The ECB bond-buying plan

“The ECB is once again intervening as the last line of defense,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in London. “The intervention will put a halt to the bond market crash that some member states faced. However, the ECB is now in for the long haul and will potentially have to buy up to half of the Italian and Spanish traded debt, the biggest risk-pulling effort ever engineered in Europe.”

Here is the article.  This analysis by Paul Krugman probably won’t be beaten, and more here.

Arguably it’s now a question of who stares down whom.  If you do not doubt German resolve, bet on the ECB and lend money to Italy fairly cheaply.  If you fear that Italy suffers from its own version of the great stagnation, and doesn’t have good enough political institutions to make decent reforms (and now the hammer of the private capital markets is partially removed), maybe the ECB will cry uncle at some point and give up.  Knowing that, confidence will not return and the speculators will continue to pounce.  We’ll see soon enough what the markets think.

As I am posting this, Dow futures are off about 250 points, although that bad news could be traced to numerous causes.

Speculative attack games can be hard to predict for the marginal cases (personally I am skeptical), but the general uncertainty resulting from the U.S. debt fight, and the resultant “flight to safety” isn’t helping matters.  It’s another way in which our fiscal nonsense brings some very real costs, and quickly.  Have you seen that France might suffer a downgrade from AAA?  In the abstract, that makes sense.  Why should they be safer than the US?  Again, our stupidity makes the European mess harder to resolve by shifting the focal equilibrium from a good outcome to a bad, scary outcome.