To my mind, the United Kingdom is probably in a middle of stagnant activity with a little growth.
In recent years silver prices have been following gold prices quite closely. During last 5 years silver prices have moved in the same direction as gold, though more sharply.
Actually, we do not think that the European Central Bank will cut the repo rate.
Germany is not a burden at all when it comes to a current account surplus. Actually, much of the surplus is coming from outside of the Eurozone, thus this is definitely a beneficial inflow into Europe. Germany's strict approach to monetary policy may be a burden, but their CA surplus is not.
We believe that in a very short run a bounce is possible, whereas in the medium risks are still on the downside.
We do not consider this outcome to be realistic. The previous bailout package for peripheral countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland has mainly conveyed that the Eurozone is willing to stay intact. We consider the Eurozone breakup risk to be very minimal as the ECB with its OMT announcement still has its effect on keeping the market calm.
The RBA expects the Australian economy to go through a period of transition: away from a very intensive period of investment in the mining sector towards a new era.
I think the timeline that we are looking at is certainly showing an increase. However, over the last 3 years, crude has not really risen.
As Ben S. Bernanke mentioned, it is not only the headline employment, which is important, but it is also quality of improvement in employment.
However, South Korea will not result in the everlasting recession like Japan.
We expect the Eurozone's economy to worsen, but only to a limited extent.
We do not believe that the Swedish Krona is ever going to have a status of a safe haven currency.
One of the key events is the BOJ monetary policy meeting that will take place from 3 to 4 April. This is the first meeting for the new BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda.
I think it has to do with the substantial amount of foreign deposits, which are mainly held by Russians and by other perhaps dubious sources. As the German parliamentary elections are looming in September this year, it would be a hard-sell to bailout Russian oligarchs using German taxpayers' money. To my mind, this is the key reason why the discussion
I do not quite see it that way, I think Canada is experiencing the tough times. However, to my mind what helped Canada was of course a positive terms of trade shock: we had price of commodities rising faster than price of manufactured goods leading to troublesome excesses in Canada. In fact, most recently the Bank of Canada has pushed
We expect that in the near future the central bank officials could increase the asset purchase programme. However, it is doubtful whether this will have any material impact.
I think we are on the threshold of a new era, with renewables being a central part of it due to several reasons. First of all, the climate change problem is actually much worse than the last IPCC report suggested a few years ago. What we see now is that the size of the glacial cover is decreasing, the ice
We forecast USD/JPY to reach 100 in one year. I think in the near term one of the most important events would be the first BOJ policy meeting under Kuroda, which takes place on 3-4 April. Our economists are looking for an extension of the maturity of JGBs purchased under the Asset Purchase Program. At the moment the Bank of
It has the potential to escalate the debt crisis, simply because Italy's election shows that at least the majority of voters are very sceptical about all the measures taken by the Monti government, and the voters also favour Euro sceptical parties. Therefore, it stands to reason that it does in fact have the potential to worsen the crisis as it
That is very possible and that seems to be where probably the majority of the finance community comes down on it. I would say that my stance on this is a little bit different than where the majority is. In general, I am a supporter of what the Fed has done. I believe that in times of deep recession as
I think it is accurate to say that none of the countries, which really suffered from a financial collapse, have seen their debt reduced even by austerity. In fact, the debts normally just get worse, because unemployment reduces government revenues and we see this everywhere. Paul Krugman, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist, and also a columnist for the
Definitely, Eurozone economic data has disappointed and, thus, the downside risks for this year forecasts have increased. That is not to say, that we do not expect to see a turnaround in the leading indicators for the Eurozone though, and mainly for the core countries in the Euro area in Q1 2013. We still bank on a reversal of the
I agree with the view that looks at hyperinflation as a low probability event. If the main risk of quantitative easing (QE) was inflation, we would have probably seen some already, given the enormous increase in money printing occurred during 2008-2011. Since inflation has not picked up, it means that money injection has had some positive impact on real activity.
Since Mark Carney joining the Bank of England at the end of June 2013, there is a lot of speculation that he will use quite a new radical regime. We do not think it is going to be a case just yet, we believe that he is still going to be sticking to "flexible inflation targeting". He was quite clear