Central Bank


ECB’s Lagarde: Higher Asset Purchase Pace Will Be Visible Over Time

ECB’s Lagarde: Higher Asset Purchase Pace Will Be Visible Over Time

In her introductory statement at the Hearing of the ECON Committee of the European Parliament, Lagarde said that the ECB’s decision to ‘significantly’ step up the pace of asset purchases reflected the conclusion that rising risk-free market interest rates and sovereign bond yields could cause overall financing conditions to tighten, she said.

18 March 2021
ECB’s Lane: Objective Is to Ensure Yield Curves Don’t Get Ahead of Economy

ECB’s Lane: Objective Is to Ensure Yield Curves Don’t Get Ahead of Economy

In an interview with Financial Times posted to the ECB’s website, Lane, who is also chief economist, said that internal analysis showed that the ECB ‘could do more in terms of providing additional stimulus’. Still, while the ECB hasn’t reached the lower bound and thus ‘could lower the deposit rate’, he said, ‘there is clearly less room to deliver monetary stimulus when interest rates are already low’.

16 March 2021
German ZEW Posts Fourth Consecutive Rise in March

German ZEW Posts Fourth Consecutive Rise in March

The improvement was the fourth consecutive monthly increase and the first time the indicator has risen that many times in a row in more than a year. Since its recent low of 39 points in November, the index has recovered 37.6 points.

16 March 2021
ECB’s Schnabel: Don’t Read Too Much into Weekly PEPP Purchase Data

ECB’s Schnabel: Don’t Read Too Much into Weekly PEPP Purchase Data

In a Twitter thread, Schnabel said that ‘[i]t may be misleading to infer from the weekly data how large monthly net purchases are likely to be. One reason is the varying number of trading days across months, which implies that identical monthly volumes may go along with different weekly volumes.’

15 March 2021