Owing to holidays and travel arrangements, Money Supply posts will be reduced between Friday April 15 and Tuesday May 3. There will also be no newsletter during this time. Read more
Greek debt affordability is set to worsen considerably, according to the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report. But in a series of charts comparing 11 countries, the striking thing is how exposed indebted economies are to rising interest rates or falling GDP.
These charts (a full set toward the end of this post) are a great way to depict several moving parts to get to the nub of the issue. The basic idea is: black line inside the green area – good; black line inside redder areas – bad. Dotted line (forecast) – likewise. (The black line, incidentally, is the historical interest rate on government debt.)
The country profiles, relative to each other, are much as you’d expect. Greece, Ireland and Portugal have less favourable interest burdens (in that order). The US, incidentally, is forecast to edge into the yellow. Japan is not. Read more
The Singapore dollar jumped to a record level against the US dollar on Thursday after the island state tightened monetary policy for the second time in six months to combat rising inflation. Economists said the move was likely to be followed by a round of interest rate rises across Asia as governments sought to curb inflation generated by rapid economic growth in the region and loose monetary policy in the west.
Singapore, which conducts its monetary policy through changes to the exchange rate, rather than through interest rates, said it was responding to faster than expected economic growth and a fall in commercial interest rates triggered by abundant global liquidity. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the country’s central bank, said it had shifted its exchange rate policy band upwards to below the prevailing level of the Singapore dollar’s nominal effective exchange rate. Read more
Greece needs time to convince international investors about its reform programme and may not be able to return to financial markets next year as planned, its finance minister has admitted.
George Papaconstantinou’s comments in a Financial Times interview highlight how Greece continues to struggle to turn its economy round almost a year after the launch of an €110bn European Union and International Monetary Fund bail-out. They may fuel speculation that European leaders will have to find fresh ways of alleviating Greece’s debt problems to avert a default scenario. Read more
To discourage volatile short-term capital flows, the Bank of Indonesia will extend the minimum holding period of its bank certificates, SBIs, from one month to six months, effective May 13. This means traders holding the notes will not be able to sell them in the secondary market until they have held them for six months.
The unexpected news builds upon previous measures aimed at slowing down investment in very short-term debt. For example, the Bank of Indonesia has already all but stopped issuing 3- and 6-month SBIs. A key risk for countries receiving increased capital inflows is that they might reverse, which could have sudden and unpredictable consequences, as the Bank of Japan has pointed out. The Bank of Israel’s Stanley Fischer has made the same argument. 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
