A sensible IMF back-down
In April, the International Monetary Fund positioned itself to go head-to-head with the UK government over its fiscal stance. The fund said it wanted Britain to consider slowing deficit reduction and Olivier Blanchard, its chief economist, said the country was “playing with fire”.
A month later, the considered view of the IMF is much more nuanced. Here are the five things you need to know about the fund’s retreat.
You can take my Pfennigs, but the cent stays
Small change
Search the pockets, wallets, purses, car cigarette ashtrays and homes of anyone in (almost) any eurozone country and you are likely to find significant heaps of small, brown iron-and-copper 1 and 2 euro cent coins.
They cost more to make than they are worth, there’s precious little you can buy with them (though the German post office does sell a €0.03 stamp) and they tend to accumulate in drawers and on flat surfaces at an alarming rate. So, one might reasonably ask, why not just get rid of them? Read more
BoE makes rulers redundant
One of the few occasions when I’ve used a ruler since leaving school is during the Bank of England’s inflation report press conferences. I’m not alone — for years a ruler has been an essential tool for those trying to fathom what monetary policy makers thought was going to happen to growth and inflation in the months and years ahead.
The BoE’s practice of waiting a week between releasing its quarterly fan charts for growth and inflation and the data underlying them left bank-watchers with little choice but to dig out the ruler to work out where the MPC thought growth would be in, say, 2014. As Chris Giles commented here, there were several problems with this approach.
Now, thanks to the Stockton Review, reporters need no longer remember their rulers (hat tip to George Buckley at Deutsche Bank for the headline of this post). Read more
Inflation report in five bites
If you read today’s Bank of England inflation report, you will notice some welcome changes. More will follow on this blog about the improvements in BoE transparency. In the meantime, the five things you need to know about the bank’s economic outlook are: Read more
Five quick takeaways from the eurozone GDP numbers
You still need a strong constitution or a taste for gallows humour to read most eurozone economic statistics, as today’s release of the preliminary Q1 gross domestic product growth contraction data shows.
The bloc is now in its longest recession since the birth of the single currency, beating the post-Lehman Brothers slump in duration, though not in the depth of the downturn. Read more
Hello and welcome to the FT’s live blog on the European Central Bank’s rate decision and press conference. All eyes on Thursday are on the ECB and what it has left in its tool kit as gloomy data throws further doubt on the recession-bound eurozone economy.
Many economists are expecting what would largely be a symbolic cut in interest rates. The governing council’s vote is due at 12.45 (BST) and ECB President Mario Draghi will meet the press at half past one.
By Claire Jones and Lindsay Whipp. All times are UK time.
FOMC preview, May 2013
The current FOMC meeting, which starts today and concludes tomorrow without a Ben Bernanke press conference, is unlikely to produce much news. Steady movement towards a taper of the $85bn, QE3 programme of asset purchases has been checked by a run of bad economic data since March.
I get no sense that much has changed in the thinking of most FOMC officials. There is still a fair bit of confidence that the underlying state of the economy has improved (see, for example, the comments of Boston Fed president Eric Rosengren). The main effect of weak payrolls and the sequester is to increase uncertainty about the trajectory of the economy. That encourages the status quo – and open-ended QE means the default is continued purchases. Read more
Did sequestration cause weak Q1 GDP?
We leaned heavily on the idea that sequestration is slowing the growth of the US economy in our write-up of Q1 GDP. The immediate reason to do so is the composition of growth.
Federal defence spending knocked 0.65 percentage points off total growth. Without that, the headline figure would have been an annualised 3.2 per cent instead of 2.5 per cent, bang in line with expectations. Read more
How to raise growth 2014-style
The FT’s US economics editor Robin Harding had an excellent scoop this week on the US plans to change the calculation methodology for the national accounts in a move that will lift US GDP by 3 per cent in July. Even better, he explained that the changes to the way the US statistics authorities plan to count intangible investment and military procurement were not a unilateral act, but part of a United Nations coordinated approach. What effect would this have on Europe, I wondered.
Well, after a root around Eurostat’s website, the UK’s ONS methodology pages and some academic articles, I am really excited. The bottom line for people with better things to do is that Eurostat reckons GDP in most EU countries will also go up by about 2 to 3 per cent. The amount depends on the quantity of R&D expenditure carried out (good for Germany, Sweden and Finland, bad for Greece) and amount of military kit purchased every year (good for France and the UK). With some exceptions, every EU country has to put in place the new European System of Accounts by September 2014. But it gets even more interesting. Read more
A positive surprise on UK growth
After almost five years of disappointing services output, Britain’s shops, restaurants, car dealerships and airlines have come to the rescue of George Osborne. They have also saved the country from deeply misleading “triple-dip” headlines, although output is still 2.6 per cent below its 2008 peak.
The preliminary estimate of gross domestic product rose 0.3 per cent in the first quarter. As my column today argued, we should not pay much attention to this figure, since the cash estimates of GDP, which come later, are more relevant to the economy’s predicament. But there are some implications of this positive surprise and I list them here in order of importance. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
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