This is a follow-up to our post on “base money confusion“, which incorporates some of the ideas we’ve raised in our “beyond scarcity” series.
Let’s assume a few truths (we’re sure they’ll be up for debate, but here goes anyway): Read more
Sany is China’s biggest machinery company, and it’s confirmed today that it will be cutting jobs from its local workforce. We’re not sure exactly how many, yet — but even a small figure would seem a bit of a blow to one of the key bullish narratives out of China this year.
In January, Sany made waves by buying Putzmeister, a German “Mittelstand” company that makes concrete pumps, for an enterprise value of €525m. It was one of the biggest Chinese purchases of this sort of German manufacturer. Read more
Live markets commentary from FT.com
Eurozone unemployment depression is naturally even more divergent on a regional level. Data released by Eurostat reveals just how divergent and paints a fairly consistent, and depressing, picture. So we have Salzburg in Austria sitting pretty with only 2.5 per cent of its populations in the jobless category while Andalucia in Spain has to grapple with a rate of 30.4 per cent. The youth unemployment divide is even starker – 54.4 per cent in Andalucia, Spain versus 4.3 per cent in Tubingen, Germany.
Overall, eight of the ten regions with the highest levels of unemployment were in Spain, while Greece played host to one and France another. The youth unemployment stats share the pain a little more equally between the same three countries. Austria and Germany dominate the opposite columns. Read more
What’s a bank to do when it has to sit on exposures that it doesn’t like?
Sell them of course! Especially if those exposures are expensive to hedge and costly in terms of regulatory capital charges. Read more
Live markets commentary from FT.com
Good morning, New York…
FT ALPHAVILLE Read more
Nomura’s Richard Koo has written a fascinating account of his meeting with “a number of influential politicians, academics, and senior government officials” in Berlin last week.
First, he heard that some Germans don’t think Greece should have ever been admitted to the eurozone. One of them even said Greece was not really a modern nation-state, Koo writes. Another politician/academic/official was more positive, saying both Greece and Ireland had become more competitive of late, as wages and prices had fallen. Read more
Elsewhere on Wednesday,
- About what was going on in the world in October 2008, when Paul Tucker and Bob Diamond had that little phone call. Read more
Barclays hit out at BoE deputy governor Paul Tucker and “senior Whitehall figures”, suggesting they may have known of and condoned the practice of submitting artificially low rates in the Libor survey. The bank released Diamond’s contemporaneous notes of a 2008 conversation – one of only three “notes to file” he has written in his career – in which he wrote that Tucker had passed on concerns from Whitehall about Barclays’ Libor submissions, adding that “it did not always need to be the case that we appeared as high as we have recently”. (Financial Times)
Market hopes for central bank easing are growing ahead of the ECB’s rate decision on Thursday. The MSCI Asia Pacific index rose 0.6% on Wednesday, heading for its longest rising streak this year. (Financial Times) Read more
1About China's capacity to absorb more capital
2Japan's mini crash: Blame China, not just Ben
3Spain's awful unemployment
4The Nikkei: a market abducted by retail
5Everlasting credit, the long view
Show more6S&P 2,100, by Goldman Sachs
7Buyback to enrich
8Measure it however you like: inflation has been low and falling
9Everyone's scared of something
10Bernanke's testimony to the Joint Economic Committee
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