The week ahead in central banking
Our week ahead email helps you track the most important events in central banking. To see all of our emails and alerts visit www.ft.com/nbe
FOMC meeting
The highlight of next week’s calendar is Tuesday’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
Here’s the FT’s US economics editor Robin Harding on what to expect: Read more
The Bank of Japan is set to increase its growth forecast to above 2 per cent, unnamed sources have told Reuters. The Bank’s forecast is currently 1.8 per cent for the fiscal year, and the next rate setting meeting is July 14-15.
The Bank would be playing catch-up with the government, if it does revise its forecast up. The finance ministry changed its growth forecast from 1.4 to 2.6 per cent last month. Private economists have apparently settled on a figure close to 2.4 per cent. Uncertainty about the economic recovery is likely to temper the Bank’s optimism, which was fuelled yesterday by a better-than-expected manufacturers’ confidence survey. Read more
One more bit of Tankan
On Japan’s Tankan business survey Capital Economics note that:
…large companies say they plan to reduce capital spending by 0.4 per cent in the fiscal year which started today (in line with consensus and the smallest decline in a March Tankan since FY 2007). These estimates are usually revised higher during the year so this small fall will probably turn into a decent increase. Read more
Dancing the Tankan
Japan’s quarterly Tankan is one of the best bits of economic data in the world: how many other business surveys cover 11,528 companies with a 98.7 per cent response rate?
It’s fascinating to look a bit beyond the main diffusion index for large corporations, which has risen from -23 in December to -14 in March. The diffusion index measures the number of businesses saying that conditions are ‘favourable’ minus the number saying they are ‘unfavourable’. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
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
