosed price. The transaction is part of the former’s strategy to increase the use of scrap steel to reduce the emissions from its steel operations. The company which has been bought operates 4 sites in Scotland which recycle steel for the UK’s oil and gas industry, with a total capacity…
Nick Ottens (Atlantic Sentinel) | Western Europe refused to see the risks. Eastern Europe refused to invest in renewables. Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States have imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia since it invaded Ukraine, banning Russian airlines and state media, cutting off Russian banks from the SWIFT financial system and freezing the assets of Russian oligarchs and the Russian Central Bank. The one step European countries…
Renta 4 | 1-. The UK Competition regulator, the CMA, has given the green light to Cellnex’s purchase of 6,000 towers from Hutchinson in the region. The deal is subject to the Spanish firm’s sale of 1,000 sites which overlap geographically with those of Hutchinson. 2-. From what we can glean from the communication, the 1,000 sites which will be subject to being sold off correspond to part of the…
Fernando González Urbaneja | The European and US deployment to help Ukraine and stifle Putin’s Russia is not as rhetorical or irrelevant as some imagined a week ago. Putin’s unilateral and criminal war is being met with the patriotism of Ukrainians, determined to defend their country and their freedom, but also with the active revulsion of most of the community of nations. The debate in the United Nations Extraordinary Assembly…
J.P. Marín-Arrese | Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, the US has shown utter disdain for Russia. It flouted the pledge made to Gorbatchev to keep former Warsaw Pact countries out of NATO so that Russia could have a security buffer zone along its frontiers. It openly invited the Ukrainian government to disregard the Minsk agreement, which was brokered to ensure that Ukraine would remain neutral. John Kerry, the former…
Fernando González Urbaneja | Russian journalist Masha Gessen wrote a biography of Putin ten years ago (“The Man Without a Face” Debate) which was recommended reading then and even more so now. In chapter 3 (Autobiography of a Thug) she sketches the character that Putin’s unofficial biographers did not hesitate to highlight when praising his character. During his youth in Leningrad (now and formerly St. Petersburg) he behaved like a…
Germany’s coalition parties agreed on Wednesday a roughly 13 billion euro package of measures to help households cope with surging energy prices, including scrapping a surcharge levied on electricity bills to support green power, as reported by Reuters. Energy prices in Germany have soared in the last year, and fears of an escalation of the crisis between Ukraine and gas supplier Russia are set to push them higher still. Germany’s…
Intermoney | The EU cannot replace Russian energy supplies in the short term since, in a normal year, as was 2019, 46.7% of the solid fuels, 41.1% of the natural gas and 26.9% of the oil it imported came from Russia. Figures that are biased upwards by Germany, given that, for example, in 2021, 42.83% of Spain’s natural gas exports came from Algeria compared to the 8.91% that came from…
Marco Troiano (Scope Ratings) | At the end of September 2021, the combined exposure of BIS reporting banks to Ukrainian residents stood at USD 13.5bn gross of risk transfers, with French and Austrian banks accounting for about half of the total. This does not pose any credit concerns. Only a handful of European banking groups maintain a meaningful local presence, including Raiffeisen’s Bank Aval, BNP Paribas’ Ukrsibbank, and PKO’s Kredobank. While…