…and what about the other side of the pond?

While on this side of the Atlantic the ECB was reacting more quickly than expected to the much weaker inflation prospects, I was in the US trying to better understand what is happening over there in the monetary area.

On the basis of the talks I had, I came back with a number of thoughts, which were not necessarily shared by my interlocutors but were stimulated by the discussions I had with them.

Has Bernanke provided a helping hand to Draghi?

In a previous post I stressed the tug of war between the Governing Council of the ECB and the money market: the former has a unanimous intention to keep the monetary policy stance constant or looser, the latter seems well poised to increase interest rates.

In this tug of war, Bernanke has been seen by some as having started to pull on the ECB side with the utterly surprising Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decision not to "taper" the 85 billion of monthly purchases of bonds by the FED.