View: OMT helpful, but not unexpected. Should temper Fed doves demands for easing
While the crux of what the ECB was working on was well flagged in advance of Thursday’s policy meeting thanks to the usual ‘official’ leaks there seems to have been enough doubters to trigger a very positive market response to the official unveiling of its new bond purchasing plan. It is perhaps partly down to timing; we didn’t actually expect such explicit detail until the German Constitutional Court had dealt with the ESM issue and the fact that there was not any immediate pressure to finalise a strategy thanks to effective verbal support over the summer was another reason to pursue things in the usual Eurozone timeframe, i.e slowly. Furthermore the hostility of the Bundesbank to debt monetisation, as they see it, was (and still is) problematic. It appears Draghi just accepted that this wasn’t something that could be resolved with Weidmann clearly the sole dissenter when the board came round to voting. Another factor might be worth mentioning is the proximity to the FOMC meeting from which the market also expects support, admittedly aimed at addressing growth rather than solvency/survival of the Euro. We’d normally have expected some buck passing to the more proactive Fed, although in this instance the opposite might be true, more on that later.
Full report below…
If you enjoyed this note, please consider sharing it!
