Lest our readers might consider that our seemingly disparate range of monthly topics are randomly chosen, we summarise below how our newsletters attempt to form a pattern enabling some overall analysis of ECB thinking to be deduced. We see increasing parallels between the ECB/ Eurosystem’s approach to creative accounting and masking of its debts, and the banking system’s use of financial engineering to conceal exposures in off balance sheet vehicles.
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Public debt in the whole world keeps growing. As recently reported in “A Mountain of Debt: Navigating the Legacy of the Pandemic” and “The Aftermath of Debt Surges”, it is just the last “debt wave” in a long-established tendency. Yet, the rise has accelerated during the Covid-19 Pandemic: during 2020, public debt increased by 16 percentage points to 120% of GDP in the advanced economies, and by 13 percentage points to 97% of GDP globally. What are the possible ways out?