James Alexander via Historinhas | While we firmly believe NGDP expectations are the best guide to monetary policy we are still some way from having a proper market measure of those expectations. However, two of the peripheral countries, Spain and Italy have now produced their first estimate of NGDP for 3Q.
MADRID | The Corner | The last ECB measures will apease investors who see that once again central banks are betting on the economy although this means forcing their mandates. And they had an immediate effect on the EU’s peripheral bonds: Spanish 10-year-bond yield closed at 2.05% and 5-year-bond at 0.72%, while risk premiums fell to multi-year lows. This will serve to drastically reduce the cost of financing and making it much easier for large companies to get funding. The euro’s strong devaluation against major world currencies should serve to increase the competitiveness of European producers and increase the region’s exports, analysts at Link commented on Monday.
MADRID | By Francisco López | The ECB President announced with fanfare last month a battery of measures to revive the credit in the EZ. The problem is that the open bar announced by Draghi won’t have an impact on loans until 2015 and, meanwhile, credit fall continues to accelerate in some peripheral countries, especially in Spain and Italy. There are those who believe that the latest data could force Mr Draghi to approve a direct debt purchase program before year’s end.
MADRID | The Corner | No matter whether they lend the funds on to the private sector, TLTRO is likely to be an attractively priced source of funding for banks, especially in the eurozone’s periphery. For those lenders “the costs of TLTRO could be as much as 109-114bp below equivalent wholesale funding for four years, or 68-73bp for two years if they do not increase net lending to the private sector,” an UBS report says. That being said, analysts aren’t sure this is particularly going to boost credit lending. In the graph you can see the dismal evolution of M3 in the 18 single currency area “Shame on the ECB, which has acted behind the curve as always,” The Corner senior economist Miguel Navascués states.
LONDON/MADRID | Financial analysts in Madrid noted today the positive surprise of a recovery tendency among Eurozone peripheral economies, particularly those of Italy and Spain.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor |Portugal and Slovenia’s debt comes back to the dangerous rate of 7%, while S&P’s responsible for EMEA defends that there is no immediate threat to peripheral countries’s debt since some of them have been able to pre-fund its needs.
VALENCIA | Spanish entrepreneur Miguel Pallardó praises Germany’s economic model in this op-ed for Valencia Plaza. He believes Berlin, with its free-market, easy hiring policies, betting on export and investment (and not public spending), reducing public debt and training workers is doing more for the common good than peripheral countries, which he finds too interventionist.
MADRID | Have you noticed that since the Libor fraud has the dubious honour to receive full front page coverage, the euro zone troubles have been dumped into inside pages? No one raises doubts on the fragile agreement reached in the last Summit, thus providing some respite to the badly mauled Southern Europe countries. It would be quite unfair to imply there is some kind of Anglo-Saxon conspiracy against the common…
His words appeared today scattered everywhere accompanied by odd yet expressive pictures, undoubtedly making for fitting material in the euro peripheral saga. He would have reaffirmed a commitment to abide by a deficit target that was negotiated rather than agreed with the European Commission, most accounts tell us, and scolded some his outspoken neighbours in a tit-for-tat monologue. Since Spain’s president Mariano Rajoy talked on Wednesday to his People’s Party parlamentary group,…
