MADRID | The Corner | Mario Draghi: “Some form of cross-country risk-sharing is essential to help reduce adjustment costs for those countries and prevent recessions from leaving deep and permanent scars.”/ Jens Weidmann: “Fiscal policy should support the central bank with solid state finances, so that monetary policy can concentrate on its actual mandate, and sustainably secure the value of money.”
MADRID | The Corner | Chairman at Bundesbank and member of the ECB’s Government Council Jens Weidmann warned -again- that more ECB measures to solve low inflation are difficult and could face legal limits. As markets await for Mr Draghi’s appearance on Thursday, ECB’s Benoit Coeure insisted in a Bloomberg TV interview they won’t “rush to a new decision without knowing.”
BERLIN | Alberto Lozano | After the strong performance of the German stock market yesterday, one of the hardest hit in recent weeks by the greater exposure of its companies to the Russian market, Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann expressed his confidence in the growth of the German economy and the euro area during the second half of the year after the paralysis of the second quarter. In fact, Bundesbank considers that the “accumulation of bad news” is responsible of the decline in the 2Q, what could change the spring forecasts, although the basic trend suggests a strengthening in the second half of the year. Moreover, the Bundesbank wanted to make clear that although “the sentiment has deteriorated from a high level, the fact that the trend for domestic demand continues basically high suggests the economy has not changed direction.”
MADRID | By Jaime Santisteban | The most critical voice about the ECB’s doing something about the euro zone’s persistent low inflation, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, said on Monday that the ECB will watch the euro’s exchange rate closely before taking policy decisions. Also, AstraZeneca turned down the allegedly “last” bid offer from Pfizer, worth €8bn.
MADRID | By The Corner | “I would like to stress that the risk of a self-reinforcing deflationary downward spiral consisting of falling wages and prices, as evoked by some, is also low, despite the present, very low inflation rates in the euro area. These are mainly a result of falling energy prices and the adjustment process in crisis countries,” European Central Bank Governing Council member Jens Weidmann said on Tuesday, playing down deflation risk. Anyway, what happened with the ECB’s 2pc inflation target?
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.