The inflation data for March will be the key publication of this week. With the market discounting a 0.1% drop in the main figure, Ebury analysts believe that a 1% inflation would be enough to drive a modest rebound in the euro from its current position.
One of the candidates to replace Merkel proposed fiscally incentivising investment in stocks, as a complement to the public pension. The idea got little support in a country with a savings rate of 10% but an enormous aversion to risk, where variable income seems reserved for the highest income.
Lidia Conde (Fráncfort) | Achim Wambach has been the president of the European economic think tank ZEW in Mannheim since 2016. He is also president of the antimonopoly commission and the Association for Social Policy. He forms part of National Platform on Electromobility and works in the advisory council of the State of Baden-Württemberg for sustainable economic development.
Lidia Conde (Frankfurt) | All the labour market data in the country are brilliant. Since 2007 it has gone from 40.3 million people in work to 45.2 million in 2019 (45.5 in 2020). In ten years Germany has gone from 8.6% unemployment to 3.1%. There is even a shortage of skilled labour. And its citizens are happier than ever with their quality of life.
Ofelia Marín- Lozano | The intervention of the ECB in sovereign bond markets stopped the rise in the internal rate of return on the periphery countries bonds, Spain and Italy. But it didn’t stop the flight to what had become the main asset of safety, German bonds, whose IRR continued falling until the nominal returns were negative.
Jens Bastian | With Merkel’s gradual retreat from German politics, a new sense of political timing is set in motion across capital cities in Europe. How will Athens react to the gradual changing of the guards in Berlin? While much air time and social media is being consumed with domestic political quarrels in Greece, both government representatives and opposition parties will be well-advised to look closely at the next developments in Germany.
Iberdrola began operations yesterday in the maritime wind farm Wikinger in the waters of the Baltic in Germany, which supposes the first maritime wind power project built by the group on its own, with an investment rising to 1.4 billion euros. With an output of 350MW, this wind farm represents the first phase in a larger wind power complex, of 836 MW and with a joint investment of 2.5 billion euros.
The market reaction to Angela Merkel’s decision has not been bad. The euro depreciated to 1.1373 against the dollar, but sovereign debt suffered more because of the greater risk appetite, and the returns on 10 years German bonds rose to +2.5 bp. However, given that Merkel has held the role of a stabilising figure in Europe, some analysts expect that the long term markets could be concerned by the vacuum she could create with her departure.
Between July 2015 and July 2018, 1.3 million people have sought asylum in Germany. The three years between the festive welcome to the refugees in Munich railway station and the xenophobic revolt in Chemnitz (Saxony) in September – after the stabbing of a 35 year old German, reportedly by foreigners – have seen an unprecedented renaissance of conservative politics.
Trump is contagious. The President of Bavaria, Markus Söder, and the conservative Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, both Social Christians, have found the magic recipe of Germany first politics to defend their coalition’s -CSU is the partner of Merkel’s CDU in Berlin- absolute majority in the next state elections in the region in October.