Mar 12, 2019 | European Economy
Going by the strength of demand at recent Italian sovereign bond auctions, it would be easy to forget that the government was recently locked in an acrimonious dispute with Brussels over its budget deficit target for 2019. Now that the budget fiasco has died down,...
Mar 1, 2019 | European Economy
Market momentum is building behind the global growth slowdown narrative, with last week’s downbeat European Commission forecast report triggering a safe-haven bid. The eurozone, in particular, is caught in the crosshairs with the German and Italian economies buckling...
Jan 11, 2019 | European Economy, Uncategorized
This post was taken from our December 4th weekly report. While attention will inevitably be focused on the upcoming ECB monetary policy meeting in December and the expected end to asset purchases, money markets are increasingly pushing back against higher policy...
Dec 14, 2018 | European Economy, Monetary Policy
Market-based measures of euro area inflation expectations have shifted lower, which could point to a delay in monetary policy normalisation. The first chart below shows the EUR 5Y5Y forward inflation swap, which has dropped sharply in recent weeks. A few years ago,...
Nov 23, 2018 | European Economy
We have previously flagged Swedish property as both a precariously overvalued asset and a risk to systemic stability given the high degree of household leverage. The scale and intensity of the Swedish property bubble is reflected in the two charts below. In real terms...
Nov 16, 2018 | European Economy, Uncategorized
With Rome appearing to square off with Brussels over its contentious budget, BTPs have faced considerable pressure and bank stocks have been hammered. This is the nefarious doom loop: Italian banks own a large chunk of Italian government debt and, given the lack of...
Oct 19, 2018 | European Economy, UK
The politics of Brexit have enveloped the UK, and have negatively affected UK growth. However, as recent current-account data shows, things are less bad than originally feared. The top-left chart shows that net investment into the UK has continued to rise. The total...
Oct 5, 2018 | European Economy
We have previously argued that the Swiss National Bank has become slightly more tolerant of modest currency strength, given that the sheer scale of previous FX intervention has dented the central bank’s appetite for further balance sheet expansion. The top-left chart,...
Sep 9, 2018 | European Economy
While the Swiss banking sector has deleveraged over the past decade, the household sector exploited record low interest rates and strong income growth to take on more debt and fund acquisitions in the booming property market. Relative to GDP, household debt is now the...
