The week ahead in central banking
The Central Bank of Brazil shocked markets in August by lowering its benchmark rate to 12 per cent. Will it cut again this Wednesday? Analysts expect so.
The Central Bank of Turkey, another of the emerging market central banks that has been taking economists by surprise by loosening policy, votes on Thursday, as does the Central Bank of the Philippines. Read more
A worrying Eurozone bank murmur?
Like a cardiogram, daily figures on use of the European Central Bank’s emergency “marginal lending” facility indicate the health of the eurozone bank system. When everything is working normally, the overnight facility is not used as it incurs a penal 2.25 per cent interest rate. For the past week the figures have signalled that something is amiss.
Occasionally there are spikes lasting a day or two when banks get caught short of liquidity by accident. But use of the facility has now been hovering around €3bn for more than a week - the latest reading on Thursday night was €2.9bn – which indicates significant problems somewhere in the system. 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
