Today, we have reserved a guest post for Jan De Blonde who is very actively engaged in sustainable farmland investment abroad. Jan is ...
My friend the equity racehorse sent me me the following interesting link which appeared on Dutch television and which basically ...
Vorige zondag (6 mei 2012) verscheen het volgend interview in De Zondag:
Elk jaar omtrent deze tijd publiceert BP zijn Statistical Review of World Energy. Bijna 50 pagina’s grotendeels gevuld met tabellen ...
Door een abrupt beëindigde skivakantie (nauwelijks 50 meter op de latten gestaan) bracht ik de rest van de week haast immobiel en al ...
Well, it's not exactly Moody's but more precisely Fitch, sending out messages which are "surprising" to say the least. Remember ...
Davos, setting of the Thomas Mann novel "Der Zauberberg" and sheltering famous people throughout history such as ...
Following our adventures in today's every changing moods in the world of finance, it's not a bad thing to assess volatility as a ...
You may remember I wrote a piece on Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) , Heineken and Fraser & Neave (F&N) when I was in Singapore earlier ...
My dear friend Sideshow Bob sent me a short note which I think deserves some attention. It opens up the discussion on one of the most ...
Geen kat die deze stelling zal betwisten, maar de impact ervan op de Chinese economie wordt vermoedelijk zwaar onderschat. We hebben ...
De kogel is door de kerk, iedereen van ons kan straks aandeelhouder van Facebook worden. Intekenen op een IPO is echter niet altijd ...
Apple kwam de afgelopen week met de langverwachte medeling over hun spaarpot van 100 miljard $. Een mogelijke overname is nog niet in ...
On March 14th, the Media Innovation Center was launched (under the wings of the IBBT) and baptized 'Mix'. Its goal is to support and ...
Yesterday Fitch released a report with some arithmetics and outlook on the ageing population and how the developed west so far has ...
According to the World Economic Forum, Canadian banks have been ranked as the soundest and most safe banks world-wide, this for 5 ...
Gemini, the immortal twins Castor and Pollux, in this case Dublin and Cork. We picked up an interesting story from out of Bloomberg ...
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Just when you thought you were helping the market, the media are now starting to bash the ECB for doing too much. In various Dutch and Anglo-saxon media we find headlines such as "ECB bank support could harm debt market" and "Money market struggles with massive support from ECB". So the 1 trillion EUR liquidity shot has overdone ...
In the ongoing saga on Greece and the Troika, again a meeting is deferred on whether or not extra money will be granted towards Athens. And the language becomes more harsh by the : "Wealthier countries are playing with fire by toying with the idea Greece should be expelled from the EMU-17 area". "There are plenty who don't want us ...
Before turning to our little soccer game - which the Swiss supervisors apparently seem to be losing - we like to turn one more time to what is happening over in Frankfurt. After the successful LTRO of last December (489 bio EUR cash injection into banks), a new round of auctioning is heating up for 29/02. And it seems we are gonna ...
The LTRO operation of late December by the ECB has relieved some tensions on money markets and bank funding cost in the short term. Indeed, libor spreads have come in considerably while certain government bonds have had a serious rally versus the core led by Bund. It doesn't stop quite there and the ECB is preparing another set of ...
For once we have some good news to report, a glimmer of hope. Last week, Ireland managed to come to the international bond market on which it made a partial buy-back of existing debt (2014) and managed to roll it over into 2015 @ 4,9%. And it was a success with an announcement of more buy-backs in the pipeline. The Irish drama and ...
A funny string of recent events have captured my attention. And it involves the IMF and politics. May be far fetched but a warning as well towards various addressees, either politically, economically or both. And the IMF is balancing here on a thin line judging the noises we are recently hearing.First of all there was Christine ...
In my previous posting dd 16/01, I forgot to mention some important leverage factors as well. I therefore take the privilege to give you an update with new numbers, taken from a very recent McKinsey study on global debt and debt deleveragingThe following chart gives you the facts on the composition of total debt across main ...
When the going gets tough, the tough usually gets going. In the case of the sovereign debt crisis, we have the Greek discussions with private creditors coming to a halt and a March deadline coming up (will the IMF grant a new tranche of loans ?). In the US, we are getting prepared for a repetition of the debt ceiling debate of late ...
Iemand betalen om je geld gedurende lange tijd bij te houden, geen zinnig mens zou dat doen, en toch is het wat deze week opnieuw met meerdere miljarden gebeurde.Duitsland sleet voor bijna 4 miljard aan obligaties en doordat de uitgifte boven pari gebeurde zorgde een lage intrestvoet ervoor dat de crediteur op vervaldatum per saldo ...
Onze vorige post over de nieuwe fiscale regels voor de Eurozone (het "Fiscal Compact") stelde dat de "nieuwe regels" (o.a. de beperking van begrotingstekorten tot 3% van het BNP) nauwelijks verschillen van de "oude regels" van het Groei- en Stabiliteitspact (GSP). Het GSP werd niet nageleefd en voorzag geen prikkels voor ...
A liquidity trap is a situation when people are hoarding cash, this out of various reasons. A standard definition would say because people are expecting an adverse event, such as deflation, insufficient aggregate demand or war. The classic debate between Keynesians and Austrians focus on the "why", not the fact that cash hoarding ...
Midden december kwamen de regeringsleiders van de Eurozone overeen begrotingstekorten te beperken tot 3% van het BNP. Voorkomen deze "nieuwe" fiscale regels, het door de ECB-voorzitter Draghi genoemde “Fiscal Compact”, de volgende euro-crisis? Fiscale regels bevorderen lagere overheidsschuld en zijn extra nuttig in een ...
The labor market, the most important one in economic terms as far as I am concerned. We used to have the idea that the European labor market is much more distorted than the American one, the latter supposedly more "free". Despite today's so-called good news on the US - admittedly, it's not so bad - the numbers don't tell the whole ...
Earlier this week, we mentioned the rally on high yield European short term government bonds in anticipation of Wednesday's ECB LTRO auctioning (Long Term Refinancing Operation). Markets had expected something in the range of 300-400 bio EUR. The final result was 489 bio EUR spread over 523 bidders, on average almost 1 bio EUR per ...
After November's hectic month on all sorts of government bonds, ranging from PIIGS over to Belgium over to credits globally, December has kicked off under a different Zodiac sign. In fact, the latest auctions on government bonds have staged various rallies on different countries.Now the question would be : Has the Belgian state ...
"Involuntary lending is what happens when your teenager figures out how to charge stuff to your credit card. The kid promises to pay for the purchases but never gets around it, so your involuntary loan keeps getting bigger. At some point it dawns on you that you might never get your money back" ...
Mario Monti en Lucas Papademos zijn de kersverse premiers van Italië en Griekenland. Met doctoraatsdiploma’s economie van MIT en Yale op zak en topcarrières in de Europese Commissie en Europese Centrale Bank zijn het rasechte technocraten. Vormt de aanstelling van deze niet-verkozen leiders het einde van de democratie of het begin ...
Last Sunday (blog pick 1 out of 3), I took the liberty of freewheeling into the minds of our policy makers. We had already ruled out the EFSF or SPV/CDO option, both on grounds of credibility and political feasibility (Germany). But we also suggested that the ECB might be tempted to come into action but not as last resort buyer at ...
...we have some busy days ahead for the financial sector. Today, bondholders of Greek sovereign paper are to meet at Deutsche Bank's headquarters in Frankfurt to discuss the "voluntary" debt swap deal arranged on 26/10. The Institute of International Finance (representing 450 financial firms and chaired by DB CEO Ackerman) has ...
"If it keeps on raining, levee's going to break. And when the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay. Mean old levee, taught me to weep and moan, got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home, oh well, oh well..." From time to time, mother nature ...
Courtesy of Zerohedge and if they are right with their scope, we still can't say that we hadn't seen this one coming : Apparently Germany is silently preparing a "tabula rasa" and "cut the crap". In Thursday's Handelsblatt edition, it would appear that the following simple question would be raised : those who can and willing to ...
480,000,000,000 or slightly more or less, doesn't make such a difference, does it. Ancient BEF that is. Or in today's lexicon AKA around EUR 12 billion (12,000,000,000). And that's a mighty big number, certainly in a Belgian framework. I even think that if you take the Global Plan of Dehaene-Van Rompuy I under consideration and ...
Yesterday's marathon meeting delivered some of the goodies, in some cases even surprisingly better than expected, in other respect still vague. And we have postponed once again some important decisions, both on the practical implementation of announcements (SPVs to fund the leveraged vehicle, quid), not a convincing attitude coming ...
The summit which was announced as the most important one of the past months (years) in the existence of the single currency, has been wrapped more quickly than expected. It doesn't however mean that the consensus on a solution has been achieved. Again, come and see next episode of...So all eyes on Wednesday to face the final ...
The Financial Times Deutschland mentioned the fact that the EU is thinking about a ban on rating agencies issuing ratings on eurozone countries. It could be said that the ratings agencies are like thermometers that provoke a rise of temperature. But this is probably not the right angle to look at this possible action. The reason ...
