By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – It was never likely to take long for those European Central Bank Governing Council members fundamentally disinclined to tighten monetary policy to hang their hat on what until late yesterday was still just a looming invasion of Ukraine by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
24 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council Philip Lane on Wednesday sounded at pains to meet the hawks part way while implicitly rejecting the more alarmist views about price pressures as he conveyed his main message: that high inflation would ultimately give way to price stability.
24 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Robert Holzmann supports tightening monetary policy, and essentially made this clear again on Wednesday for anyone who has been under a rock lately; the details are naturally interesting but the overall picture hardly changes as a result.
23 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Having done a first review last week of European Central Bank Governing Council members’ individual inclination to initiate a hiking cycle this year, we now repeat the exercise in light of relevant comments made since then.
22 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member François Villeroy de Galhau on Tuesday sought to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater, preserving some semblance of forward guidance for ECB policy while acknowledging room for improvement.
16 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel’s latest comments suggest that the ECB has become more serious yet about heading inflation risks off at the pass and raise the stakes for the March Governing Council meeting.
16 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – As in her appearance at a hearing of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament exactly one week ago, Lagarde on Monday made prepared remarks with the same more dovish tone than at the press conference on February 3, but went strictly no further.
14 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – To facilitate consideration of the question of whether the European Central Bank will initiate a hiking cycle this year, we have grouped 22 members of the Governing Council based on their apparent desire to see this occur.
14 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – If thought-provoking exegeses of important issues were the goal, the medium of communication would likely be other than Twitter. In a Twitter interview on Wednesday, European Central Bank Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel steered clear of venturing out onto any limbs.
9 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – If there were any lingering doubts as to where Joachim Nagel, the newest member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, stood on the issues of the day, he effectively did away with them on Wednesday by positioning himself clearly in favour of normalising monetary policy sooner rather than later.
9 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde appeared on Monday to want to take at least some of the hawkish edge off her performance last Thursday.
8 February 2022
Following is the full transcript of the interview conducted by Econostream on February 2 with Teppo Koivisto, director of the Finance Division of Finland’s State Treasury and thus responsible for Finnish public debt management.
7 February 2022
- ‘What we’d like to see is more standardisation in the sustainable bond market overall’
- Noticing that ‘investors are a little bit more cautious with regard to duration’
- Will eventually cease issuing 15-years entirely, depending on funding volumes
- Expect roughly same or slightly more green expenditures to issue green bonds in 2022
- Ultra-long maturities more and more attractive, but not yet at necessary threshold
Following is the full transcript of the interview conducted by Econostream on January 24 with Tammo Diemer, member of the Executive Board of Germany’s Finance Agency:
4 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde’s performance at the press conference on Thursday suggested that she is finally taking her Governing Council colleagues’ inflation fears with the commensurate degree of seriousness and that she regards the situation as having changed in a way that could conceivably lead to a policy move as soon as March.
3 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Judging by the effort European Central Bank Governing Council members have put into hammering home their views since their last gathering, one might think that the meeting this week stood to yield a particularly significant outcome following a heated debate. While the discussion will probably be spirited, expectations of major results are likely to be dashed.
1 February 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – The account of the European Central Bank’s policy meeting of 15-16 December, released by the ECB on Thursday, suggested that reasonably widely held views of the inflation outlook expressed at the gathering got relatively little airtime at the subsequent press conference by President Christine Lagarde - or since.
20 January 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Econostream’s ranking of Governing Council members in terms of hawkishness/dovishness has been updated today in two respects: a major re-ranking of Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau and a minor adjustment to the placement of Banque centrale du Luxembourg Governor Gaston Reinesch.
19 January 2022
By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Do central bankers anticipate economic developments well enough to remain perpetually one step ahead of financial markets and shape monetary policy proactively, or does the lack of any special foreknowledge mean that in fact they essentially go with the flow?
18 January 2022