Financial and Fiscal Newsletter

Central Banking – The Bank for International Settlements again Questions Prevailing Central Bank Policies. The BIS has recently published two reports. In one, appearing to embrace the Austrian School of…

Problems executing QE cause market confidence in the ECB to dip. What policy changes should we expect from the ECB in 2016?

Reports from the European Banking Authority and Bank of England claim that banks are healthy, but weak measures of capital are used.

US regulations blamed for banks turning away deposits. Will this add further impetus to non-banking deposit and payment businesses?

Even More Bad news from Deutsche Bank. Can the Bank be Turned Around?

Despite abundant and increasing evidence of loose monetary policies being the cause of emerging market economies moving from boom to bust, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

Central Bankers want to abolish cash in order to be able to set substantially negative interest rates.

China devalued its currency by 3%. Financial markets responded disproportionately, but we explain that it is quite understandable, given government policies in the rich countries.
We then investigate the devaluation’s effect on the US and EU financial markets as well as on the currencies of emerging markets.

Ultra Low Interest Rates have destabilized the global Economy whose capital markets now show signs of Illiquidity.

Stress testing of banks by central banking authorities has come to prominence as reliance on the traditional accounting standards has waned. Europe’s banking system was successfully stress tested last October, but we were not impressed.

As the US vs European recovery story swings our way, what lessons can Europe learn from the strong swing to the centre right in Britain’s elections? Is there a possibility of Brexit?

Banks have been hit with more fines, but more importantly, also with Criminal Convictions. Is this banking out of control because it has been deregulated? Is it fair to call the regulatory changes “deregulation”?

Most media optimism, both in the US and Europe, continues to focus on the dizzy levels of stock and bond markets, but in our view these index levels have been driven up by professionals front-running QE in the US and Europe.

In the past month, a Bulgarian court appointed two experts to liquidate the assets of CCB (known also by its Bulgarian initials KTB). This marked the end of a rather remarkable story that began in June 2014, when the rest of the Eurozone banking system was enjoying a period of relative calm.