J.L.M. Campuzano (Spanish Banking Association) | According to Eurostat, the business investment rate in the last quarter of 2016 grew to 23.5% from 22% in the previous quarter. We are talking about reaching pre-crisis levels.
All European Union members except the UK are meeting today in Rome to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the so considered seed of their club: The treaty of Rome. An event with a bittersweet taste however since the participants will start designing a common strategy on Brexit, the first exit of a member state.
Benjamin Cole | The econosphere is again rumbling about Chinese debt and China banks, evidently forgetting the long serious faces made many times about Chinese debt and China banks in the recent past. But China keeps growing. Japan is another story that defies Western orthodox macroeconomics.
Once again Mario Draghi followed the expected script: it kept interest rates at 0%, where they have been for the last year; it left the deposit facility unchanged at -0.4% and did not modify the debt purchasing programme.
The 2014 -15 oil price crash led to sharp pullbacks in upstream capex, leading to the “conventional wisdom” (as held by the IEA, EIA, and OPEC Secretariat) that a supply gap will open up by the end of the decade due to limited greenfield projects and accelerating decline rates… but Citi’s analysts disagree with this consensus.
Miguel Ángel Tramullas | Investment in public debt has traditionally been one of the most popular fixed income assets with both retail and institutional investors. It’s considered as a safe-haven. But in the last few years, it has lost part of its attraction because of lower interest rates which in some places are now in negative territory. To protect themselves, many countries like the US, Japan, the UK, France, Italy and also Spain have begun to issue inflation-linked bonds.
Inflation is back. The first stage has been the rise in oil prices from $30 to $50 per barrel, which is already being passed on to the consumer economies. Too much inflation is a bad thing: it creates rising expectations and people try to anticipate them. But too little is even worse. The 2008 crisis caused a very costly deflation. .
AXA IM | The past year has witnessed something of a turn-around in investors’ perceptions of the economic and financial outlook, chiefly on the back of hopes that the cloud of secular stagnation may be starting to dissipate. In our 2017 outlook, we take a step back from current market jitters and examine the fundamentals behind the present backdrop of ultra-low interest rates and poor economic growth. Simply we challenge the dominant idea that this is the fate of our future as investors.
Francesco Saraceno | There are a number of ways, not necessarily politically feasible, to allow EMU countries to run semi-permanent government deficits. A first one could be to restore complete national budget sovereignty, (scrapping the Stability Pact). This would mean relying on market discipline alone for maintaining fiscal responsibility.
Of all the arguments I have heard against monetary normalisation, I would definitely highlight the potential destablising effect which it could have on some financial markets. And I am not emphasising this in a positive way: I sincerely believe that delaying a decision which can help reduce uncertainty in the medium and long-term to avoid a negative impact (which I think will be limited) in the short-term is, without any doubt, questionable.