€14.3bn
The ECB settled €14.3bn-worth of government bond purchases last week, meaning that it bought that amount of debt between last Tuesday and the previous Wednesday.
The figure – down from the €22bn settled the previous week – takes the total amount of bonds bought through the securities markets programme to €110.3bn. Read more
Why the Bundesbank opposed bond purchases
What exactly did Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president, say when earlier this month he and other members of the European Central Bank’s governing council debated whether to reactivate the ECB’s bond purchasing programme? He opposed the step, but has kept a discreet silence since.
A clue is offered in the Bundesbank’s latest monthly report, released on Monday. It notes that ahead of the July 21 eurozone summit, the interest rates on Spanish and Italian bonds had risen, but argues in the short term they would “in no way” have led to an unsustainable fiscal burden that required emergency action. Read more
How to backstop the eurozone
What could provide the eurozone with an effective backstop and ensure its financial stability? The lack of a safety net is the main reason why investors remain so nervous about Europe’s monetary union. In the US and UK, the central banks are seen - rightly or wrongly - as offering the ultimate defence.
With the European Central Bank only reluctantly buying eurozone bonds, and politicians split over common “eurobonds,” perhaps momentum might grow behind a proposal put forward by Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, and Thomas Mayer, chief economist at Deutsche Bank?
Their idea is that the European Financial Stability Facility, the EU’s new bail-out fund, should be given access to ECB liquidity – thus increasing substantially its potential firepower. 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
