Will inflation rise in the US? That is the expectation of investors. Is it due to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy? You bet. But, economist Luis Arroyo concludes, eggs end up broken when making an omelette. Or when a central bank stimulates employment.
By CaixaBank research team, in Barcelona | The upswing exceeded expectations with a first quarter GDP that grew by 1.0% quarter-on-quarter and 2.6% year-on-year. This momentarily places Japan at the head of advanced economies in terms of growth. However, the forecast for the whole of 2012 hardly reaches 2.5%, as the composition of the national accounts raises doubts regarding the sustainability of the upswing. Unusually, the growth of the first…
Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | Greece was in free fall mode when at the European Central Bank they had the funny idea of pushing the country …downwards. The ECB said it had frozen all operations with Greek banks, which already are suffering a killing capital drain: “Central bank head George Provopoulos told Papoulias that Greeks have withdrawn as much as €700 million ($891 million) and the situation could worsen, according to the transcript…
LONDON | In its global macro outlook report, investment company Schroders said on Friday that its eyes were on France amidst ongoing euro zone concerns and despite the uncertainty surrounding Spain. The upcoming elections could thwart France’s plans to implement State budget cuts, the Schroders paper highlighted, while the European Central Bank refinancing lines would have ring-fenced the Spanish banking sector from liquidity scarcity, unlike Italy’s. “France is the euro zone member currently…
Many economists and the Anglo-Saxon financial gurus have been killing the euro month after month since early 2010. But, even if their doomsday predictions have miserably failed so far, their negative influence over the markets can not be neglected. By Fernando Barciela, in Madrid | In one of his recent and terrifying articles about the euro and the sovereign debt crisis in the Financial Times, ‘There is no Spanish siesta for the eurozone‘, Wolfgang Münchau found that many…
By Gustavo Matías | Professor Emeritus at MIT, Peter Temin understands why German Chancellor Angela Merkel bullies everyone into austerity. But he disagrees. Temin believes too many, too deep budget cuts can prevent countries from paying their debts as it has already been the case in Greece. So Germany could destroy the euro and put the global economy under risk? Something similar happened in 1931, also because of Germany’s influence, and led…
LONDON | Global asset manager Threadneedle pointed at liquidity operations carried out by most G20 governments as the primordial reason behind the recent rally that the equity sector has experienced. “We see the LTROs, the recent £50bn extension to quantitative easing by the Bank of England and the ¥10trn increase in the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase scheme as activities that boost liquidity and are likely to increase demand for…
LONDON | The London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research on Friday put its baseline forecast for global growth on 3.5% for 2012. The NIESR gave next year a slightly higher growth rate probability of 4%. In both cases, the Institute assumes a downward revision of about 0.5 percentage point in each year compared to its last forecast. The NIESR warned that the financial instability resulting from the euro crisis, combined…
