monetary policy

Long-term interest rates are a series of future short-term rates. That necessarily means that an interest-rate targetting central bank exerts the dominant influence not just on the short end in its currency area, but across the yield curve.…

Bernanke will inflate at an accelerating pace. The other central banks will chase him.

I was on BNN this afternoon talking to presenter Howard Green and The Economist's Ryan Avent about Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's testimony before congress today. You can read Bernanke's prepared remarks here and watch the video clip here.…

Here are 10 items that investors will be watching this week.

This Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, shows the US dollar is threatening to move above a trendline against the Canadian dollar drop off the 2011 and 2012 highs. The proximate cause is the dismal retail sales report., which collapsed…

Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co., talks about the outlook for Federal Reserve monetary policy and debt purchases, known as quantitative easing. Gross also discusses the state of credit markets and…

Eurozone policy seems driven by market sentiment. This column argues that fear and panic led to excessive, and possibly self-defeating, austerity in the south while failing to induce offsetting stimulus in the north. The resulting deflation…

Sweden has been one of the countries to have best weathered the economic crisis. Despite a hiccup in its domestic economy and the extra deflationary impulse from souring loans to the Baltics in 2009, the Swedish economy has been remarkably…

Sterling is has eclipsed the yen as the main focus in the foreign exchange market. The surprising news that has kicked it to fresh multi-month low was that the BOE is closer to easing policy than has been suspected. While it was a unanimous…

It has been some time now since the ECB turned to monetisation to deal with its sovereign debt crisis. At the time, the Germans were out in full force attempting to stop the train of events and keep the ECB out of the political economy.…