In the Blind Spot (Go F*** yourselves. Err, no, not really.)
Dear Subscribers, Since the Blind Spot doesn’t have any advertisers (funded as we are by subscribers), we, alas, can’t indulge in an impulse to tell them to “go fuck themselves” if they disagree with our editorial slant or want to impose their slant on us. But what we can and have pre-emptively committed to is […]
In the Blind Spot (Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do)
Dear Subscribers, A short greeting today as I have to get ice-skating.I will leave you with one thought to ponder for the weekend: If a public-domain AI really has the capacity to be as powerful as all the techno billionaires say, consider what might happen if, by some weird osmosis or intelligence, it started […]
ECB faces up to a self-made paradox on green finance (POLITICO)
By Ben Munster, Geoffrey Smith · Nov 24, 2023, 2:05 PM The European Central Bank: You all need to spend half a trillion euros to prevent a disaster that will make the planet uninhabitable. Also the European Central Bank: We’d love to help, you understand, but we’re legally required to only make things worse. Let […]
Pfizer is suing Poland over vaccines. This is how we got here (POLITICO)
By Carlo Martuscelli · Nov 22, 2023 It took a while, but the bill finally came. On Tuesday evening, Gazeta Prawa reported that U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is taking the Polish government to court over missing payments for 60 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine it developed with BioNTech. The lawsuit, which comes as Poland […]
BoE considers HMT indemnity for losses ‘binding’ (POLITICO)
By Izabella Kaminska · Nov 21, 2023 LONDON ― The Bank of England would likely treat any failure by the U.K. Treasury to transfer funds to cover losses related to quantitative easing as a breach of the indemnity it was issued by government in 2009, policymakers were told on Tuesday. The guarantee, that was theoretically […]
In The Blind Spot (Radio Free Europe gives way to TikTok meme warfare)
Dear Subscribers, Since nobody can agree if central bank losses really matter, and/or if raising the minimum reserve requirement makes sense or not, I thought it might be helpful to revisit perspectives from 2009 to see what highly respected central bank voices were saying back then about the prospect of sticky QE exits. So here, […]
In the Blind Spot (Spanish sovereignty, technocracy and stablecoins)
Dear Blind Spotters, It’s Remembrance Sunday so I’m going to keep today’s intro short. My main value-add of the week is that I had the opportunity to interview City Minister/Economic Secretary to the Treasury Andrew Griffith at Politico’s first-ever UK Financial Services summit on Thursday. He told me that the reason pensions reform was missing […]
In the Blind Spot (On the significance of connector economies, plus cbank loss bond swaps)
Dear Subscribers, This week’s newsletter touches only briefly on some important central bank liquidity developments (which I would otherwise be keen to provide a proper evaluation of) due to me being a bit under the weather. This has rendered me a bit useless since at least Thursday. So consider the below mostly a teaser. […]
In the Blind Spot (Approaching ‘quasi fiscal’ monetary operations)
Dear Subscribers, It’s the half-term weekend before Halloween. So it’s probably fitting that Boris Johnson just announced he’s set to become the latest parliamentarian to join GB News’ roster of political chat show hosts, an array that currently includes Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Nigel Farage. But it’s not just politicians stacking up at the […]
Dentists, bakers and trained killers: Meet the French navy’s elite crew (POLITICO)
By Laura Kayali · Oct 23, 2023 ABOARD THE FRENCH HELICOPTER CARRIER TONNERRE — John Denver’s “Country Roads,” a folk song from 1971, resounds through the Tonnerre. It’s 7:30 a.m., and some of the crew aboard the Mistral-class amphibious helicopter carrier are already eating breakfast — loading up on calories ahead of a planned exercise […]