06.06.2014 - Currencies: Survival of the weakest
So the ECB has introduced negative deposit rates, as was widely expected. Whether this will work to boost bank lending is open to question; Denmark had negative deposit rates and it acted as a tax on them, which they had to recoup from customers. But it might work to weaken the euro; the single currency has dropped 0.6% against the dollar at the time of writing. (This may be because the ECB did quite a lot more than making rates negative; it added a loan facility for non-financial companies, for example.) David Bloom at HSBC says that The ECB has argued it does not have an exchange rate target, but it is clear that a weaker EUR will be a critical element in the ECB achieving its inflation target...............................................Full Article: Source
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