Fernando Rodríguez | The MifidII obliges the 100,000 professionals who inform and advise on finances in Spain to be accredited as being technically qualified to do this job by January 2018. Spain is the only country in Europe which doesn’t have any regulation in place regarding professional qualifications.
A decent rebound in eurozone equities in recent weeks brought up concerns that the market might already be overvalued by now. Julius Baer’s research clarifies that “valuation is not the main driver of our asset allocation as earnings definitively remain more important”. However, valuation is easy to observe and thus attracts quite some attention. One of the measures they are following is the equity risk premium.
The balancing acts which are devised in Frankfurt oblige us to once again take a look at the present and future of inflation in the Eurozone, focusing our analysis on the prices chain. “The ECB did this exercise and the conclusions favour the institution’s caution,” they explain.
The surprisingly low annual eurozone inflation reading for March at 1.5% will finally end speculation about an earlier end to the negative deposit rate in today’s ECB’s governing council meeting, as reported by Julius Bär’s experts. Both ECB Chief Economist Peter Praet and ECB President Mario Draghi have already made clear in recent weeks that interest rates will not rise before the ECB’s asset-purchasing programme comes to an end.
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.
Housing prices in the Eurozone rose 4.1% in the fourth quarter of 2016 from a year earlier, the highest interannual increase since the third quarter of 2007, according to Eurostat data. In Spain, the average rise in prices remained at 4.4%.
I don’t have the slightest doubt that Draghi is going to do the impossible to keep the euro, but it doesn’t depend on him. The euro is a false project which should have happened when things were more settled, in other words, as Draghi says, “when there was a single market.”
Eurozone inflation increased above the European Central Bank’s target for the first time in four years, Eurostat’s figures showed on Thursday. Inflation accelerated to 2 % in February from 1.8 % in January. A similar higher rate was last seen in January 2013. Markets expected prices to rise 1.9 %.
Yes, inflation is a global phenomenon, and inflation moving higher elsewhere will help Euro area inflation. According to BoAML, while the global backdrop will be helping, it will not move the needle enough to sustain inflation beyond the mid-year hump. Analysts think that a gradual improvement in the global output gap will generate a cumulative increase of 5bps in Euro area core inflation.
Germany’s external trade figures are an insult for the EU and the euro- it reaches the incredible figure of 300 billion euros, or 9% of GDP. It doesn’t look like the US would be too unhappy about getting rid of the single currency, with the help of Le Pen and others.