Fernando Fernández is a member of the board at Bankia and Red Eléctrica. Apart from the challenges presented by the macroeconomic environment and the technology revolution, he believes that Spain’s banks have to establish a new kind of relationship with their clients and consolidate the sector’s new size.
The challenge for German judges was to determine if the OMT can be seen as monetary financing of governments or not, banned in EU treaties or not. The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has ruled on Tuesday the ECB’s 2012 bond-buying plan is legal. Ifo President Clemens Fuest has, however, has critisised the OMT ruling. “That is a shame because it is obvious that the OMT programme primarily pursues the fiscal goal of preserving highly indebted states’ access to credit”.
BoAML | We have remained quite bearish on Euro area inflation for the past few years, particularly compared with ECB forecasts (but also consensus), and have highlighted the many downside risks to the inflation outlook.
James Alexander via Historinhas | While still waiting for the 1Q16 official Eurostat NGDP figure for the Euro Area of 19 countries it has been interesting to have a look at the implied deflators for the currency bloc and its constituents. (Ireland, Slovakia, Cyprus and Luxemburg are all hopelessly late delivering GDP figures, and the first two don’t even seem to do it to Eurostat standards for calendar-adjusted data.)
UBP | Unsurprisingly, the ECB kept its monetary policy unchanged. Corporate bonds buying are going to start on June 8th and the TLTRO on June 22nd.
Mario Draghi can hardly make a move, while Janet Yellen seems bound to do so, no matter the consequences. This summary offers some hindsight on the dilemma facing those at the helm of global financial stability.
For once, BBVA chairman’s words have been a kind of premonition. Last week, when he said rather desperately that “negative interest rates are killing us,” he was not referring to Popular. But the fact remains that a few days later, the bank with Angel Ron at the helm announced a capital hike for 2.5 billion euros, slightly less than half of its stock market value. The aim of the operation is to offset the impact of future regulatory requirements and the shortfall related to the “floor clauses,” calculated at nearly 4.7 billion euros.
BoAML | Even with structural reforms, trend GDP growth may not be consistent with comfortable debt sustainability in key peripherals by the time inflation normalizes. If the euro area does not make progress towards fiscal union in the meantime, the ECB will likely have to remain involved on the bond market.
In Sober Look, Marcello Minenna gives us a clue about a possible new breach in the euro’s structure. A few years ago (2011-2012), when the euro was going through its worst time, one of the consequences was that the central banks in the peripheral countries increased their debt position with TARGET2.
UBS | As expected, yesterday’s ECB meeting provided neither new stimulus nor major new guidance on the policy outlook. The discussion was dominated by helicopter money (which according to Mr Draghi has not been discussed), the German criticism of the ECB’s low interest rate policy (which Mr Draghi diplomatically rejected) and the issue of whether or not interest rates could go down further (which could happen, if necessary).