The Swedish central bank has kept the repo rate at 0.25 per cent, but brought forward the likely date of first rise to summer or autumn and substantially increased its inflation forecast for 2010.
Economic recovery is on more solid ground, both in Sweden and internationally, the Riksbank believes. “The risk of a major setback in the recovery of the economy has declined and that the upturn therefore rests on more solid ground,” said the statement. 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
The Swedish central bank will keep the repo rate at 0.25 per cent in order to “attain the inflation target of 2 per cent and to support the economic recovery”. The repo rate is expected to remain at this level until Q4, when it is forecast to rise to 0.4 per cent. Also unchanged are the deposit rate at -0.25 per cent and the lending rate at 0.75 per cent.
Deputy Governor Lars Svensson entered a reservation against the decision Read more
Happily for Sweden, Latvia accounts for less than five per cent of Swedbank’s total lending and only three per cent of SEB’s, and both banks have recently strengthened their balance sheets. Less happily for Sweden, currency traders are bearish the krona, writes Andrew Ward of the FT Read more
Swedish finance minister prepares Swedish banks for Latvian collapse. Gold may be heading to $1,500 a troy ounce, with many investors confused why; and has the G20 already broken its pledge to transparency and a rebalancing of power? 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
