U.K. jobless claims rose for an eighth consecutive month in September, extending the longest period of increases in almost 13 years, “as growth in Europe’s second- biggest economy slows”. This adds just a little more evidence to the fact that all is not necessarily currently all for the best in the land of John Stuart [...]

Brad Setser has a post today on Kate Moss, not provoked by her evidently economically intriguing modelling properties, but due to the Kate-Moss-thin credit-spreads which Bloomberg’s William Pesek refers to in this article. What really turns Pesek on it turns out isn’t Kate Moss at all but the possible existence of links between [...]

Morgan Stanley team members Steven Jen and Eric Chaney (joined by Takehiro Sato and David Miles) debate today the interesting question of whether the eurozone economies have entered a liquidity trap (LT). Those who have no idea what one of these would look like could do worse than read Paul Krugman’s classic article on the [...]

The euro fell briefly below $1.19 yesterday. There is nothing surprising or exceptional about that, the common currency has been drifting steadily downwards against the dollar for a number of, by-now, pretty well known reasons - better economic performance in the US, a growing interest rate differential between the ECB and the Fed, political issues [...]

This is a very convenient moment to put up this post. Alan Greenspan has just admitted that he’s human like the rest of us, and that he doesn’t have a very good explanation for why long-term interest rates have been falling at a time when he and his Fed colleagues have been busy raising [...]

Here’s the FT’s reading of the situation.
Note this extract: “As financial markets digested the remarks of Roberto Maroni, Italy’s welfare minister, the interest rate differential between Italian and German bonds rose to 23 basis points, the widest spread since November 2002.”
These are the numbers we will be following at Afoe moving forward. Maroni is [...]

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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Following the turbulent river of news which has flowed unrelentingly through the principal European media outlets since Sunday night, today we seem to be swimming in a relative ocean of calm. This is very deceptive. Today the Netherlands is voting and tomorrow the ECB will have a closely watched meeting which may potentially have significant [...]

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 [...]