FRANKFURT, May 18 (Reuters) – German police said they detained 400 anti-capitalist protesters in Frankfurt on Friday for defying a ban on demonstrations against austerity policies implemented to tackle the intensifying euro zone debt crisis.

The demonstration in the German financial capital was part of a four-day-long “Blockupy” protest, due to run until Saturday, against capitalism and swingeing austerity measures.

“Hungry? Eat a banker,” read one banner protesters held up outside the Messeturm skyscraper housing Goldman Sachs’ offices. Reuters’ Frankfurt office is also in the building.

Police closed several main roads in Frankfurt – including a main artery into the city that passes by the Messeturm – and flooded the centre with officers. There was no violence.

The protesters are angry at the misery they say governments are inflicting on people with their response to the crisis, which has intensified since inconclusive elections in Greece this month fueled concerns about its future in the euro zone.

“The Greek austerity measures are making Greece go kaputt even faster,” said protester Leonard Loch, 37, from Hamburg.

The European Central Bank reported no trouble on Friday and commercial banks, many of whom have made contingency plans to cope with the protests, said their operations were running smoothly.

FRANKFURT/VIENNA (Reuters) – The European Central Bank is ready to raise interest rates when inflation risks arise, a top ECB policymaker said on Thursday as a survey pointed to stubbornly high prices this year and the Bundesbank signalled it may live with higher German inflation.

Financial markets are looking to the ECB to take further steps to stem the euro zone crisis but ECB policymakers speaking at a conference in Vienna focussed more on being ready to unwind the extraordinary support they have taken than any fresh action.

Peter Praet, the ECB Executive Board member who holds the powerful economics portfolio, said the bank will raise interest rates when it sees upside risks to prices, and remove other crisis measures if they add to inflation pressures.

“As in the past, the Governing Council will be vigilant in order to contain upside risks to price stability”, Praet said in a speech at an Austrian National Bank conference.

Euro zone rates are at a record-low level of 1.0 percent and the ECB said earlier this month inflation risks are balanced.

In addition to cutting rates, the ECB has injected over 1 trillion euros into the financial system with twin 3-year funding operations, or LTROs, in December and February that eased markets’ angst in the first quarter about the euro zone.

Inconclusive elections in Greece and renewed concerns about the health of Spain’s banking sector are nonetheless feeding those fears again and the supportive effect of the LTROs is wearing thin.

FRANKFURT/VIENNA, May 10 (Reuters) – The Bundesbank is preparing to stomach higher German inflation than it likes, above the European Central Bank’s target level, because of the euro zone crisis, a source at the central bank said on Thursday.

Structural reforms in peripheral euro zone states would improve their competitiveness and under this scenario Germany could have an inflation rate above the bloc’s average, the bank said in a statement for a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday.

“That means an inflation rate moderately above the ECB inflation target of around 2 percent,” the high-ranking central banker who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

Germans have a deep-seated aversion to inflation stemming from the national experience of hyperinflation in the 1920s and the Bundesbank has traditionally pushed for tighter ECB monetary policy to choke off price pressures.

Although the Bundesbank still wants stable prices across the euro zone, its latest comments show the bank recognises that upward pressure on German wage costs and property prices suggest its inflation is likely to rise above the bloc’s average.

“It means that they will not try to fight a purely German interest rate policy in the (ECB),” said Christian Schulz at Berenberg Bank, a former ECB economist.

“They are aware that interest rates have to be lower than they would be if Germany was on its own,” he added, referring to the ECB’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy.

MANNHEIM, Germany, April 17 (Reuters) – German analyst and investor sentiment rose unexpectedly in April to its highest level since June 2010, a survey showed on Tuesday, bolstering hopes that Europe’s biggest economy is recovering from a weak spell.

The Mannheim-based ZEW economic think tank’s monthly poll of economic sentiment rose to 23.4 from 22.3 in March, beating a consensus forecast in a Reuters poll of analysts for a fall to 20.0.

The euro rose on the reading which counters some recent disappointing industrial and manufacturing data.

“Both the ZEW and the Ifo index have been on a non-stop upward trend since the end of last year,” said economist Carsten Brzeski at ING.

“Higher oil prices, new market turmoil and a return of sovereign debt woes, it looks as if – at least in the eyes of financial analysts – nothing can stop the German economy.”

The reading shrugged off a bigger-than-expected fall in industrial output in February, blamed on a cold snap, along with a contraction in manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) last month, which revived concerns that the German economy may dip into a recession.

A separate gauge of ZEW current conditions rose to 40.7 from 37.6 in March, beating a forecast of 35.3.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Persistently high inflation will prevent the European Central Bank from doing anything new on Wednesday to prop up the euro zone’s shaky economic recovery, even with renewed worries about its fourth-largest economy, Spain.

While ECB President Mario Draghi has said that the worst of the debt crisis is over, resurgent concern about Spain and questions about whether Portugal will need a second bailout remain.

The bank, however, generally believes it has done as much as it can and that it is now up to governments and banks to deal with the debt crisis and its fallout.

Meeting on Wednesday this month ahead of Easter, instead of the usual Thursday, ECB policymakers face conflicting pressures from rising prices and an economy flirting with recession – factors that effectively cancel each other out.

This is despite the financial sector’s health improving since the ECB injected over 1 trillion euros into the financial system in recent months.

Despite the money supply growing faster than expected in February, the euro zone economy took an unexpected turn for the worse last month, hit by a sharp fall in French and German factory activity that even the most pessimistic economists failed to predict.

“As far as economic data is concerned, there have been some disappointments, the data over the past couple of weeks has come in on the weak side,” Commerzbank economist Joerg Kraemer said, though he added that it had it surprised on the positive side in the previous month.

FRANKFURT/LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) – Banks cut lending to euro zone companies in February while those in Spain and Italy stocked up on government bonds, suggesting the flood of cash that the European Central Bank has pumped out has yet to bolster flagging businesses in the wider economy.

The ECB funnelled over 1 trillion euros into the financial system with twin ultra-cheap funding operations in December and February to head off a credit crunch that risked exacerbating the euro zone crisis and threatening the currency bloc’s future.

Governments are responding too by raising the “firewall” around the euro zone to prevent contagion, but ECB policymaker Jens Weidmann said this would only buy time and that governments must tackle the roots of the crisis.

Speaking in London, he said that “just like the ‘Tower of Babel’ the ‘Wall of Money’ will never reach heaven… If we continue to make it higher and higher, we will, in fact, run into more worldly constraints – both financial and political ones.”

“We must realise that all the money we put on the table will not buy us a lasting solution to the crisis.”

Weidmann, who also heads Germany’s Bundesbank, called for countries with current account deficits and excessive public debt to implement structural reforms and consolidate budgets.

His comments are part of an ECB push to put the onus on euro zone governments to address the causes of the crisis, rather than looking to the central bank for help.

FRANKFURT, March 26 (Reuters) – A sharp rise in German property prices is worrying some European Central Bank policymakers but the sudden upswing is unlikely to push the ECB into raising interest rates.

The ECB sets rates for all 17 euro zone members no matter what state their individual economies are in, and Germany’s mini-boom is more than balanced by depressed housing markets elsewhere, notably Spain and Ireland.

Residential property prices in German cities rose by 5.5 percent last year – nothing to write home about in many countries, but almost a bubble by normally depressed German standards.

By contrast, housing prices in Spain fell 11.2 percent in the fourth quarter year-on-year. In Ireland, residential prices fell 16.7 percent in 2011.

The problem is the ECB’s one-size-fits-all interest rate. Deutsche Bank economist Gilles Moec calculates that monetary policy is “too lenient” by a margin of more than 200 basis points in Germany and “too tight” by 40 basis points for Spain.

This is creating another headache for Bundesbank President and ECB Governing Council member Jens Weidmann, already under pressure at home for backing the ECB’s expansionary monetary policy, which is feeding Germans’ fear of inflation.

The risks associated with asset-price bubbles are clearly on Weidmann’s mind. He told Reuters earlier this month that housing price rises in Germany were “something we have to watch” and made repeated reference to bubbles in a speech last week.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The European Central Bank is likely to signal on Thursday that it has done all it intends to do to fight the euro zone crisis, putting the onus back on governments after cutting interest rates and flooding the market with cash in recent months.

Banks have been shored up and government debt markets stabilized by two ECB cash injections totaling more than a trillion euros since December, steps which ECB President Mario Draghi says have averted a major credit crunch.

But other policymakers have expressed worries that the wall of cash could add to problems down the road, with German central bank head Jens Weidmann leading the charge for the ECB to think about an exit strategy.

While it is too early for the 17-country bloc’s central bank to say anything publicly about when it plans to tighten policy, it has taken just two weeks for economists to back off forecasts that it will cut interest rates again within months.

“We may see not a really hawkish press conference, but a pretty clear statement that unless the economy takes another lurch down, that’s it, we’re finished, no more rate cuts, no more liquidity, we’re done,” Societe Generale economist James Nixon said.

Draghi said last month that the policymakers did not discuss cutting rates in that meeting and with the tentative signs of economic stabilization increasing, any pressure for them to ease policy further has diminished.

The ECB’s wait-and-see mode also extends to its bond-purchase program, which has seen no action in the past few weeks.

FRANKFURT, Feb 27 (Reuters) – Firms and consumers continued to pull their money out of Greek banks at a rapid rate in January, European Central Bank data showed on Monday, in a sign of waning trust in the country’s banking system.

Private sector deposits in Greek banks fell by almost 3 percent in January, the second fastest drop since the financial crisis began and pushing the total level of deposits down to 174.9 billion euros, the lowest level since November 2006.

Bank deposits are now about 28 percent below their all time peak in December 2009.

The drop reflects uncertainty about what would happen to money held in banks were Greece ever to leave the euro and also a draw down in savings as Greeks struggle to stay afloat financially during the crisis.

Private-sector deposits in Portugal and other countries in the middle of the debt crisis fared much better, however. In Portugal, they increased fractionally, to 233.2 billion. Deposits fell slightly in Italy, Ireland and Spain.

With the exception of Portugal, there has been a steady decline in the amount of money parked in banks in all peripheral countries in the last year and even longer in Greece and Ireland.

Large-scale losses of deposits create a major headache for banks, which have to either find alternative funding sources to replenish their capital buffers or else scale down their businesses to cope on the smaller rations.