The ECB met earlier today to conduct the monthly review of interest rate policy. It came as a surprise to noone that the outcome was to leave everything just as it is. Surprisingly though the decision this month is surrounded by a little more controversy than has been the case of late since Italy’s Berlusconi [...]

Currency traders around the globe lazily staring into their screens must have found themselves transfixed last Friday when the flatline indicating the value of the Chinese yuan (or renminbi if you prefer) suddenly jumped to life. And so it was that during a brief 20 minute interval the yuan surged to a level of 8.270 [...]

In a post which appeared earlier this week Tobias asks us whether, given some of the possible consequences of a French “non”, it might not be reasonable to ’scare’ voters a little by spelling out some of the potential fallout which might follow a French rejection of the Constitution Treaty.
Perhaps the phrasing is unfortunate, [...]

I was a little surprised to read in the Christmas edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (not yet online, subscription wall, in German) that Robert Mundell seems to have changed his mind. In his seminal 1961 paper about monetary integration, he famously stated that “the optimum currency area is not the world”. Now it appears [...]

The euro today again broke through to a new high at $1.3329. This was on the back of an unexpected decline in US consumer confidence. What seems to be happening is that any piece of good news in the US temporarily stems the rise, whilst bad news sets it off again. And this despite the [...]

In a fairly ironic and cryptic post yesterday I alluded to the potential influence of the Russian central bank on the value of the euro. This situation is not to be taken lightly. The euro today hit another record passing the 1.32 to the dollar mark. At the same time business confidence index readings [...]

It seems that there is a renewed interest in detailed comparisons of the economic realities in Europe and the US. First Die Zeit (German), then The Economist, and now Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has a very nice piece illustrating the statistical problems inherent in all international economic comparisons - there’s not one just reality, and [...]

It’s no secret that the euro is now hitting record highs in its exchange rate with the dollar. It is also pretty apparent that some EU leaders are becoming rather preoccupied about the consequences of this for those eurozone economies which are driven by exports. What is much less clear though is what can be [...]

This is the interesting question that Morgan Stanley’s Vicenzo Guzzo asked a couple of weeks back. The key background details in question are what are known as the cross-country risk spreads. Now this may seem like a piece of technical obfuscation, so what exactly does he mean?
Well, one of the main consequences of the introduction [...]

That the US jobs report last Friday showed continuing weakness in the labour market is certainly by now far from breaking news. I wouldn’t however want to let it pass by without comment. I think it is now abundantly clear that there is a pattern in all this somewhere (what that pattern is precisely, and [...]