Financial Times (December 16)
“European bonds rallied on Friday, pushing yields to nine-month lows as investors focused on the latest signs of a slowing economy and shrugged off the European Central Bank’s insistence that it was not considering interest rate cuts.” Given the Fed’s pivot, markets appear skeptical of “ECB president Christine Lagarde’s insistence on Thursday that it was too soon to talk about the timing of rate cuts and that the bank had ‘more work to be done’ in its battle to tame inflation.”
Tags: Bonds, ECB, European, Inflation, Insistence, Interest, Investors, Lagarde, Lows, Rallied, Rate cuts, Slowing Economy, Timing, Yields
The Economist (May 26)
Christine Lagarde is talented, but she should not be chosen to head the International Monetary Fund. “The stitch-up, whereby the head of the IMF is a European and the head of the World Bank is an American, is a disgrace. International posts should be filled according to merit…. Europe’s monopoly of the IMF’s leadership has long been an anomaly. It is time that it ended.”
Tags: Europe, IMF, Lagarde, U.S., World Bank