Taxes drive up prices in Mexico
Inflation in Mexico more than doubled to 1.09 per cent in January as residents were hit with growing government taxes and fees.
Sales tax rose countrywide from 15 to 16 per cent at the beginning of the year, increasing the cost of some foods, beer and cigarettes. At the same time cash-strapped municipalities have been raising the cost of public transportation and telephone calls. Read more
Brussels has just approved €6.9bn of ‘urgent rescue aid’ for ABN Amro and Fortis Bank. The cash is destined to separate Fortis from both its Netherland unit and its (2007-acquired) ABN Amro operations. The separated parts will then be merged. The various units have insufficient cash to achieve the reconstruction by themselves.
Meanwhile the Irish government is set to acquire further stakes in its top banks as a result of loans being transferred to the country’s “bad bank”, central bank governor Patrick Honohan said today. “It is pretty clear the government will be acquiring additional equity stakes,” Mr Honohan told an event at Trinity College Dublin. Read more
Well done to the Swedes. While the world frets and dithers about house price bubbles, the Swedish central bank has come up with a plan. In less than a year, a new commission will report back on all you could wish to know about Swedish housing bubbles: what makes them likely; what pops them; what tools are – or should be – available to combat them; and whether Swedes are currently in one.
The report will focus on residential property, although the (better studied) commercial property sector will be included. The commission will be run from within the central bank by heads of the monetary policy and financial stability departments. A related conference will be held in the autumn of this year and the final report is expected no later than January 31, 2011. Read more
Current US monetary policy is likely to prove excessively inflationary for China and Hong Kong, but both countries are ‘stuck’ with the effects of Fed policy as they have pegged their currencies to the dollar.
So says Janet Yellen, San Francisco Fed chief: Read more
Bank of England: A decision tree
Three issues should dominate tomorrow’s Bank of England inflation report: changes to the Bank’s economic forecasts; the implications of these changes for monetary policy; and the degree to which the Bank is confident it can offset further fiscal tightening with looser monetary policy.
Will we get clear indications of the Bank’s thinking on these three areas? There is no good reason why not, but a lack of justification for obfuscation doesn’t usually prevent the practice. All three are related so I have used the following decision tree to help my thinking.
In the diagram negative numbers represent the degree of policy loosening implied relative to November, while positive numbers indicate a degree of policy tightening and:
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain will begin discussing measures to set up a common central bank at a meeting on March 30 in the Saudi capital Riyadh, Asharq al-Awsat reported, citing the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdel Rahman Al-Atiya.
The meeting, to be attended by central bank governors of the four nations, will be considered the first held by the joint central bank. They will also discuss the creation of a monetary union. Read more
Hector Sants resigned on Monday night as head of the Financial Services Authority, the City watchdog, in a dramatic move that throws the direction of financial regulation into question.
Mr Sants had been a vocal advocate of banking reform both in the UK and internationally in the wake of the financial crisis. He had also been outspoken in his criticism of the plans of a potential incoming Conservative government to disband the FSA. Read more
Trichet comes home early
A change in travel plans by Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president, has caused a flurry of excitement in financial markets this morning. He is leaving early a Reserve Bank of Australia conference in Sydney in order to get back for Thursday’s European Union leaders summit in Brussels. The buzz in markets is that this could be a sign that a bail-out is being prepared for Greece.
It is a good story to trade on (the euro is up a bit) but is such speculation credible? I am not so sure. It didn’t help that the first reports said Mr Trichet was returning for an extraordinary meeting of the ECB’s governing council - an understandable mistake for anyone in Australia not familiar with the EU’s array of councils and presidents.
But my understanding is that the ECB president always intended to be at Thursday’s summit in Brussels, which was Read more
With very little enthusiasm, Israeli politicians have given preliminary approval to a bill that would completely change the policymaking framework of the central bank. The first reading was passed 22-2 (that’s 24 people voting out of a possible 120). Two further approvals are required before the bill can become law.
Currently, the central bank governor has sole responsibility for making interest rate decisions, after discussions and a non-binding vote by central bank department heads. The bank has worked this way since 1954.
Discussions have been underway for 12 years to move toward the European/American model, in which a committee or board cast binding votes on the interest rate decision. The current proposal is to create a six-member board headed by the governor. 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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