September 12, 2019 @ 8:03 pm | Breaking News |
If it had come to a formal vote, there’s a good chance that European Central Bank President Mario Draghi would have faced defeat in his efforts to revive quantitative easing at the central bank. But the bank doesn’t usually hold a formal vote on a issue...
September 9, 2019 @ 7:18 pm | Breaking News |
Will the European Central Bank revive its program of bond-buying when it meets on Thursday? The bank only ended this program of quantitative easing in December. The markets are currently pricing in a new program of 40 billion euros a month in bond purchases–plus...
August 16, 2019 @ 7:21 pm | Breaking News |
We’ve seen this play before: Financial markets start to tumble and central banks step in–not with actual stimulus quite yet but certainly with talk of stimulus. The European Central Bank and the German government took a turn today. Germany’s Der...
February 1, 2019 @ 7:20 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
Once upon a time–as late as 2018–the consensus thinking in financial markets was that the Federal Reserve was but the first central bank to raise interest rates. Other central banks, most notably the European Central Bank, (but not the Bank of Japan, which...
November 26, 2018 @ 8:07 pm | Breaking News, Volatility, You May Have Missed |
On December 13 the European Central Bank will decide whether to cap its $2.9 trillion program of bond buying as planned. The bank had decided that Europe’s economy was strong enough for the central bank to wind down its purchases of bonds that have kept interest...
June 12, 2018 @ 7:42 pm | Breaking News |
The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un produced nothing of import, apparently meeting financial market expectations for “much ado about nothing,” and all eyes on Wall Street have shifted to what I’m...
August 17, 2017 @ 6:51 pm | Breaking News, Volatility |
The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index closed down 1.54% today and the NASDAQ Composite fell 1.94%. Gold picked up 0.87%. The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) broke above 15 again, soaring 31.94% on the day. There was just too much for the markets to...
March 7, 2017 @ 7:21 pm | Breaking News |
Ahead of Thursday’s meeting of the European Central Bank futures markets have started to raise the odds that the bank will start raising its benchmark deposit interest rate beginning in April 2018. The market was putting the odds of an April increase at 20% last...
January 5, 2017 @ 8:09 pm | Breaking News, Volatility |
In my macro look forward at 2017 “My-forecast-of-the-big-events-and-macro-trends-for-the-year-ahead-the-12-most-dangerous-months-of-2017/” I flagged the lose/lose decision facing the European Central Bank in the year ahead. The bank’s current policy...
September 9, 2016 @ 7:41 pm | Breaking News |
I’ve been waiting seemingly forever for the financial markets to show some acknowledgement that central bank stimulus policies can’t go on until the sun turns into a dark cinder. For how long have I been waiting? More than a year certainly. But each time I...