After the ECB Meeting ...

As a runner-up to yesterday's ECB meeting I had a large post up here at Alpha.Sources looking at some of the issues which are confronted the ECB and the Eurozone economy as well as of course an estimate of what we are likely to see in the future. Now that the meeting is over I also have a note up on GEM which tries to discern the ECB's strategy ... A lot of the points are elaborations on previously noted issues but still I think it should be worth while. Here is my introduction ...

Is the ECB's Playbook too Thin?  

This I think is the main question in my head following yesterday's meeting in Frankfurt where the ECB decided to adopt and essentially continue the position of holding steady on what is clearly an uncertain outlook. For good measure the original statement can be found here and the introductory statement too. In essence the ECB did what most of us had expected in the sense that the bank is effectively on hold pending on the evolution in credit markets. Of course, this was the rather uninteresting part of the narrative and what consequently really had the markets going was of whether Trichet would mention the recent flight of the EUR/USD. On this note, Trichet fiddled with the same old G7/ECB speak narrative saying that excessive volatility was counterproductive but (of course) gave no indication as to the extent he has been following let alone directed by the past week's skirmishes between Eurozone presidents (or was it only Sarkozy?) and the ECB.

The overall summary of the meeting is thus a tad bit difficult to draw and given what I have already said I don’t have that much to add even if I do think it is worth noting a couple of points.