el-erian@pimco: germany in a lose-lose situation

--- liquidity versus solvency: nos amis ricains ne nous ont-ils pas déjà fait le coup récemment? au moins eux n'ont pas posé un ultimatum à 2013 pour que leurs banques finissent de cicatriser grâce à une courbe des taux superbement raide et à quelques pansements comptables  http://www.pimco.com/Pages/GermanyinaLose-LoseSituation.aspx ---

  • The problem is that the current approach – centred on dealing with liquidity problems now and solvency issues later – is not working.
  • A liquidity approach that delays the day of reckoning may be good regional politics, but it's bad economics. It does not restore sustainable growth to the periphery, and it exposes the core to contamination.
  • Rather than simply doubling up on a faltering liquidity approach, the time has come for Germany to lead a more holistic solution focused on addressing the periphery’s debt overhang and competitiveness problems.

[…]

This is not the first time that Germany faces such a dilemma. After the fall of the Berlin wall, West Germany judged that good politics trumped bad economics, and agreed to reunify with much-weaker East Germany at a one-to-one exchange rate. It took years to overcome the costs of this decision.

bookstaber @f: nobody wants to take the step of doing something about an outsized risk because that's costly

--- bookstaber le nouveau régulateur, souhaitons-lui bonne chance,  le système financier s'en porterait mieux! http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/23/is-the-sec-fighting-last-years-war/ ---

What is the hardest part of securities regulation?

If you find a valve in a nuclear power plant that isn't working right and replace it, the valve is not going to try to fool you into thinking it's on when it's really off. In the market, traders will try to fool you. In other words, there's a realm of feedback and gaming that can occur in the financial markets that doesn't occur in an engineering system. That makes developing rules much more difficult for Wall Street than for safety in engineering.

kaminska @ft: here comes quatitative tightening

--- ahah, j'adore le concept: QT chinois pour contrecarrer les externalités négatives du QE ricain! http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/11/24/414956/here-comes-the-quantitative-tightening ---

[…]quantitative tightening (or QT) is coming to the People’s Republic of China very soon indeed.

And by QT we mean tightening by any means other than lifting interest rates directly.

As HSBC has already argued, this makes sense because it really is the only possible antidote to US quantitative easing for China — which under the existing trade framework ends up absorbing much of the US-created QE2 inflationary effect.