Fighting over US budget baselines
A war of words and numbers has broken out in Washington over the geekiest of subjects: which budget baseline should be used to calculate the level of spending cuts being negotiated by the White House and congressional leaders.
On Thursday afternoon, Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, announced that the Obama administration was putting on the table an additional $6.5bn in spending cuts to woo Republicans into a deal before March 18, the new deadline for a government shutdown. At least everyone agrees on those basic facts.
Here’s where things get tricky. Mr Sperling said that with those cuts, the White House was meeting Republicans “halfway” compared to their own spending targets – a clear sign of the administration’s willingness to negotiate. Read more
It’s only five basis points but it’s the direction that matters. Federal reserve banks cut the seasonal discount rate at its last meeting to 0.2 per cent.
The seasonal discount rate is typically aimed at small banks in agricultural or tourist areas, where businesses’ and individuals’ borrowing needs are highly seasonal. The rate, as you can see, has gone lower, to 0.15 per cent. During talk of green shoots in mid-2010, the seasonal rate reached the heady heights of 0.35 per cent before heading down to a fortnight spell at 0.2 per cent in November. To give some context, the average since 1996 is 3.5 per cent. Read more
Maybe charity doesn’t pay, after all.
The founding assumption of my earlier post has proven incorrect, for which I apologise. To set the record straight, ECB national accounts show that the central bank held more like 18 per cent than 8 per cent of bonds bought to aid sovereigns in distress. Read more
Indonesia has held rates after tightening them for the first time since 2008 at its last meeting – but said this should not be interpreted as a change of direction. “This decision does not change the direction of Bank Indonesia’s monetary policy that is tending to be tight to manage high inflationary pressures,” said the Bank.
Inflation in south-east Asia’s largest economy is above target but falling. Prices rose by more than 7 per cent in the year to January. This fell to 6.84 per cent in the year to February, and the head of Indonesia’s statistics body sees March inflation at a similar or lower level. The target is 5 per cent +/- 1 per cent. Read more
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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
