The European Central Bank held its main refinancing rate constant at 2% for the 24th consecutive month this afternoon. No real surprise here. Perhaps the most revealing comment has been: “Whether others like it or not, the ECB isn?t an activist central bank,? a view offered to the Financial Times by one Julian Jessop, economist [...]

For those who are not old enough to remember, these are the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies.
Now throwing a link quickly back across the Atlantic, Dave Altig at Macro blog picked up my ECB post and added a response from Hans Eichel.
But, the plot does thicken a bit.

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I had promised a quiet day. I may have to eat my words. Look at this on the euro, and remember my post yesterday.
The currency also weakened after Germany’s Stern magazine reported German Finance Minister Hans Eichel and Bundesbank President Axel Weber discussed a possible failure of European monetary union. The euro is off to [...]

I missed this at the time, but apparently officials responsible for monetary policy in the Czech Republic are begining to have second thoughts about joining the euro.
“Czech central bank policy maker Robert Holman said the government should abandon plans to adopt the euro by 2010 because joining the single currency may stifle growth, the first [...]

A right royal row is brewing at the ECB. Basically the old guard theorists of the ‘one size fits all’ monetary policy are being challenged by more pragmatic observers of day to day realities. For the moments it is the politicians who are making the running (but there are plenty of competent economists in Germany [...]

The euro reached its lowest level against the dollar in seven months last week dropping from a valueof $1.311 a month ago to $1.255 on Friday. This was the lowest level since last October. Undoubtedly there are a confluence of factors at work here: yesterday’s French growth numbers, longer term stagnant growth [...]

“Dial D for Deflation” declared the Economist in 2002 in an article which amazingly is still available online. Since Alan Greenspan officially declared the deflation scare over, the word has hardly cropped up in economic debates.
Yet anyone looking at the rapid rise in value of the euro, and the absence of growth in [...]

Tony Blair inched home to a historic Labour third term in the UK last week. But looking at the changing tempo of the British economy over the last couple of months, you could be tempted to ask: was this a case of ‘just in time’ electioneering?
At the present time there seems to be a general [...]

Yes, that’s what Bloomberg’s William Pesek suggests we might see evolving. As Pesek notes, the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund would:
“have major consequences for the global elites and the so-called “Washington Consensus” on how developing nations should go about raising living standards for their swelling and often poor populations.”
In particular, if this came off, [...]

Despite a widespread feeling that interest rates in Europe may be about to rise, futures markets seem near to pricing in a rate cut for the second half of the year.
One interesting knock-on consequence of this that no-one seems to be twigging is that any such move might well cramp the style of Alan Greenspan [...]