smh.com.au: Europe's liquidity blitz fails to settle nervous credit markets - by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Europe's liquidity blitz fails to settle nervous credit markets - by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
THE Bank of England is once again the frugal sister of the credit markets, vastly outdone by Frankfurt. The €349 billion ($583.5 billion) blitz by the European Central Bank is 25 times the size of Tuesday's auction on Threadneedle Street, where banks took up a modest £10 billion ($23.2 billion) of three-month credit at an average rate of 5.95 per cent. The scale of the ECB injection dwarfs the emergency funding that stunned financial markets at the start of the credit crunch in August. Unlimited sums are being provided for two weeks at 4.21 per cent, 70 basis points below the three-month Euribor rates that set mortgages in Spain, Ireland and elsewhere.
Labels: ECB, EU, World Economy
