Sweden has 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 citizens. France has 6.6; Germany, 8.2. Yet Swedes live slightly longer http://t.co/WLvILqgok3
17 minutes ago
Archive for January, 2012
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Is the ECB/EU Achieving Stated Objective of Balanced Growth?
The primary objective of the European Central Bank is to maintain price stability; however, as a compliment to its primary objective, the Eurosystem “shall also ‘support the general economic policies in the Union with a view to contributing to the achievement of the objectives of the Union’. These include inter alia ‘full employment’ and ‘balanced economic [...]
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Core Euro Area Banks Still Very Exposed to Contagion from a Greek Exit
Today Megan Greene (@economistmeg) wrote a rather insightful post linking this weekend’s German proposal to Greece’s eventual exit from the EMU – the leaked proposal is to (1) make Greek debt service a top priority, and (2) for Greece to rescind national fiscal sovereignty to the European level (links included in her post). At the [...]
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The ECB Is Plugging Holes
Today the ECB released its monthly data on monetary developments in the Euro area (EA), as measured by M3 and its components. The market usually focuses on the marketable assets portion of M3, M3-M2, as a representation of funding access – here’s an FT Alphaville post highlighting as much. In December 2011, M3-M2 declined 0.2% [...]
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European Daily Catch: Know Your Consumers
Today’s European Daily Catch compares the aggregate implications of the reported January 1-point rise in French household confidence to the reported January stabilization of Italian consumer confidence. Specifically, French consumers could be ‘happier’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re spending more, while Italian household confidence translates rather directly to aggregate spending patterns. Domestic demand is a large contributor to GDP growth [...]
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Japan’s Lopsided Financial Balances
Tim Duy and Paul Krugman discuss the merits and failures of Japanese policy. The sectoral snapshot of the economic financial balances shows that Japanese policy was indeed a success but also a failure. First, policy was a success, given the private sector was recuperating from the bursting of a credit and investment bubble. The chart [...]
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Ratings Matter for the Euro Area
As you all have heard, Friday was (again) S&P’s day in the limelight. The rating agency downgraded over half of the 16 Euro area countries put on credit watch negative in December 2011. A quick look at my feed shows several takes on S&P’s action: the Economist’s Free Exchange comments on the now soft-core country, [...]
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European Daily Catch: Unemployment and Retail
Global labor reports prevailed today, but the US employment report took center stage. I’ll not comment on that report, so as to keep with my generally all things European theme here at The Wilder View. However, a quick sift through my feed reveals rather cynical takes: see Dean Baker’s comments here and here; Spencer’s take here; Jake’s [...]
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What Is a Safe Asset?
Last month, David Beckworth at Macro and Other Market Musings had some interesting thoughts on the global shortage of safe assets. His essay got me thinking about what is a safe asset? Beckworth alludes to two definitions of ‘safe’: (1) a credit being AAA-rated, (2) satisfying a certain level of liquidity to be used in repo markets (an [...]
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Fractional Money Multipliers
Money multipliers – the stock of money divided by a measure of base money (generally reserves plus currency in circulation) – are dwindling to fractions of what they used to be. FT Alphaville draws our attention to this fact on the Euro area (EA) using SocGen’s analysis. The money multiplier is a representation of how [...]
