MacroScope

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, in addition to conveying a dovish yet somewhat obtuse message on the bank’s future policy, taught journalists telephone etiquette.

He was asked about his phone conversation with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, he declined to say anything about the content of the call.

However, Draghi said there was nothing unusual about him taking the call, rejecting the assumption that he was seeking to meddle in Italian politics.

“Usually that’s what you do, that’s what usually humans do. When they call, I respond to them and then that’s it,” Draghi deadpanned. “There is nothing to say about what we discussed.”

Let’s hope he’s as willing to take call next time Reuters wants something clarified.

The European Central Bank takes centre stage. While others in the euro zone are saying the way Cyprus was bailed out – with bank bondholders and big depositors hit – could be repeated, the ECB insists it was a one-off.

Fearful of any signs of contagion it will continue to talk that talk and there’s no sign of it having to do more so far, with no bank run even in Cyprus let alone further afield. But the last two weeks has reignited debate about what the ECB might have to do in extremis. It’s no nearer deploying its bond-buying programme but it could flood the currency area’s financial system with long-term liquidity again if called upon.

Interest rates are expected to be held at a record low 0.75 percent. Hints of policy easing further out are not out of the question. As ever, Mario Draghi’s hour long press conference will be minutely parsed but there will be nothing to match the Bank of Japan which earlier announced a stunning revamp of its policymaking rules – setting a balance sheet target which will involve printing money faster and pledging to double its government bond holdings over two years.

Money markets largely braved Cyprus’s bailout saga last week, but figures showing liquidity conditions are tightening suggest sentiment may not be as resilient the next time around.

Data from CrossBorder Capital, an independent financial firm that specialises in analysing global liquidity flows, shows the euro zone saw its biggest capital outflow in March since late 2011 – around the time the ECB injected liquidity into the financial system.

Financial institutions and governments took a net $175 billion worth of bonds and stocks, on an annualised basis, out of the euro zone in March – the biggest outflow since $201.4 billion in December 2011, according to the data.

Spring is in the air and U.S. growth is getting unexpected support from the nation’s doughty consumers.

Despite higher taxes, households are lifting spending, begging the question of how much momentum will carry into the second quarter and what it means for Fed bond purchases.

After early-year fears that the fiscal cliff and automatic public spending cuts could tip the country back into recession, some economists now feel confident enough to upgrade projections for the first quarter ahead of all-important monthly payroll data, due on Friday. From JP Morgan’s Mike Feroli:

The Great Recession set the U.S. labor market so far back that there is still a long way to go before policymakers can claim victory and point to a true return to healthy conditions, a top former Fed economist said. The U.S. economy remains around 3 million jobs short of its pre-recession levels, and that’s without accounting for population growth.

“The goal line is still a long ways off,” David Stockton, former head of economic research at theU.S.central bank’s powerful Washington-based board, told an event sponsored by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He sees the American economy improving this year, but believes the recovery will continue to have its ups and downs.

A lot of people have been quite excited about some of the recent strength in the labor market. It’s encouraging but I don’t think we’ve yet seen any clear break out and I don’t think we’re going to for a while.  […]

The problem of a “democratic deficit” that might arise from the process of European integration has always been high on policymakers’ minds. The term even has its own Wikipedia entry.

As Cypriots waited patiently in line for banks to reopen after being shuttered for two weeks, the issue was brought to light with particular clarity, since the country’s bailout is widely seen as being imposed on it by richer, more powerful states, particularly Germany.

Luxembourg has accused the Germans of trying to impose “hegemony” on the euro zone.  The country, whose banking system, like Cyprus’, is very large relative to the economy’s tiny size, fears that similarly harsh treatment could be imposed on its depositors.

Ask top Federal Reserve officials about adopting a target for non-inflation adjusted growth, or nominal GDP, and they will generally wince. Proponents of the awkwardly-named NGDP-targeting approach say it would be a more powerful weapon than the central bank’s current approach in getting the U.S.economy out of a prolonged rut.

This is what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke had to say when asked about it at a press conference in November 2011:

So the Fed’s mandate is, of course, a dual mandate. We have a mandate for both employment and for price stability, and we have a framework in place that allows us to communicate and to think about the two sides of that mandate. We talked today – or yesterday, actually – about nominal GDP as an indicator, as an information variable, as something to add to the list of variables that we think about, and it was a very interesting discussion. However, we think that within the existing framework that we have, which looks at both sides of the mandate, not just some combination of the two, we can communicate whatever we need to communicate about future monetary policy. So we are not contemplating at this date, at this time, any radical change in framework. We are going to stay within the dual mandate approach that we’ve been using until this point.

Cypriot banks were supposed to reopen today but they won’t and when they do capital controls will be slapped on to prevent money fleeing its borders (was that how the single currency zone and single market was supposed to work?) The controls are supposed to be temporary but the Icelandic experience showed that once imposed they can be devilishly hard to remove. It seems pretty certain that there will be a bank run when the doors are reopened, which is now slated for Thursday.

Dutch Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem gave markets a jolt yesterday. In an interview with Reuters he said in future, the onus would be put on banks to recapitalize and if they couldn’t “then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”. He added that he wanted to get to a situation where the euro zone never needed to use its ESM rescue fund to recapitalize banks directly – a plan that was created last year at the height of the crisis. That all seemed crystal clear but after some adverse market reaction a later statement was put out on his behalf reverting to the earlier line that Cyprus was a one-off case.

So which is it? One-off or precedent? With a banking system eight times the size of its economy and awash with foreign money Cyprus clearly is unlike any of its euro zone peers. But it’s been also clear for some time now that Germany and other northern Europeans don’t want taxpayers to be on the hook for future bailouts and are not keen on using the ESM to recapitalize banks (that was supposed to break the doom loop between weak banks and sovereigns but maybe not any more). German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was explicit after the bailout was agreed in the early hours of Monday morning, saying with the bail-in “we got what we always wanted”. As such, the Bundestag is almost certain to vote for it.

I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke during his quarterly press conference this week if the central bank had its own estimate for the implicit subsidy that banks considered too big to fail receive in the form of cheaper borrowing. Senator Elizabeth Warren had confronted him at a recent hearing with a Bloomberg estimate of $83 billion which itself was derived from an IMF study. At the time, he dismissed her concern: “That’s one study Senator, you don’t know if that’s an accurate number.”

At the press briefing, Bernanke said the Fed does not have its own figures for Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail subsidy, in part because there were too many factors that made it difficult to calculate.

However, this time around, he seemed more sympathetic to Warren’s concerns than he had at the Senate Banking Committee hearing.

Two analyses published this week highlight how alarmed investors are about inflation in Brazil.

In the first, published on Wednesday following a poll on global stock markets, equity investors say an interest rate hike wouldn’t be a bad idea – a paradox, since stocks usually drop when borrowing costs rise. Are they keen to move to bonds? Not really; their argument is that an interest rate hike could assuage inflation fears after eight consecutive months of above-forecast price rises. A rate hike could also reduce concerns of economic mismanagement after several government attempts to intervene in key sectors such as banking and power generation.

The central bank signalled it could act later this year, but would rather wait because the recent inflation surge could be just temporary. Bond investors disagree, according to a separate analysis published today. In their view, inflation will remain above the 4.5 percent target mid-point through at least 2018, raising uncertainty about long-term investments needed to bridge the gap between Brazil’s booming demand and its clogged roads and ports.