A cobweb in the Eurotower

Eurotower is the name of the building currently hosting the European Central Bank, waiting to move into its new premises later in the year, but it is not that the cleaning people in the Eurotower are not serious about their job: the cobweb I refer to in the title is the one presented in old microeconomic textbooks.

Should the ECB go quantitative?

Many commentators either complain that the European Central Bank has not followed the FED, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan on the Quantitative Easing (QE) path of purchasing very large amounts of securities or, more kindly, advice the ECB to go that way, to more forcefully fight the risk of too low inflation [1].

Trust in Europe paid handsomely!

Over the first few days of January, the prices of sovereign bonds of peripheral €-area countries have recorded large increases. This has been matched by positive developments in market access and issuance. In some market commentaries these developments were noted with something of a surprised tone (for having made wrong forecasts about the demise of the €?). Such surprise is indeed surprising, since the posting of large gains by sovereign peripheral bonds is a persistent development that has brought large capital gains to those investors, included the ECB, which bought peripheral bonds when their prices were stressed.[1]

Three liquidity scenarios after the year-end.

There are 3 main scenarios that could develop in the liquidity and money market in the €-area at the beginning of 2014, after the tensions at the end of 2013.

First, tensions could dissipate since the reinforced year-end effect has gone.

€ liquidity is getting more valuable: what can be done about it?

It is a recurrent phenomenon that liquidity gets more valuable at the end of the year: this is seen in the fact that, notwithstanding the higher amount outstanding, the overnight money market rate (EONIA) increases in the last weeks of the year. While the phenomenon was suppressed during the crisis by the overabundant liquidity provision, before the crisis, the average increase between the beginning of December and the end of the year, was of the order of 36 basis points, concentrated in the last few days of the month (see table 1). 

Should German workers be paid more? Or, Do we have an omitted variable bias?

A recurrent problem in regression analysis is the omitted variable bias: if you estimate a regression and you do not include on the right side a variable that belongs to the model and is correlated with some included variables, the OLS estimates will be biased. The gist of this post is whether we have something of an analogous problem in addressing the current macroeconomic problems in the €-area, namely by not considering the possible influence of income distribution.  

Should the European Central Bank do more and go negative?

The European Central Bank is torn between those who say that it is already doing too much, mostly in Germany, and those who say it should do more. One of the actions the ECB should pursue, in the opinion of the latter group, is to bring the deposit rate into negative territory. 

Is the price stability target of the ECB at risk?

Get me right. I am not fearing, for the time being, that inflation will move above the 2.0 per cent ECB target. Of course, it would be wrong to assume that inflation is dead and can never come back and the central bank must be symmetrically alert to all deviations from price stability. Too high inflation is not, however, the risk against which to guard in the foreseeable future. The issue I want to explore here is whether there is a risk of inflation remaining too low for too long. This issue is germane to the risk of "Japanification", which has started to be discussed in the market.

…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.

Forget the € and demand management!

The title of this post is a bit exaggerated, yet it helps stressing the gist of the point I want to make: policy makers, market participants and ordinary citizens should start devoting less attention to the € and to demand management and should concentrate, instead, on supply issues.

Let me expand a little this basic idea.