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by Ashraf Laidi
Posted: Feb 20, 2010 5:00
Comments: 30765
Posted: Feb 20, 2010 5:00
Comments: 30765
Forum Topic:
EUR
Discuss EUR in this thread
Ashraf
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avNXnGsrVUmc&pos=1
External debt is managable if it is dominated in the native currency. EUR is a bit of a special case as the restrictions (both fiscal and monetary) associated with the currency make it comparable to the restrictive (repressive?) nature of gold as a currency, coupled with the incongruence of economies, results in debt that is really in no one's native currency, yet the currency must be used as such.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10661748
Not sure how relevant here, but could be regarded as a piece of jawboning for a stronger Euro.
rules which are , in economical recession, mutually exclusive. This aside, one cannot trace exactly whether China has indeed sold USD and bought EUR. There is one important question open whether the ECB has a liquidity problem. This table , published by ECB, is the daily EONIA
( date in DD.MM:YYYY)
16.07.2010 0,56
15.07.2010 0,49
14.07.2010 0,44
12.07.2010 0,39
09.07.2010 0,39
08.07.2010 0,40
07.07.2010 0,41
06.07.2010 0,42
05.07.2010 0,41
02.07.2010 0,44
There are clear, evident reasons for EUR rise aside from short covering, which clearly occurred. EONIA has been floored by the gradual yet progressive removal of excess liquidity in the expiration of the 12 month repo and the presumably limited lifespan on the remaining 3 month and 1 week repos. This has set a floor on front end rates, supportive of the EUR. If you saw last week when China's growth of 10.3% was released, it was also accopmanied by the release of China's overall reserve holdings (as China does not provide the transparency to identify the % composition of these reserves). Foreign reserves grew by the smallest amount in years. Some of this has to do with lower exports (trade accounting is flawed, but for the sake of this argument let's go with this). Less exports results in less USD and EUR China is long. But another driver of the decline buried within the smaller net increase has clearly got to be due to the decline in the EUR. China's EUR reserves lost value, while USD increased. Couple this with possible greater US export revenues versus EUR revenues (again, don't have this transparency), any asset manager would engage is a rebalancing of reserves that required both the selling of USD to decrease exposure and the purchasing of EUR to increase the % of the reserve bucket. This had to occur regardless of trade concerns. And those trade concerns are more effectively addressed by focusing on increasin domestic demand and consumption, which China is explicitly focusing on as China is not foolish enough to ignore the fact that external consumption in the form of exports is a ship that has sailed. Why do you think China is going to relapse into stimulus, even at the risk of restarting the bubble-like real estate market via a revisitation of their Western expansion strategy (originated in 2000 and put on hold)? Have you not read the stories of labor unrest, mid-skill labor shortages resulting in increased wages?