Monetary Dialogue Briefing Papers: June 2011

Hostility measures from the ECB.

Since Greece cannot be expelled from the euro, the ECB seems intent on pushing it into a position where it has no option but to leave.

The ECB is a rogue institution.

Thanks for the link to interesting papers.

However, it is not clear to me what exactly you suggest the ECB should do.

As you know, the ECB is obliged by the treaty only to lend against “adequate” collateral. Should junk-rated government paper be considered as adequate? And if not, how exactly should the ECB “continue to act as a lender of last resort” to banks that don’t have eligible collateral? Should it suspend its collateral policy altogether?

As to lender-of-last-resort function, it is not obvious what the ECB has to do with it. In the Eurosystem division of labour, ELA was always kept within the national central banks.

The weakness seems to be who decides what is adequate collateral.

Outsourcing it to external credit rating agencies seems to be a bad idea.
Leaving it to the discretion of the ECB-board seems to be a bad idea.

If the collateral turns out to be bad, then the ECB will face losses which will in turn be compensated for by the euro-zone member states. Would it be a crazy idea to have the ones who are expected to cover any losses on bad collateral to be the ones deciding what is acceptable collateral?

-> Finance ministers of the euro-zone decide what the ECB can accept as collateral. Voting and countries votes are weighted by size of economy/expected contribution to cover losses

Well done, Karl!

I noted on another thread the Concluding Statement of the annual IMF Mission on Euro-Area Policies (available at http://www.imf.org. since yesterday)

It includes the following rebuttal to Draghi’s misgivings of last week:

“Many banks still rely heavily on European Central Bank (ECB) financing, and market access might not be immediate even after a recapitalization. A conditional term funding facility for private illiquid assets, possibly operated by the ECB but with the explicit backing of euro area sovereigns (e.g., via the EFSF), would smooth the transition, while protecting the ECB’s independence and flexibility and reinforcing the incentives to tackle the banking problems at their root.”

Mr. Draghi has to do more than give simplistic dismissals to MEPs.

With an Italian in the hot seat – printing Three Trillion should not be a bother. Why wait? It’s inevitable if EU to proceed and its dodgy banking system to be ‘protected’. Roll on those EZ ‘stess tests’!

It makes little sense for the ECB to provide open-ended funding to private banks or nationalised banks that intend to be continuing concerns. There is a clear market distortion there. What would make more sense is for a commitment to be given to fund wind-down vehicles with a commitment from governments that they will make up a capital short-fall if required at the end of the wind-down period.

There should be no particular requirement that the wind-down banks themselves should be solvent during this time – zero coupon promissory notes should be enough.

A levy on financial transactions should build up a fund to cope with insolvency costs that result from the wind-down.

Where banks that are currently operating are insolvent or terminally illiquid (another word for insolvent), they should be broken up, sold off, with the rump put into wind-down.

This would satisfy both moral hazard and financial stability.

What does this sound like? Oh yeah, the FDIC…

@ Karl Whelan

Good stuff. Spot on.

“However, it is clear that ECB officials have regularly used the implicit threat that they can withdraw their support for peripheral banking systems”

The threat is explicit here:

“The Eurosystem has provided – and is still providing – support to those national banking systems which face liquidity needs. I would like to underline that the key precondition for such a support is that the country concerned sticks to the EU/IMF adjustment programme and are on track.”

LBS – “One size fits all?”

Is the ECBs show of force a weakness ?- are they displaying fear in the face of a full scale physical breakdown crisis.
Do we need a Confucian solution that rides with this tempest or do we stop it with blunt force ?
Here is a excellent presentation …. at the 6 minute mark he makes a great observation , just why is American crude less expensive then European on a continual basis ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAooDnscb7s

@Hogan

“A levy on financial transactions should build up a fund to cope with insolvency costs that result from the wind-down.”

A 10% tax on the insured value of naked CDS should act better than fibrogel to flush out a lot of the system.

@Joseph Ryan
The intent was to forbid any monetizing of state debts (“quantitative easing ” à la Bernanke) .Remember that the sole objective of the ECB was to limit inflation. Any use of monetary policy to influence economic growth ot fight unemployment was verboten. I think this make little sense,but it was the price to pay to have Germany on board.This had nothing to to do with the present situation of the Irish banking system.

Could you please describe the divorce procedure?

So Incognito reckons: “Summary of the Irish attitude towards the ECB: no good deed will be left unpunished.”

So the Irish government have followed the ECB’s advice of paying off bondholders in insolvent banks and transferring all the risk onto the sovereign. Now, the Irish having taken this course of action and lost access to sovereign bond markets, the ECB regularly threatens to cause a liquidity crisis if the transferring of private bond risk to the sovereign isn’t fully completed. Good deeds?

Ask yourself this: Would any member of the Fed’s FOMC or the Bank of England’s MPC threaten to remove a bank from its liquidity operations by musing to a journalist that support for the bank was illegal? The ECB have wandered so far into the area of unprofessional behaviour that people don’t even seem to notice anymore how strange this is.

Karl, do you not see that what you’re saying is effectively “the ECB made a deal with Ireland that they would provide liquidity as long as Ireland guaranteed the bank debt. Now the ECB is saying that they will provide liquidity as long as Ireland guarantees the bank debt”. It is the Irish government which, having made a deal, is now trying to change the terms of the deal. In answer to your question, no analogous situation would ever arise because no private sector bank would ever behave that way to the Fed or Bank of England. The IMF, which is more analogous in this case, regulalry does discuss the circumstances under which it can and cannot continue to provide lending to a borrower which does not want to comply with the terms of the deal.

Even granted that you don’t agree with the specific deal done last year, can you not see that Ireland has a massive and overpowering interest in maintaining its reputation as a trusted party? If the anonymous ECB official was being unprofessional, how would you describe Noonan?

“The ECB have wandered so far into the area of unprofessional behaviour that people don’t even seem to notice anymore how strange this is.”

And what exactly was it that made you think the ECB was “professional”. Whatever that is.

The ECB is a disgusting political adventure.

And it is about to fail.

And with it Nice and Lisbon.

Or maybe not.

Maybe the ECB can use the threat of not providing thin air money to corrupt every Nation in Europe to its will.

But they wouldn’t do that.

Would they?

@anonymous

I’d would agree with much of what you have written. My point about comparison with the Fed and BoE was referring to the dealings with the press – claiming current policies are illegal. I cannot imagine that happening at either the Fed or BoE.

From The Rotarian (USA), Dec 1920.

“It is not only the opinion of members of the French Government that our present economic outlook creates a feeling of absolute confidence in its soundness; interested visitors from other countries who have traveled thru France with a view to seeing what his happening, have the same impression,” M. Francois Marsal, French Minister of Finance said recently. “In every part of France, in the city as well as in the country, in the factories and on the farms, evidence is seen of the nation’s desire to work and its will to produce.”
Referring specifically to financial matters, M. Marsal said: “As to our finances, tho great efforts must still be made in order to get back to our former position, we already see certain signs which indicate beyond doubt that re-establishment has started. The outstanding fact is that the currency circulation, which had increased during 1919 by 8,000,000,000 france, has not increased by a single sou since January 1, 1920; the State has asked for no new loan from the Bank of France; the floating debt has diminisht nearly 2,000,000,000 francs between November 19 and June 20, whereas it had increased in the corresponding period for the year previously by 15,000,000,000.
“Another important fact is the increase of revenue from taxation. Revenues for the first seven months of 1920 are 65 per cent in excess of those for the corresponding period of the year before. Lastly, the voting of 8,000,000,000 francs in new taxes by Parliament, the raising of railway fares, postage rates, and the prices of tobacco and of government controlled bread show our willingness to make sacrifices.
“Our revenues for the current year will exceed 20,000,000,000 francs which will cover the expenses of our ordinary budget, including of course, the interest on our debt and war loans.
“But it is not enough to pay taxes; we must reduce our state expenses. Already the Government has supprest the subsidies for bread, frozen meat and sugar; we are doing our utmost to increase production and discourage all expenditure on luxuries.”

The French economy contracted by more than 4% in 1921. France’s quixotic efforts to rejoin the gold standard at 1914 parity failed; in the end only the fascists of Action Française were in favour of continuing. It didn’t rejoin until 1928 and even then at only 20% of the 1914 rate, facts that place Marsal’s bizarre list of ‘achievements’ in perspective.

Today the arguments are the same, the issue identical, the interests arguing the different sides of the debate are equivalent, as are the winners and losers, and in the end the result will be no different either.

@Karl
Why are you so surprised that the ECB is not acting in a benign manner ?

A organisation with such a concentrated and unchecked power base is always a dangerous beast.
Its no longer the merry dance between the needs of the exchequer and the wants of the usury class.
Any symbiotic advantages are seen as a regression for these new Olympian Gods.
Nation states are a Lichen to them now – a necessary stage in evolution but now a interesting curiosity.
These men want all the of the economic biosphere – they do not want to share.

@ Anonymous/Karl

The ECB has, in fairness, been placed in a difficult situation, and it has tried to be flexibile with its collateral policy, but too often it shouts “independence!” when asked to think of some more aggressive measures to fix the debt crisis, and too often it hides behind the “primary mandate” as the guidng ‘compass’ for all its actions, practical outcomes be damned. There is a complete lack of joined up thinking between the national governments, the EU Commission, and the ECB. At many stages the different arms of the Eurozone have been almost warring with each other. Can you imagine the Fed and the Treasury acting like that?? The IMF seems to the only one to see the big picture and the gaps that still need to be filled out in the Eurozone policy response to the crisis.

@anonymous

Agree in as much as part of the explanation for the ECB being so defensive about risk is that it hasn’t been given political cover to take losses.

@hogan

The Fed’s bond purcase program (Like Japan’s earlier) was a monetary policy measure aimed at boosting private credit. It was not aimed at helping the sovereign’s funding – the US Treasury yields were at historically very low levels and there was no shortage of buyers. The Fed never considered taking a credit risk in purchasing these bonds.

As to the Maiden Lanes, each of them had a loss buffer provided by a third party (JPM or the Treasury). The Fed initially considered both the Bear Sterns and the AIG “bad assets” merely illiquid rather than fundamentally impared and accepted small equity/loss buffer (about 3% for ML I, 5% for ML II). Later with the ML III it had realized the true extent of the problems and required a whopping 17% loss buffer. The Fed was very much concerned about its capital and did its best to keep itself in the role of liquidity provider.

Incidentally, each of the Maiden Lanes is well in black, so the Fed does not stand to suffer any losses.

I’m not aware of the chage in accounting mechanism you refer to. But by definition, a central bank can hardly go bust in a currency it controls and can create at will. At worst, its currency looses credibility and value.

@Anonymous

“There was a clear understanding between the Fed and the Treasury that the Fed only provided liquidity, and that it wasn’t the central bank’s business to put its capital at stake.”

Willem Buiter doesn’t agree:

The Fed does not have a full indemnity from the US Treasury even for its outright purchases of private securities. It has no guarantee or indemnity for private credit risk assumed as a result of its repo operations and collateralised lending.

For the Fed’s potential $1 trillion exposure to private credit risk through the Term Asset- Backed Securities Loan Facility, for instance, the Treasury only guarantees $100 billion. They call it 10 times leverage. I call it the Fed being potentially in the hole for $900 billion. Similar credit risk exposures have been assumed by the Fed in the commercial paper market, in its purchases of Fannie and Freddie mortgages, in the rescue of AIG, and in a host of other quasi-fiscal rescue operations mounted by the Fed and by the Fed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the US Treasury jointly.

“Obviously, the ECB feels highly uncomfortable with the situation.”

In Europe taxpayers also obviously feel highly uncomfortable with the situation. There are only three groups that can pay: taxpayers, creditors and currency holders. In Europe the actions of the ECB have allowed private creditors to be made whole and replaced by official ones, a process that will be largely complete by 2014/2015. Any efforts that involve creditors taking losses on their investments have been opposed by the ECB using any tactics necessary. The final split across the three groups in Europe will look something like 100/0/0.

In the US the total cost to taxpayers of the bailout is very low – e.g. with estimates of a $25bn loss on TARP. On the banking bailout taxpayers made a profit, and are even looking at a small profit on AIG. In the US there is thus a completely different split between the three groups, with minimal taxpayer support, some creditor losses, and currency holders taking a hit via QE/inflation.

The ECB takes an extreme, ideologically driven, approach to protecting its clients (i.e. the banks and the moneyed classes), and is openly using the crisis to drive the institutional structure of the EU towards its federalist goals. In fact as Trichet nears the end of his term he is becoming more candid on his views for an elitist technocratic central control mechanism and dismisses public/democratic control as “populism” that will lead to chaos. I find his views profoundly anti-democratic.

The US response in my view has been far more pragmatic and successful than is the case in Europe, due in part to the close co-ordination between Fed and Treasury, and the fact that each side isn’t throwing its “rule book” at the other.

@Bryan G

Thanks, because the TALF is indeed the perfect proof of my point: we are talking about a program in which the Fed only lends against triple-A-rated collateral, and even here it requires the Treasury to indemnify it against the first $100 bn of losses.

Compared to the ECB, any credit risk assumed by the Fed has been insignificant.

@christy

“The ECB have never explained why they are involved in the senior debt decision.”

This actually is quite simple. The ECB was not, strictly speaking, directly involved in the senior debt decision. Whether or not to burn bondholders was purely an Irish decision.

But, as it happens, Ireland’s cost/benefit analysis in the senior debt decision was heavily affected by two other decisions which clearly did belong to the ECB: i) what it considers a financially sound counterparty and ii) what it considers adequate collateral.

Whatever the ECB’s views on the links between the senior debt decision and its own counterparty and collateral decisions, it was enough to change the government’s mind.

@ Bryan G

I would agree with the manner in which you put the situation except in one respect, that of attributing an ideological view to the ECB. The general consensus across Europe, except among many of the benighted commentariat on this island – or at least on this blog – is that, of all the participants in the not very edifying spectacle of the management of the crisis in the euro, the ECB has emerged with its reputation most intact.

What escapes many of the participants in this debate is the fact the EU operates on the basis of a distribution of powers between various players which follows the pattern of, and is legally based on, the democratic debate in its constituent member states (paradoxically, especially that of Germany). The Commission (Administration) proposes, the Legislature (the Council and the Parliament under co-decision) disposes and the European Court Of Justice decides whether their actions are in accordance with the constituent treaties or not.

There are two exceptions to this general rule in respect of the supranational executive powers granted (i) to the Commission and (ii) to the ECB.

Contributors are jumping up and down about the exercise by the ECB of the powers given to it by the treaties and there is either no interest in, or a total unawareness of, the draconian powers exercised by the Commission – including visits to commercial premises at dawn – as the competition authority of the EU. This is what the member states have collectively decided in legally binding texts, as in the case of the ECB, and if there are objections the place to start is with proposals to debate and change those texts.

cf. the attached comment from the NYT (by still another American professor!) that “there is no such thing as a free haircut”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/opinion/22iht-edlet22.html

The professor in question is ignorant of the democratic functioning of the EU in a manner in which he would never be in respect of the federal government in Washington. The taxpayers across Europe are on the hook not alone for the decision of the ECB to intervene in the secondary bond markets, but also for failing to realise that the Maastricht Treaty, with its no bailout clause, left the solvency of banks as an issue of national responsibility, with varying capacity on the part of the nations concerned to actually carry it.

@ All

As a postscript to my contribution above, the following is an extract from the Treaty of Lisbon ratified by the people of Ireland.

Articles 10.1 & 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

“The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy. Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament. Member States are represented in the European Council by their Heads of State or Government and in the Council by their governments, themselves democratically accountable either to their national Parliaments, or to their citizens”.

@DOCM

“The general consensus across Europe … is that the ECB has emerged with its reputation most intact.”

You may claim that, but I don’t see the evidence for it. I’ve just finished reading an article in the Economist that points out that the can-kicking exercise that is Greek Bailout 2.0 ignores the insolvency problem, and says that when restructuring does inevitably occur it will hit the taxpayer even harder (due to the preponderance of official creditors). I’ve read many articles that make the same point. Since the ECB led the charge against even the modest 7-year extension restructuring, it must be seen as a leader in this can kicking exercise. Their position, as exemplified by allies such as Juncker with his statement the other day that “Greece’s debt is clearly sustainable”, is viewed outside Europe as almost delusional.

…unless you mean its reputation as a defender of the banks and the moneyed classes in which case I would be forced to agree!

@Joseph Ryan

You demonstrate that Jesuits have wasted their time educating Irishmen.This is a fine piece of convoluted logic to demonstrate exactly the opposite of the very text you quote first.

@ Joseph Ryan

How do you possibly infer from the articles that you quoted that the ECB has an obligation to Ireland at the expense of the Eurozone whole? The ECB has been entirely consistent throughout the crisis as having an issue with contagion, as being scared about the risks of contagion. They may well be wrong on the impact of this, but they have been consistent so one assumes that their fear has a basis.

Karl Whelan, on previous posts, has suggested that the Central Bank numbers fail to take into account beneficial, as opposed to mere legal ownership of assets, and has also suggested that the CBI numbers fail to take into account the secondary markets in bonds. Neither proposition is supported by the rules governing the reporting of data by the CBI/ ECB, indeed he is suggesting that we are subject to large scale non-compliance with said rules

http://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/legal/1005/1021/html/index.en.html, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/mfs/manual/

Yet KW can infer that these guidelines are not being complied with, without providing any data to support that inference, while this blog does not seem to expect any support for that inference of non-compliance. Is it possible that there might be an anti ECB agenda here because the remit of the ECB has to prioritize the Eurozone whole over Ireland? Like it or not we voted for it, just as we voted for FF to remain in power throughout the bubble.

@Overseas Commentator

Well, it’s crystal clear that the ECB’s pro-creditor (one might say pro-speculator) policies don’t promote ‘balanced economic growth…aiming at full employment and social progress’, let alone ‘solidarity among Member States’.

@ Eamon and Aisling

“They may well be wrong on the impact of this, but they have been consistent so one assumes that their fear has a basis.”

Or maybe it doesn’t – “I’m against simple restructuring, as the risks are unknowable, and I have a hunch, there’s the contagion possibility,” said Jean-Claude Juncker.

If I could do italics mine, I’d italicise ‘unknowable’ and ‘hunch’

@ Eamonn
“Its Ireland V (the senior bond holders) Financial/commercial elites in Europe and the US.” If Trichet and Geithner and co are right then any bondholder burning would not threaten some mythical “financial/ commercial elite”, it would threaten tipping the global economy into a long and deep recession.

Anglo senior, and the ECB has left the door ajar on this, could be burnt provided that the holders of such debt are, as one would suspect, hedge funds rather than players in the real economy.

If this were simply about protecting creditors then there would be uproar about the AIB default, but there is not, because players in the real economy should not have been holding AIB sub, and senior holders have had more than enough time to protect themselves.

This is about contagion, nothing more and nothing less.

@Gavin

I don’t think that the ECB has stated that they have a hunch, or that it is unknowable.

If they, and the various eurozone central banks, are in compliance with their reporting guidelines, then the ECB has access to the best numbers on this. Numbers which admittedly will not disclose derivatives, but which will disclose the cross exposures of the European banking sectors to each other’s debt, and to sovereign debt.

While nothing is certain in financial markets you can and should make informed choices, and the ECB is informed, and has chosen to act against contagion. We know that they were right in relation to us and the bond markets, Merkel seems to have finally copped on that they might be right in relation to Spain and the bond markets, in fact I wonder whether a Greek default would take out Belgium before Spain due to the combination of Depfa, a whole heap of debt and no government. The ECB has been entirely consistent throughout this crisis, the various Member States are playing catch up.

One of the reasons for the crisis is an inconsistent approach across the eurozone, caused by the very structure of the eurozone as something more than a voluntary combination of States and something less than a federal whole. We are finally reaching a consensus view, and it is the view of the ECB. Now that the ECB view is the German view, that view may in and of itself calm the markets once the Greek storm abates.

@ Bryan G

I am nor arguing that the track record of the ECB is not open to criticism. I am saying that casting it as the villain of the piece is seriously mistaken. The bank’s role in the institutional structure of the EU is deeply misunderstood in Ireland (as exemplified by the remark that Trichet was merely a “civil servant”). Very significant appointments are made to the institutions of the EU in which those appointed play a political role but, and this cannot be emphasised enough, strictly within the legal powers granted to them by the treaties. Indeed, I cannot understand why this point is not grasped as no questions are raised, for example, about the political authority of the appointments made in the American Administration.

But, to go slightly off topic as far as this thread is concerned, and to return to one raised by John McHale, the change in preferred creditor status of the ESM for countries already “in a programme”, the attached report by the Danske Bank research team is of great interest.

http://tinyurl.com/5wawhyx

Juncker at his press conference on Monday stressed, in response to a question, that he personally thought that the only way to make real progress in the EU was through the “Community method” (which I described in my earlier post). The ESM is a classic case of breaching this injunction. It is being negotiated – on German insistence – outside the institutions of the EU but with their active involvement as otherwise it could not be negotiated at all.

The reading put on the preferred status change in the Irish media is, in my opinion, completely off the mark. The change simply corrects an egregious error as far as the deal agreed in March is concerned in anticipation of the second Greek bailout being subsumed by the EFSF. It has the not unimportant benefit of making it easier for Ireland and Portugal to return to the markets but increases the pressure on them to take the necessary steps nationally to enable them to do so. It is not a “get out jail” card.

As to advocates of default and other assorted sorcerer’s apprentices, even the WSJ seems to be waking up to what is at stake.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070104576399790795514416.html

The author is wrong on the last point with regard to the rate being charged to Greece but I think he is right on everything else. The issue of any change in the Irish interest rate can hardlyy be addressed against such a background without the risk some considerable additional disruption.

We now have the rather uninspiring spectacle of a meeting of the European Council which cannot sensibly either talk or decide on anything of any real significance while awaiting for events to unfold in Greece. It is the great good fortune of the smaller countries in the EU that the strength of the institutional structure of the EU is such that even the combined assault on it of such luminaries of international politics as Merkel, Sarkozy and Berlusconi have been unable to subvert it (yet!).

@DOCM
I would recommend you listen to Mike Darda latest take on the ECB

“the ECB is sabotaging fiscal austerity”

Its contracting the monetory base and raising interest rates baby.

Basically its doing what the FED did in the late 30s – punishing the Treasuries for their “mistake”
In my opinion if people want a central treasury in Europe we need to remove the Gold from the banks control.
Impossible in a Europe infested with a 2 century long banking plague however.

Having trouble getting the link
Please Goggle : DARDA: GREECE COULD BE THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG | PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM – 13:

Oh, its one of THOSE days…

“Noonan Says He May Print ‘Ireland Is Not Greece’ T-Shirts

By Joe Brennan and Dara Doyle
June 23 (Bloomberg) — Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan said he’s considering getting T-shirts printed that say “Ireland is not Greece” in an attempt to distance Ireland from other debt-burdened nations.
“We won’t give them away, we’ll sell them,” Noonan said at an event in Dublin today. He also said Ireland is “on track” with budget measures under its bailout agreement with the European Union and International Monetary Fund.”

More interestingly, he also claimed the bank recap plan may only end up costing “€15-16bn” instead of €19bn…

@Bond Eoin Bond

Nobody is listening to him…2nd 13.7%. A record?

@DOCM

With regards to the WSJ article – on any topic there will always be contrarians and outliers, but you can only believe “Greece is solvent” if you ignore the likely growth rates (given the huge contraction in demand due to the austerity measures and the ever increasing debt servicing load), ignore likely interest rates when Greece returns to the market, and ignore the reality of the political and institutional make-up of the country and the speed with which this will change. If everybody in Greece suddenly woke up tomorrow with the mind-set, institutions and technological know-how of the Wirtschaftswunder of Germany in the 1950s, then maybe there’s a chance, but that’s not going to happen.

What matters is the view of the markets that Greece hopes to re-enter. From a recent UBS Q&A session:

And of course, as Stephane points out, we all know that at some point a coercive restructuring with principal haircuts will need to take place, and that’s certainly been the experience in the EM sphere where voluntary restructurings have often been followed further down the line by full on principal haircuts.

Indefinite can-kicking won’t work – the laws of arithmetic will win in the end. A little financial repression helps to kick the can (it appears the 7-year extension plan is back, except that it is now a 3-year extension plan or a 5-year one with coupons equal to the EFSF interest rate), but ignores the insolvency elephant in the room.

@Aisling

When do you expect the ECB to print a few Trillion?

@Joseph Ryan

Gettin pretty sick of this Contagion Spin for the Financial Classes meself – roight on!

Mr. Bini Smaghi to go?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/business/global/25iht-draghi25.html