{"id":3991,"date":"2011-04-07T07:58:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T13:58:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonapollovoss.local\/?p=3991"},"modified":"2018-09-21T02:07:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-21T06:07:42","slug":"what-my-intuition-tells-me-now-european-central-bank-raises-interest-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2011\/04\/07\/what-my-intuition-tells-me-now-european-central-bank-raises-interest-rates\/","title":{"rendered":"European Central Bank Raises Interest Rates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Europe&#8217;s Central Bank &#8211; the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve &#8211; announced that it was raising interest rates from 1.0% to 1.25%.\u00a0 This is the first rise in interest rates by the ECB since July 2008.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Analysis: <\/strong>For me, this is a very clear indication that, at the worldwide political level, the Great Recession is over.\u00a0 That worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) is on a strong footing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Only in the situation in which a government was extremely comfortable that its economy was stable could it raise the price of money, or interest rates.\u00a0 In the heart of a recession such an action would be seen as a brake on economic recovery.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Consider also that Europe&#8217;s economy, while large, has very low growth rates.\u00a0 So only if there was very high confidence on the part of banking officials would they raise interest rates.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">This also means that fears of the European debt crisis, as I have been describing on the blog since my <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web2010\/12\/13\/what-my-intuition-tells-me-now-2011-predictions\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2011 Predictions<\/a><\/span>, are way overblown.\u00a0 If European officials were worried about the crisis spreading throughout the eurozone and collapsing the entire European economy, why would they raise the cost of troubled nations to refinance their debt?\u00a0 They wouldn&#8217;t.\u00a0 In other words, the outbreak of budgetary crises in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and maybe even Italy, must be seen by the ECB has able to be quarantined and not much of a threat to the wider Union.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">That the ECB has raised rates during the Middle Eastern crisis and when Japan is still trying to coordinate its recovery from the tsunami is also an indication that these events are not a threat to European economic growth.\u00a0 Ergo, they cannot be a threat to a larger, healthier economy like the United States either.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Importance grade:<\/strong> 9; this is a very strong vote of confidence on the part of European officials in the worldwide economic recovery.\u00a0 I would have rated it a 10 but Europe&#8217;s bankers have a knack for being knuckleheads, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Europe&#8217;s Central Bank &#8211; the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve &#8211; announced that it was raising interest rates from 1.0% to 1.25%.\u00a0 This is the first rise in interest rates by the ECB since July 2008. &nbsp; Analysis: For me, this is a very clear indication that, at the worldwide political level, the Great [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}