“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 [...]

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 [...]