It must be a strange experience for non-European officials to talk to Europeans at events such as this weekend’s Group of 20 nations’ financial conference in St. Andrews, Scotland. If you want to make a deal with Europe, whom do you speak to? At the table there is Germany, France, Italy and Britain, a representative of the country that holds the rotating EU presidency (currently Sweden) and a representative of the executive European Commission.

The famous quote from Henry Kissinger “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” is just as valid in economic policy-making as it is in foreign or defence policy.

In theory, the 27-nation European Union prepares its common position for global forums like

the G20 at ministerial meetings or summits shortly before the G20. So it should be enough to have just one pan-EU delegation that would present that common view, by necessity an internal EU compromise. Somehow, it is not.

Sources taking part in the meetings say the four biggest European economies that guard their individual seats at the G20 do not always speak with one voice. Or toe the EU line.

How does that make the EU representative look? Or the European Union as a whole? Why would anybody want to do a deal with the EU if its biggest members themselves undermine its authority by the very fact that they don’t trust a single delegation to present their joint view? Doesn’t that mean that, in fact, there is no common view? Then why bother with going through the motions of preparing a joint position before a G20?

The EU is an area with the biggest gross domestic product in the world – almost one third of world output and much above the United States, according to 2008 IMF data. It has half a billion citizens, making it the third biggest in the world after China and India.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet  signalled on Thursday that the days of 12-month loans to banks will come to an end soon and that will be the start of a gradual exit from unlimited liquidity injections.
“The market, as far as I see, it is not expecting that we will prolong (our) one-year operation, I will say nothing to dispel this present sentiment of the market,” Trichet said in a news conference after the 16-country bloc’s central bank kept rates at 1 percent. “The enhanced credit support … was not for eternity,” he added.

The ECB started the 12-month cash injections to help the ailing banking sector back into form, and banks reacted with joy, snapping up nearly half a trillion euros of cheap money in the first such operation in June.

But Trichet also had soothing words for banks addicted to cheap money. The ECB would keep interbank interest rates well below the main refinancing rate, he said.  But it seems banks will have to learn to play again with each other rather than relying only on the ECB’s largesse.

And before signing off, Trichet also had words of advice for the media.  “This is exactly the same language as we always have utilised. Everybody knows that, so no news there.”

That advice seemed fall on deaf ears, as most media, including Reuters, would make a lot of hay out of his words on 12-month liquidity injections and keep it the centrepiece of their coverage.

BULLHEAD CITY, Arizona – Not so long ago this town on the Nevada border was in full boom mode.

It was a magnet for people coming to work in the casinos across the Colorado River in Laughlin, plus Californians looking to retire here or have a second home at a fraction of the cost in their own state. Construction workers flocked here to build homes and roads.

All told, successive booms turned Bullhead City from a fishing village just a few decades ago to being a city of more than 40,000 people.

But America’s housing crisis and the most severe downturn since the 1930s stopped the city’s boom dead in its tracks.

“We had booms in the 1980s and the 1990s, but in 2005 and 2006 things went absolutely nuts,” said John “Mac” McCollum. “Then in 2007 all of a sudden the lights went out.”

Many of the construction workers have gone, as have a lot of people who have been laid off at Laughlin’s casinos. Nevada’s casinos have had 20 consecutive months of declining gambling profits.

“Unemployment is on the rise and we’ve had quite a few foreclosures,” said Bullhead City Mayor Jack Hakim. “Families are leaving because there’s no work to be had.”

“It’s going to be tough for a while around here,” he added.

Unemployment in Mohave County where Bullhead City is located is around 10 percent. The median house price here has fallen from nearly $190,000 in January 2006 to less than $93,000 now, a drop of more than 50 percent.

Around 60 percent of McCollum’s sales now are foreclosures.

“Many of the other sales we handle are people trying to avoid foreclosure or at least break even,” he said. “Either way, right now foreclosures are pretty much the only game in town.”

John McCormick of McCormick Development helps run a number of family businesses – a water company, a construction company, a land development company and a real estate broker’s office – and says that many of the people walking away from homes here are either speculators or Californians who bought a second home here.

“If they end up in trouble, it’s so much easier to walk away from a second home than a primary residence,” he said.

The McCormick clan’s land development business has laid out a subdivision north of Bullhead City with 141 empty lots, complete with roads and water mains. But although there have been plenty of people looking, no one is buying right now. The family business owes the bank $8 million on the development, plus has to pay $160,000 annually in property taxes while the subdivision remains empty.

“There’s money out there but a lot of people won’t let it go,” McCormick said. “They just waiting to see if prices will go lower.”

For Bullhead City to come back, both McCormick and McCollum agree that casino business needs to pick up again but – even more importantly – California’s economy needs to recover.

“If California’s market is in the tank, we ‘re in the tank,” McCormick said. “I think we may be past the worst of it now. But nothing big is going to happen any time soon.”

Reuters is blogging live from the G20 meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.  Finance ministers and central bankers will seek to firm up a plan to rebalance the world economy, aiming to beat out how to set national policy goals and make sure everyone keeps to them. In addition countries are expected to push individual concerns, from Brazil’s about FX reserves to France’s about bankers’ bonuses.

When the Bank of England decided to expand its quantitative easing policy by 25 billion pounds to 200 billion on Thursday, it was essentially hedging its bets.

After Britain's economy shrank unexpectedly in the third quarter, and with two thirds of the City expecting an expansion to the QE programme, simply shutting off the tap of government bond purchases would risk being more of a shock than the economy could bear.

On the other hand, the Bank clearly believes that the worst is over for the economy and that recovery will come soon -- even if it's going to be weak.

Thursday's decision means the central bank will keep buying government debt until February, but at only half the pace of before. This still amounts to around 2 billion pounds a week, not including the much smaller sums of corporate debt that the Bank is buying.

What the decision means for a typical household is harder to calculate. The Bank says that its quantitative easing programme has raised the price of government and corporate
bonds, making borrowing cheaper.

But for average firms and consumers looking for a loan, the benefit is harder to spot.

There is little clear evidence that banks are much more willing to lend than a few months ago -- though the Bank would argue that quantitative easing has been instrumental in avoiding the recession turning into a depression.

In the longer term, the big unknown is the impact that quantitative easing will have on inflation. Sterling's weakness against the dollar and the euro will push inflation up in the short term, and going forward the Bank of England said it faced a balancing act.

While rising unemployment and half-full shops and factories will keep a lid on prices, policymakers know that quantitative easing could exert upward pressure on demand and prices for months if not years after it has stopped.

That's why they took the decision today which could mark the gradual phasing out of this unprecedented policy of asset purchases.

Chile, UAE, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Ireland and Norway claim top rankings on the latest transparency index, published by SWF Institute. At the bottom of the ranking is Venezuela, Oman, Nigeria, Mauritania, Kiribati, Iran, Brunei and Algeria.

The Linaburg-Maduell index is calculated with 10 principles — such as whether the fund provides up-to-date, independently audited annual reports, or whether it provides clear strategies and objectives. It also gives points on whether the fund gives ownership percentage of company hodlings, total market value, returns and management compensation.

Enhancing transparency is a key task for sovereign wealth funds, whose often opaque operations have come under heavy criticism by some Western politicians who suspect them of investing with political, rather than commercial, motives.

In fact in the recent meeting of the world’s leading sovereign wealth funds, only Norway, Chile, New Zealand agreed in advance to speak to Reuters on the sidelines; when contacted on the ground China also spoke. Others either declined to comment at all or did not return email.

(Source: SWF Institute; www.swfinstitute.org)

Interesting dilemmas facing G20 countries as their finance ministers and central bankers get together on the golf ball strewn Scottish coast ( a meeting in St Andrews we will be Live Blogging on MacroScope, by the way).

First, you have the Brazilians who are worried about hot money and have already slapped a tax on foreign investments in domestic bonds and stocks in order to cool down capital inflows.  They want the G20 to take action against what their central bank chief calls “imbalance- and bubble-building”.

Next you have the Americans and other big economies who know that the huge amounts of stimulus they have put into the world economy have to be removed eventually. They are not ready to do it yet, but expect the G20 countries to discuss how they are going to “sequence” the great unwinding.

And then there is Argentina, which is not alone in noticing that talk of unwinding tends to put investors on edge.  Its central bank governor wants the big countries to be careful, fearing a rapid reversal of stimulus policies could mean big outflows in emerging market countries such as, er, Argentina.

So a tricky balance, a super-sensitive investor audience, and plenty of domestic politics. Fore!

If you’re looking for ground zero in America’s longest and deepest recession, El Centro in southern California appears on first glance to fit the bill.

The unemployment rate here and for the whole of Imperial County hit 30.1 percent in September, the highest rate in the United States. Locals say there is no denying that El Centro has suffered as a result of the recession and that jobs are more scarce in an area where agriculture is the backbone of the community and forms 25 percent of the local economy.

“We’ve always had high unemployment, but nothing like this,” said Judith Klein-Pritchard, director of the Center for Family Solutions of Imperial Valley, which provides intervention for domestic violence and shelter services in the area.

However, officials like El Centro city manager Ruben Duran say the jobless numbers don’t tell the full story.

Duran points to the fact that back in March 2006 unemployment in Imperial County fell to 12.2 percent and the number of employed people in this county of around 160,000 totaled 54,057.

But when unemployment hit 30.1 percent – well over double the rate in March 2006 -- the number of employed workers slid less than 1 percent, to 53,734. City revenue from taxes is only down about 10 percent this year, Duran said, which also does not tally with the sharp rise in the jobless rate.

“Yes, there has been hardship and suffering here,” Duran said. “But where did all those extra unemployed people come from if the number of people in work has barely fallen?”

Tim Kelley, head of the Imperial Valley Development Corporation – a pubic private partnership set up to diversify the local economy -- said some of the rise in the unemployment rate comes from El Centro residents scattered about the country who have lost their jobs because of the recession and have come home to stay with relatives. Or that some of them are Mexican immigrants who have lost their jobs in the United States, have returned home and are claiming unemployment benefits in El Centro because it is a stone’s throw from the border.

“There are people who are working the system and that affects our unemployment figures,” Kelley said.

Drive around El Centro, a city of some 48,000, and it does not feel like some of America’s long-suffering communities like Flint, Michigan, where collapsing auto sales amid the recession have led to an unemployment rate of 15.8 percent. Whereas Flint is dealing with shuttered businesses and abandoned homes, relatively few stores have closed in El Centro.

Duran said the key to understanding the local economy and El Centro’s high jobless rate lies just across the border in the city of Mexicali, a city of more than 1 million people.

“The border bleeds both ways,” he said. “Many people who live here work in Mexicali. The trouble with the statistics is they stop at the border and don’t take into account the role a major city across the border plays in our economy.”

Photos by Lucy Nicholson

For more Route to Recovery stories from El Centro, click here

For the Route to Recovery live blog, click here

Henrique Meirelles, Brazil’s highly rated central bank president, gave unusual insight into current thinking at the International Olympic Committee in a speech in Oxford the other night.

Diverging from his main theme on Brazil’s remarkable journey from economic basket case to emerging market superpower, Meirelles said that he had gone to Copenhagen last month as part of Rio de Janeiro’s successful bid for the 2016 Olympics. The reason: The IOC asked him to come.

Meirelles said that the IOC knew that Brazil currently had all the conditions needed to host the Games, but wanted to know about how predictable it was that this would carry through over the next seven years. “They wanted to know what is really happening,” he said.

Essentially, the IOC wanted to check with the top economic manager that the country’s finances will still be shining when the Games are held.

 Perhaps they were thinking of London 2012.

Inflation may not be at the forefront of worries about economy for now, but it’s certainly in the back of many investors’ minds. Not that anyone thinks price increases will be reinforced by the labor market, as per the old “wage-push” theory. A new report from the International Labor Organization showed that wage growth continued to decline around the world in 2008, falling to 1.4 percent last year from 4.3 percent in 2007. The UN group also suggested things have gotten worse this year.

The picture on wages is likely to get worse in 2009 – despite the beginning of a possible economic recovery.   Compared to the annual average of 2008, the real wages in the first quarter of 2009 fell in more than half of the 35 countries for which recent data is available.   The downward trend in wages raises some questions about the extent to which the consumption of workers and their families will be able to sustain aggregate demand for economic production once the effects of government rescue packages peter out.

This trend has not, however, succeeded in calming those spooked by unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus from governments and central banks around the world. Indeed, inflation-hedging is creating market niches all of its own. The Treasury, for instance, is expected to bring back 30-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or TIPS, as part of its quarterly refunding announcement on Wednesday. Gorge Goncalves at Cantor Fitzgerald notes:

The Treasury could expand its TIPS offerings and or bring back the 30-Year TIPS to help finance the federal debt needs.  In the latest dealer questionnaire the Treasury asked about potential changes to the TIPS program including the replacement of the 20-year TIPS with a new 30-year TIPS security. 

Bond giant PIMCO, in the meantime, has introduced its own new anti-inflation fund, which it says is composed of a mix of TIPS and municipal bonds. John Cummings, who will manage the fund, offers some insight into the reasoning behind its creation.

With growing U.S. deficit projections and continued economic uncertainty, investors are facing the potential for higher taxes, elevated financial risks and the need to protect the purchasing power of their investments against inflation over time.