Well the G7 meeting has come and gone, but I’m not sure how much the world is going to notice the fact. If I had been a fly, perhaps I would now be glad I hadn’t wasted my efforts. Basically there is a ’shift’ from focusing on the oil issue to the inflation one, but [...]

One of the things about targeting expectations, and factoring-in changes, is that the world moves on at a very rapid clip these days. So the ECB rate rise in now, really, yesterday’s news. The big issue today is the fact that the easing cycle in the eurozone may already be over (we need to see [...]

I’d simply love to be a fly on the wall in London this weekend. The G7 finance ministers are about to meet the central bankers, and as in by now well known, these two groups haven’t exactly been hitting it off too well lately, at least, and better said, in Germany and Japan they haven’t. [...]

The results of the latest GfK’s consumer confidence survey are just in. The results are hardly a surprise. (Btw there is a good discussion of consumption in Germany in this post and comments):
Consumer confidence in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, fell for a second month in three as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government decided to raise [...]

Just when he’s left the FT concludes that Schroder’s labour market reforms are in fact working. It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that although the German economy is producing a lot of jobs, a very high proportion of these are temporary.
Controversial labour market reforms introduced in Germany by Gerhard Schröder in 2004 are showing [...]

The idea that there was a global savings glut now having gone out of fashion, some are presently arguing that what we have is an investment dearth (my own view is that these two effectively mean the same thing, since the issue is a relational one). More evidence for this investment dearth hypothesis comes today [...]

I know you should never take what a central banker says at face value, but still. Today Christopher Swann in Washington tells us (in an article entitled: End in sight to the Fed’s rate-tightening cycle - and with no question mark):
For much of the past year and a half the Fed has been running almost [...]

Whatever the underlying reality behind all the news headlines about ‘panic in Harbin’ one thing is sure, there are plenty of asymmetries pending resolution between the ultra-modern and sophistocated new-technology China and the ‘informationally closed’ political system which breeds a lack of trust and the kinds of over-reaction we are now seeing. China obviously [...]

First off, Dave at MacroBlog has a good summary of the core of the economic policy programme adopted by the new German government. He also has some to-the-point comments about ECB credibility issues
But the big news today must surely be the surprising state of the European consumer . Perhaps the most indicative reading on the [...]

European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet’s indication last Friday that eurozone interest rates are about to rise continues to make waves.
Yesterday the EU Observer had a piece indicating the Eurozone finance ministers were not amused, and today we have a retaliatory piece were Trichet explains theat the ECB is the ‘listening’ people bank, which [...]