Greece Interior Ministry Results all regions voting ‘OXI’ = ‘No’ Huffington Post: Live Updates: Greece Votes In Referendum On Bailout Proposal More links as afternoon progresses. This article by Steve Randy Waldman at Interfluidity has been getting a lot of play around the Intertoobz since yesterday (I also linked to it in Comments on the […]

by Rebecca Wilder ECB Rates Policy is Clogged in Key Periphery Markets How the Euro area (EA) will grow, according to Mario Draghi: The outlook for economic activity should be supported by foreign demand, the very low short-term interest rates in the euro area, and all the measures taken to foster the proper functioning of […]

Two posts on European Banks and their view of what constitutes a “Safe Harbor.” His conclusion isn’t just The Pull Quote of the Year, it’s the Pull Quote That Explains the Year: Putting it all together yields a compelling story: European banks are shifting their cash assets out of European banks and putting much of […]

by Rebecca Wilder Lieblings quote of the day by Dean Baker: “The ECB is run by a perverse cult that worships 2.0 percent inflation and is prepared to sacrifice almost all other economic goals to meet this target.” The article goes on to argue that the ECB should increase its inflation target to 3-4% in […]

Go. Read. US Bank Exposure to Greece, part 3. The FT lets someone from Nomura argue that Kash’s declaration of U.S. bank exposure to Greek default in Part 2 (referenced here, but just go to Kash’s link for the gist) was overstated. Nomura and The FT lose the argument, badly. “Disasters for an economy — […]

Update: Nouriel Roubini front pages this post on Euromonitor here. The ECB dove in and hiked its policy rate by 25 basis points to 1.25%. I had the pleasure of listening to Wolfgang Munchau on Thursday, and he reiterated what I reluctantly understood: the ECB’s strict inflation target is ridiculously simple for such a complex […]

Earlier this week I argued that the ECB’s inflation target of just below 2% is too simplistic, especially during periods of supply-side price shocks: energy, food, VAT hikes. Here’s a menu of reactions to the ECB’s announced rate hike (Trichet used the phrase ‘strong vigilance’, which historically is a leading indicator of a rate hike […]

I WAY underestimated the simplicity of ECB policy. I think that the terse monetary policy objective explains quite well the ECB’s announced stance on policy today: The primary objective of the ECB’s monetary policy is to maintain price stability. The ECB aims at inflation rates of below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. […]

The global inflation picture is heating up. On Google, a search of ‘inflation’ spanning the month of February 2011 gets 311,000,000. For one year ago, the same search parameters yielded 1,850,000 hits. Inflation’s on the monetary policy makers’ minds. But why? In the developed world, it’s a food and energy story! Seriously, look at German […]

Today the German Federal Statistics Office reported that the February Consumer Price Index is expected to mark a 2.0% (2.047% by my calculations, which is very close to a rounded 2.1%) annual pace in February 2011. This is simply a ‘flash’ print, and the Statistics Office was very careful to discount the fact that inflation […]