On this week’s Business Monitor Podcast, we revisit Central and Eastern Europe and our core macroeconomic strategy favouring Turkey and Poland. Has the region shaken off the structural imbalances which made it a focal point of crisis risks or is the positive convergence story no longer a core defining feature for the growth outlook? BMI’s… [Read more]
That the long awaited results from the EU bank stress tests (released late on July 23) failed to move the markets substantially should come as little surprise. For the stress test results to cause a major re-pricing of assets in the short run, one of two scenarios would have had to take place. On the… [Read more]
A year ago today, US investment bank giant Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sending shock waves reverberating through global financial markets. Whether the US Treasury was right to let this happen still remains open to much debate. Either way, at the time, the news, despite being highly depressing, played up the key view of my… [Read more]
Using the word ‘unprecedented’ too often risks diluting its significance. But with the US government’s rescue of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we are once again in unprecedented territory, following on from the Federal Reserve’s aggressive intra-meeting rate cuts, the opening of new Fed lending facilities, and the last-ditch rescue of… [Read more]
