UK deficit

britain

How Weidmann confounded currency market investors

LONDON- THE WEEK THAT WAS | By Victor Jiménez | Did Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann just had a Mario Draghi-like moment? In July 2012, while bets against the survival of the Eurozone community of countries remaining whole piled up to stress levels that presaged a self-fulfilling prophesy, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, let go in his now famous London speech a “we’ll do whatever it takes” to protect the common currency whose deterrent consequences have rippled to today: we might be messy, the message conveyed by Draghi came to mean in the British City and Wall Street, but we know how to make the anti-euro speculative bubble burst; and it is an easy thing to do.


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A hole in Number 11, Downing Street

LONDON | There was a bit of a kerfuffle in UK politics, not to mention economics, when the Financial Times‘ (FT) Monday edition announced it had reached a 25 per cent-difference conclusion on what the country’s structural deficit actually weighs. The FT researchers, the newspaper explained, had spent the British summer making swift calculations –while probably reading Aristotle and his “Metaphysics“: they followed the government’s own mathematics formula to bring…