Thursday, March 24, 2016

Another decision of the ECB shows that the concerns expressed at the level of the banking system, concerning the effects of negative interest rates on market profitability and liquidity, have been taken into account. The European Central Bank has also announced the launch of four new long-term refinancing operations (TLTRO II) with a four-year maturity and interest rates that "can reach the level of the interest rate for the deposit facility", starting with June 2016, as stated in the press release. The operations will be performed quarterly, and the last TLTRO operation will reach maturity in March 2021, according to statements by Mario Draghi. The amounts borrowed by banks as part of these operations depend on the amount of the loans in the portfolio, so as to allow the ECB to reach its goal, of boosting lending. That means that the ECB will pay banks to "refinance" over a long period of time, but the nature of the financial securities which will be accepted as collateral in the TLTRO II is not known. As part of the first refinancing operations only the securities with the highest rating have been accepted, but the conditions have been significantly eased over the last few years. Perhaps the prediction made by a German MP in 2012, who told Handelsblatt that "if the ECB keeps going that way, it will soon end up buying even old bicycles" will come true eventually.  In Mario Draghi's opinion, "the exhaustive package will exploit the synergies of the monetary policy instruments", and the accelerated rise of the European stock market indexes, along with the significant weakening of the Euro against the dollar seem to indicate the resurrection of investor confidence.  But how long will the exuberance of the synergies last when faced with reality? The rise of the stock exchanges petered out after a few minutes, and the Euro rose to 1.095 USD/EUR, from approximately 1.08 USD/EUR after the announcement of the monetary policy decision. During the press conference, the Euro rose even more, passing the level of 1.11 USD/EUR.  Mario Draghi once again mentioned the deflationary threat, as well as the need for structural reforms. In the press conference nobody asked whether the quantitative easing wasn't in fact the main hurdle to structural reforms.  As for the deflationary threat, Patrick Artus, the chief-economist of investment bank Natixis, recently wrote that "deflation represents a decline of the GFP deflator and not of the CPI". According to the definition found on the NBR website, the GDP deflator is "the index which measures the price variation of all the end-user goods and services created in an economy, over a specified period".

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