In a beaten-down market, any signs of buying fuels excessive exuberance on the trading floor. But hey, getting you to buy is the job of brokers and that's why they sing the sell-side rap.
Here we are in the grip of this latest financial market crisis, trying to dig ourselves out from underneath the slippery remnants of yet another burst speculative bubble, checking for scabs and bruises AND trying to diagnose the disaster. It's tulips all over again. Lemme explain ...
I mean, about inflation for you and me and Bobby McGee. Not inflation as bankers see it, as economists see it, as central bankers see it. Not about CPIs and PPIs and HICPs. Not about price-adjusted, calendar-adjusted and average-workday-weighted statistics, which economists so fondly call "real" inflation.
Well, not altogether true, of course. Or rather: It´s not so much confidence, but the notable lack thereof. Has Ben Bernanke completely lost his bearings? That's the question of the day ...
It is the ECB's mandate, credo and conviction that only an inflation-free (inflation-free in ECB speak is a rise in consumer prices of no more than 2 percent) economy is a healthy economy and that price stability is the best guarantor for economic growth and prowess.
You might have seen the headlines. You might have seen curious press pics and television news clips with German top managers, such a Klaus Zuminkel, the (since pushed into resigning) CEO of Deutsche Post, led in handcuffs from their homes, a battalion of tax investigators bearing boxes of documents trailing triumphantly.
The tax controversy between tiny Lichtenstein and its big German neighbor is more intriguing than fiction.
Here in Deutschland, we're smack in the middle of what's fondly called The Fifth Season, the silly season or simply KARNEVAL – you know, similar to what you have left with Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Ok, now we've got that emergency rate cut from the Fed AND the full 75 bp the markets wanted...
Ok, now we've got that emergency rate cut from the Fed AND the full 75 bp the markets wanted...
The Austrian capital is the city where the old EU meets the new EU. Teeming with international organizations, it's also the city that was the first to foray into Eastern European banking and the destination for tasty pastry.
It's that time of the year again, when Germany's trade unions traditionally put their wage demands on the table for the opening rounds of the annual ritual that is called "collective wage bargaining". And, with the economy growing at a robust pace still and with corporate profits on the rise, the voice of the unions is getting louder again. We've already had some taste of strike this season. Is there more to come?
An evocative smell from childhood can quickly trigger the realization that cost cutting is not a strategy, but a reaction that, without corresponding investment, will doom industries.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight we turn our attention to some of the big predictions of 2007 and whether investors might have been better off just rolling the bones.
Instead of beating the drum for the greatness of the single European currency, the last missive was a demand for European companies to quit blaming the strong euro for what are their own mistakes. But some readers took umbrage.
Hedge wise and sleep well. Or, as they say in German: Gut gehedged ist halb gewonnen! Silvia Wadhwa gives her take on the single currency.
The same banks that demanded market forces be allowed to work in other indutries are now begging central banks for help.
"Drat!" you say. "Yawn! Not more morning notes. Not another string with market pearls of wisdom I might have to read."Fear not! I threaten you only with idle thoughts and random contemplations from the other side of the Big Pond (from beyond the Channel even). In other words, from parts of the world where a Hamburger doesn't necessarily come as a snack between two bits of a soggy roll, where a Frankfurter might well eat a wiener, and where cars -- oh, bliss! -- generally have a stick shift and a clutch!It's also from a part of the world -- eat your heart out, friends from the British Isles -- where you can travel from country to country without ever showing your passport and, more to the point, never have to change your money.OK, that also means the land where battalions of politicians argue passionately over the size, color and bending-angle (seriously!) of bananas, about what exactly passes for a standard-size €uro condom and acceptable work practices for a €uro chimney sweep. If that doesn't justify the title of this blog -- €urocentric -- then I don't know what does.
