The Spanish National Statistics Office (INE) today published the first detailed estimate of Spain’s Q1 GDP. Basically they confirm the gist of the original Bank of Spain numbers (see my report of 25 March below) although there are some important nuances. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Before the Euro, there was the EMS
Paul Krugman, reacting to what appears to be a somewhat self-serving discussion by EU elites at the ECB Forum in Portugal –
Sorry, but depression-level slumps didn’t happen in Europe before the coming of the euro.
The chart is unemployment in Ireland since 1983; we’ve used the longest span of consistent series produced by the Central Statistics Office. And the mid-1980s was no picnic for other high-debt EEC (as it then was) countries either. Granted, the Euro probably locked in some of the forces that could be quarantined back then through devaluations. But you don’t have be that old in Ireland to have been around for the second macroeconomic destruction of your economy in your lifetime.
The central bankers are in Sintra, Portugal discussing how banking supervision and monetary policy should evolve in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. They might want to discuss instead whether anything fundamental about the politics of boom and bust has changed in the last 6 years.
Mario Draghi’s Ongoing Faustian Pact
Word has it that Mario Draghi is busily working up a new version of his “whatever it takes” methodology. This time the objective is not saving the Eurozone, but maintaining the region’s inflation at or near the ECBs official 2% inflation objective. The first time round the President of the Euro Area’s central bank had it easy, since market participants took him at his word and he effectively needed to do nothing to comply. This time though, as they say, it will be different.
Greek Re-entry (or Grentry) Not The Game Changer Many Think It Is
There is no doubt that Greece’s recent bond sale was an exciting and even invigorating moment for many people. The WSJ’s Simon Nixon, for example, called it “a symbolically important moment for the euro crisis”. Reuters’ Marius Zaharia suggested the speed of the come back could even be a game-changer for the heavily indebted southern European country. Certainly there can be little doubt that, as Nixon puts it, the turn round in market fortunes was a remarkable achievement, illustrative of just “how far market sentiment toward Southern Europe has changed”.
Continue reading
On The Trail Of Italian Debt
Looking for trends and correlations in that landslide of economic data which arrives, day in and day out, on our desks is normally something akin to trying to find a needle in a very large and raggedy haystack. From time to time, however, some things are just to obvious not to be noticed, like the ever rising levels of debt on the EU periphery and the growing demand from political leaders there for some kind of QE type initiative from the European central bank, for example. Sure, there is no obvious causal connecting here – the missing “middle term” linking the two would probably be all that ongoing deflation risk – but the inability of governments to contain their debt levels is a consequence of having low growth and low inflation, as is the wish being ever more insistently expressed by Southern Europe’s political leaders that the ECB were more like the Bank of Japan. Continue reading
Inflate!
Here’s an interesting chart.
Why the poor can have "things" but can't escape poverty pic.twitter.com/nzE6f6ONLh
— Mark Mellman (@MarkMellman) May 4, 2014
The eurozone version of this is the debate about to what extent the relative increase in prices in southern Europe in the 2000s represented an increase in wage costs, and to what extent it represented wider inflation. I certainly remember a lot of concern about “mileuristas”, and of course the Greek version of living on €1,000 a month was living on €700 a month. The classic example is the fact that the CPI doesn’t include housing costs, and there was a housing bubble, dammit.
I used to be quite snarky about people who claimed there was really huge inflation because they saw someone selling this or that for so much and it wasn’t like that in my day. I am less so now. In a real sense, if inflation doesn’t include food or housing or healthcare or energy, is it a useful measurement?
So you might think I would be pleased at the content of this piece. But I’m very far from it. The reason is, basically, Piketty.
If you want r to get under g and stay there, inflation and financial-repression is a big part of the picture. And for this to be of any use, it has to be proper inflation – i.e. the sort that includes wages. You could make a case that the price stability the ECB achieved was actually more like “wage stability”. I wonder if prices expressed in terms of earnings is a measure we should monitor.
More intercepts.
This FT piece from Ukraine is notable for the role of signals intelligence proliferation.
Kiev also on Saturday released audio tapes of phone calls it purported proved close ties between Vladimir Lukin, a Kremlin envoy sent to negotiate the release of the OSCE German-led military mission taken hostage by separatists last week, and an alleged Russian agent leading the separatists.
Ukraine said the intercepted phone calls proved that Mr Lukin enjoyed a cosy working relationship with Igor Girkin, a senior security official for the separatists in Slavyansk. An arrest warrant has been issued for Mr Girkin, who Kiev say is a Russian citizen and military intelligence agent who created unrest in Crimea before it was annexed by Moscow in March.
In one of the tapes, Mr Lukin is heard asking Mr Girkin: “How warm is the atmosphere, and when can we meet?” In another, the rebel leader is heard telling the Kremlin envoy: “I was given the order to give assistance to you, and not to the European partners.”