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Wednesday, April 11

11th Apr - SAGGY: Spanish Announcement Games, Good Yield

So we got some talk that ECB could buy Spanish bonds, and the 10-year yield dropped back below the dreaded 6%-level. Usual announcement games, if you ask me.
 
Quote of the Day by Peter Tchir: Talk is cheap, but there is real concern within the EU that bonds on the ECB balance sheet cause problems. They would like to shift SMP to EFSF (it is part of it’s bigger mandate), but so far haven’t. They also know once they start buying, it will be a clear indication that LTRO failed. TF Market Advisors

News And Market Re-Cap – RanSquawk / ZH
Frontrunning: April 10 – ZH
The Lunch Wrap – alphaville / FT
EM New York headlines – beyondbrics / FT
Morning MarketBeat: Shades of 2011 –  MarketBeat / WSJ
Morning Take-Out – DealBook / NYT
Daily Press Summary  – Open Europe

EURO CRISIS
The EZ breakup contest: Take ignorance seriouslyvoxeu.org
Richard Baldwin: The five finalists of the £250,000 EZ breakup contest were announced last week; only one has a graduate degree in economics. This column argues that three are amateurish efforts full of economic and factual errors. European economists should take such ignorance seriously. Failure to do so in the US allowed odious ideas to gain respectability.

Financing the economy of the euro area: the ECB’s roleECB
Speech by Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, Association Française des Tresoriers d’Entreprises (AFTE), Paris, 11 April 2012

EURO CRISIS: SPAIN
Spain takes centre stageopen europe
At some level this is likely to be a correction to the massive post-LTRO optimism seen on European markets, but there are definitely valid concerns underlying it – this is only the beginning of the problems in Spain.

The pain in Spain falls mainly on…MacroScope / Reuters

The only country in worse shape than SpainAlso Sprach Analyst
JPMorgan’s quick table without comments

OTHER
Money as maturity and asset transformationalphaville / FT
In their new paper Singh and Stella suggest that the world may have under-estimated how much easier it has become to transform assets into money due to technological innovations. Indeed, the largely unregulated financial ‘pawnbroking’ business got smarter and more pervasive while nobody was watching.

The inevitability of shadowy banking (and how to regulate for it)alphaville / FT
Edward Kane presented at the Atlanta Fed-hosted financial markets conference. Kane’s paper says shadowy banking is basically safety-net arbitrage.

[CVA] A tragedy the monolines hath wroughtalphaville / FT

The ways China can rebalancempettis
(9-Apr) No matter how sincere its intentions, what Beijing says it will do over the next few years is meaningful only if its policies are both internally consistent and do not violate external constraints.

Nordic Outlook (40 pages)Danske Bank (pdf)
Denmark: economy is neither performing very well nor very badly – and there is little  prospect of this situation changing much in the coming years lackluster outlook
Sweden:  no growth in 2012 followed by slow growth in 2013
Norway: economy has emerged from the European debt crisis unscathed.  Growth is above trend, unemployment is falling and credit growth is accelerating
Finland: The Finnish economy remains relatively healthy and we expect a modest recovery

When the tail-event becomes the standard riskalphaville / FT
On Artemis Capital’s latest report I mentioned last night.

OFF-TOPIC
FiveBooks Interviews: Edward Lucas on Putin and Russian HistoryThe Browser
The international editor of The Economist and author of a new book about Russia gives an excoriating critique of Putinism and explains how Russia's amoral present is rooted in a failure to come to terms with its past

How recruiters look at your resumeFlowingData
Interesting analysis of tracking eye movements over CV’s