No-one really knows why Mario Draghi said last week that for the time being there are no reasons to increase the ECB’s anti-deflation weaponry beyond March 2017. He said the matter had not even been discussed during the central bank’s Council Meeting on Thursday. The euro has risen and the yield on the German bund as well.
BoAML| The emerging market rally of the past six months appears to have paused and needs another theme to resume: we think the exchange rates will be the key issue. Since end-January, emerging market assets have rallied on a compression of excessive cred it risk premiums that were created by the oil and China induced panic.
J. L. Martínez Campuzano (Spanish Banking Association) | The BoJ has begun a period of reflection to try to answer the question of why expansionary monetary measures are not being reflected in higher inflation. I honestly believe that this is a reflection which other central banks should undertake. But, in the end, the easiest thing will always be to continue with more measures without a clear strategy of what their final objectives are.
Why are interest rates so low? We have explained that the reason is the weak credit situation for financing investment.
In an internal report, the IMF has confessed to errors linked to the bailouts in which it participated during the euro crisis, according to what Ambrose Evans-Prichard tells us. Just what the euro needed: explicit recognition, in black and white, that nothing could be done about the “infamy of competitive devaluation.”
The IEA estimates that the drop in production in non-OPEC countries, mainly the US, coupled with the positive trend in demand, could foreseeably shut off the excess of supply in the second hald of 2016, returning stability to the oil market.
AXA IM | Is the future for fixed income one of flat and negative yield curves? That is certainly the direction of travel as central bank buying, lowered growth and inflation expectations and a lower for longer interest rate outlook all contribute to reduced term premium and hoarding of safe haven assets.
Larry Summers has written a perceptive analysis about the Fed’s confusion (and that of all the central banks, by the way) over what they are doing. Last Wednesday he made a brief reference to the FOMC’s decision not to raise rates, with the Fed once again being forced to withdraw from its previous plan of action. The total failure of ‘forward guidance,’ which has only served to make the Fed’s prose even more tedious to hide their misgivings.
James Alexander via Historinhas | It is reported that 90% of UK economists are in favour of the UK remaining in the EU. They have carefully considered the costs and benefits of the UK leaving and mostly decided the economic loss is great, up to 8% of RGDP by 2030 – or around 0.5% per year for the next 14 years.
There is recurrent talk about Helicopter Money, a concept conceived by Friedman to revive the economy. This kind of monetary policy is very often referered to as special, beyond the frontiers of accounting, as if a central bank could actually get into a helicopter every day and drop bills from the sky “ex nihilo,” out of nothing. But as Cullen Roche explains, HM is not special.