Argonautica

This weekend will see the UEFA Champions’ League final contested at Wembley, the home of English football, by Germany’s top two sides, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. By way of contrast this was the first season since 1995-6 that no English club has progressed to at least the quarter-final of the competition. Next season will also see former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola take over at Munich having reportedly spurned job offers from the top English clubs. For many this illustrates a shift of…

We recently wrote that we live in an age of central bank heroics. But so far it’s all talk from the ECB. As we can see from the table below whereas continued asset purchases from the Federal Reserve and those announced by the Bank of Japan have significantly increased the size of central bank balance sheets in the US and Japan since the start of the year, the balance sheet of the ECB has actually shrunk to 27% of Eurozone GDP from 32%, largely as a result of €276bn of LTRO liquidity being repaid1.…