The Bank of England has published the latest issue of its twice-yearly Financial Stability Report. The Financial Times leads on the story under the optimistic heading “Bank of England Signals Worst Is Over.” The report’s argument was summarized by John Gieve, the deputy governor of the bank: “While there remain downside risks, the most likely path ahead is that confidence and risk appetite will return gradually in the coming months.” The bank’s optimism extends even to the U.S. housing market.

Even with a further decline in U.S. house prices, the bank does not expect any default in AAA-rated subprime mortgage-backed securities. That means that those securities are significantly undervalued and that some of the writing down has been much greater than necessary.

This optimistic review was published on the day that the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a further quarter percentage point, to 2%. This was only slightly mitigated by the Fed’s hint that there might be a pause in rate cuts at the next meeting, in June.

There is now a very wide gap between the interest rate philosophy of European central banks, including the Bank of England, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. The Europeans have shown little willingness to counter the credit crunch by large and repeated interest rate cuts. The Fed has continued to follow the much-criticized Alan Greenspan policy of cutting rates early and often.

The pessimistic American view is supported by most New York opinion. Jim O’Neill, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, says that Britain is “in the eye of the storm of a deleveraging world economy… The U.K. mortgage market is effectively frozen. House prices are going to go through negative changes. It’s going to be a challenge for U.K. policymakers.” This American view has even penetrated to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, where an American member of the committee, David Blanchflower, has said that a 30% fall in house prices by 2010 is not implausible. Such a fall would be comparable to the fall in house prices in the United States.

My own view is that the Bank of England is probably premature in spotting a turn in the market. For some time yet, banks will be rewriting their capital bases. They will be concerned to reassure themselves and their customers about their own financial situation and will, therefore, remain risk averse and reluctant to lend. The banks have had a very nasty fright, in which it was impossible to value major investments and difficult to be sure of the true solvency position of major banks. That was a global phenomenon.

It may be true that the worst of the immediate panic has passed, but the mood of caution, even of exaggerated caution, has not. There are also, in the U.K., problems with the falling valuation of commercial property that are as worrying as the concerns about U.K. residential policy. The Bank of England wants to help restore confidence, but it will take time for banks to return to their more relaxed attitude to the lending risk. Indeed, the Bank of England would not want them to go back to the mood of 2006, when lending standards were too low.

However, the European view is not merely one of optimism about the future trend of asset values, but one of greater pessimism about inflation. Record prices for property may have peaked; some commodities, including gold, have reacted, as well. But energy and food prices are at record levels and have not yet turned down.

European bankers remain relatively anxious about the threat of a return to inflation. That is why European Central Bankers are reluctant to follow the Fed in cutting interest rates. The Bank of England is also worried about the rising budget deficit of the British government. High interest rates tend to offset the inflationary effect of the deficit, which itself seems to be rising by the day.

I find it easy to see the pessimistic case. I expect the U.K. housing and commercial property markets to continue to fall. In London, they are very closely linked. I expect the U.K. budget deficit to continue to rise. I expect Bank of England interest rate policy to remain cautious, as will that of the European Central Bank. I expect these financial conditions to continue in 2009, and probably 2010, as well. There is not all that much encouragement for optimism.

Regards,
Lord William Rees-Mogg
May 1, 2008

Fed Effects on Europe was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

“Those who oppose reform may get revolution.”

— John F. Kennedy, speaking of Latin America in 1962

THE EURO HIT FRESH ALL-TIME HIGHS VERSUS THE DOLLAR already this month — and we’re only one trading week in.

So might U.S. investors want to switch out of gold bullion ahead of Easter this year and move into the single currency, instead?

After all, the euro still pays 4.0% interest per year — a feat that dumb gold could never promise or achieve — and with eurozone inflation holding at a record 3.2% year on year in February, the European Central Bank (ECB) is clearly in no mood to start slashing rates now.

“Inflation will not slow as markedly as supposed,” warned the ECB’s Axel Weber last week. Colleague Juergen Stark added that he was “highly dissatisfied” with the current surge in the cost of living.

Tight money to come, right? Well, the gold market doesn’t buy it. Not at $1.52 to the dollar — with European manufacturing squeaking and Mediterranean house prices slipping:

The gold price for French, German, and Italian savers just keeps on rising, gaining for six of the last seven months.

Yet luxury carmaker BMW says it can’t bear a further “sustained rise” in the euro above $1.50 to the dollar. Last week, it cut 5,600 jobs.

Dassault Aviation in France says it can’t compete at this kind of exchange rate, either. “The natural step is to shift to the dollar zone [including most of Asia, remember] or low-cost areas as they have done in the car industry,” said CEO and Chairman Charles Edelstenne to Le Monde last week.

“This could include parts of our factory plant and some research tasks.”

Put another way, Europe has got the worst of both worlds right now — a high-value currency that’s crimping exports, and surging inflation at the very same time. So the European Central Bank needs to talk tough while doing nothing, hoping the inflationary and currency pressures don’t squash the economy both at once.

Good thing the old economies retain such political importance, as well. Right?

“To have an increase in the [voting] quotas of emerging countries — China, India, Brazil — is very difficult because the sum has to add up to 100%,” noted Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund in late February, “so some others must lose.

“The ones who are going to lose are mainly the European countries, and that is the reason why they may be reluctant [to vote for change].”

The debate goes far beyond the IMF, however, that brave remnant of postwar global planning. All top-level political groupings now face the problem of too many powers, with too much at stake, all wanting to be members of the top few spots in the oh-so-crucial club.

The G-7 group of industrialized nations, for instance, currently invites three eurozone nations to the party — Germany, France, and Italy — as well as Canada, Japan, and the United States.

The United Kingdom gets to tag along too, not least because it’s still vying with China for the No. 4 slot in world GDP, behind the U.S., Japan, and Germany. It also prints the world’s No. 3 reserve currency, the British pound. And my, but how it prints it!

Growing by 12.9% in January from a year earlier, the broad supply of pounds sterling has now been expanding at a two-decade record since March 2005.

No wonder the gold price in British pounds is surging alongside the U.K.’s trade and government deficits. But “When are we gonna get the real players, with the money, in the middle of these [G-7] debates?” asks Jack Welch, former head of General Electric. He was talking to Larry Summers, U.S. Treasury secretary at the tail end of the last Clinton presidency, on CNBC last week.

“It seems like some of our government institutions are living the last war — for example, the G-7. Four European economies, Canada, Japan, and you guys [the U.S. Treasury], all meet…but the money’s somewhere else.”

“Oh, you know how these things go, Jack,” replied Summers, former president of Harvard University and now a part-time hedge fund consultant in New York. “It’s much easier to get people in than it is to get other people out…

“You want to have a reasonably small group. We worked with the Canadians to set up the G-20 for exactly the reasons you give. And I think [U.S. Treasury] Secretary Paulson is to be commended for the effort he has put into having a regular financial dialogue with China on a bilateral basis.

“I think you’re going to see this kind of evolution. Look, if we want to address this issue of sovereign wealth funds — which I think is a concern, though it’s a concern that has to be kept in perspective — the way we’re going to do it is by having dialogue with the countries that, just as you say, have the money. Some of them are China, some of them are in the Middle East, and I think we do need to recognize more than we probably have before that the distribution of financial power and influence and capacity is pretty different from the distribution of the sort of political congeniality with U.S. interests across the board.

“That means we may need to have a somewhat different grouping for the foreign ministers and the finance ministers.”

Can political and financial power really be split into two different groups…with the United States at the head of both, choosing its allies here, but inviting a different clique of friends there?

Perhaps with Europe gnashing its teeth about the high euro, it’s actually time for the dollar itself to bounce, rallying from new all-time record lows on its trade-weighted index and forcing U.S. gold prices lower.

Sure — it might require higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve, rather than the campaign of monetary destruction begun by Ben Bernanke back in August. Or conversely, those new record lows in the world value of the U.S. dollar might help stoke U.S. export sales so fast that they revive the major Wall Street stock indexes and erase the last five months of losses.

No?

Should the dollar and Wall Street’s collapse continue, meanwhile, some kind of new monetary world order will only continue to look ever more likely. Russia is preparing to price and sell crude oil in rubles, for example, rather than dollars. The ruble might also be used as one means of payment on a forthcoming Iranian oil exchange in Tehran, according to Iran’s ambassador to Moscow last month.

But whatever comes, and no matter what happens to the price of gold, don’t expect the chocolate bunnies of today’s monetary order to vote for either Easter or a heat wave…let alone both at the same time.

Regards,
Adrian Ash
BullionVault
March 7, 2008

The Dollar’s Continued Fall was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

“Living in a credit era, we cannot go back to a currency era without massive upheavals.”

— Robert L. Smitley, Popular Financial Delusions (1933)

WHY DON’T WE JUST DO AWAY WITH all the different currencies of the world and settle on one single money to buy, sell, invest and light our cigars with?

Because as it is, the Babel we live in — where 143 different kinds of currency either change hands or act as a way of measuring prices around the globe — keeps finding itself in no end of trouble.

“The rupee rose on [Feb. 1],” reports Livemint, The Wall Street Journal’s Mumbai offering, “as investors bought the Indian unit for its higher yields after a hefty interest rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

“But concerns weighed that the Indian central bank would intervene against the local unit, as it is widely suspected of doing in recent months.”

“There was some suspected intervention against the Singapore dollar at 1.427,” a currency trader in the tiny Asian state told Reuters in January, “so I guess players are wary.” Across the Pacific, meanwhile, the Argentine peso has lost more than 10% of its value against the U.S. dollar over the last four years thanks to “continued central bank intervention,” says the newswire elsewhere.

And as the world’s stock markets tumbled last month, the central banks of the Philippines, Malaysia and Turkey are also rumored to have stepped into the open market, dumping their own currencies and buying the U.S. dollar in a bid to support it and thus keep their export economies cheap for foreign customers.

Put another way, as Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations said at a recent meeting (or so The Washington Post reports), “The United States is exporting inflation worldwide” by forcing these sovereign nations to print up mountains of their own currency with which to buy the ailing greenback.

Countries like China and the Middle Eastern petro-kingdoms peg their currencies to the dollar — the world’s No.1 reserve currency, and still top dog after all these years. So they “thus [peg themselves] to U.S. monetary policy” too.

And U.S. monetary policy, quite clearly, is inflationary right now. That makes monetary policy inflationary everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Beijing. Even those of us lucky enough to sit outside the “dollar zone” can expect rates to slide in tandem.

Slashing almost a third off the cost of borrowing dollars inside eight days — and then offering to lend U.S. banks $60 billion in 28-day loans every two weeks — makes for quite the game of “follow the leader,” don’t you think?

Ah, but over in the dozy spires of pan-global political daydreams, abolishing sovereign currencies and anointing one single money in their place would smooth the wheels of commerce and boost world GDP overnight. Apparently.

“Annual transaction costs of $400 billion [would] be eliminated,” reckons Morrison Bonpasse, editor of The Single Global Currency (2007 edition), published by Munich University. “Global currency imbalances will [also] be eliminated,” he adds, along with “all balance of payments problems…currency crises…currency speculation…and the need for foreign exchange reserves (with a current annual opportunity cost of approximately $470 billion).”

Indeed, “Worldwide interest rates will be lower than the current average due to the elimination of currency risk” — and you’ve just got to love cheaper money!

So what’s not to like? “National currencies and global markets simply do not mix,” wrote Benn Steil in the policy wonk’s favorite glossy, Foreign Affairs, last May.

“Together, they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today’s instability.”

Instability being a bad thing — the kind of thing that knocks the S&P lower by 7% inside one month, for instance — it should be abolished, right? The beautiful stability of Western Europe’s economies just goes to show how remarkable a single currency could prove:

“Spanish and Italian manufacturers are clearly struggling in the head winds of weaker global growth, the strong euro, high oil prices and eroding demand in domestic markets,” said Jacques Cailloux, economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London, to Dow Jones Newswires Feb. 1 after the eurozone’s Purchasing Managers’ Index for January showed a slight rise overall.

“Against this, French and German manufacturers continue to do well, at least for the time being, but German producers have failed to fully make up the pace lost last autumn.”

Why the disparity? According to most Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Greek politicians, the cost of borrowing euros is too high. According to the latest inflation data for the 14-nation currency zone, however, it’s still way too low.

“Annual inflation in the eurozone jumped to a new high of 3.2% in January, the European Union’s statistics bureau Eurostat estimated on Friday,” reports the China Daily.

“The figure, including new eurozone members Malta and Cyprus for the first time, was the highest since the single currency was introduced to world markets as an accounting currency in 1999. It rose from 3.1% in the previous two months and stayed well above the 2% ceiling preferred by the European Central Bank (ECB) for the fifth consecutive month.”

Spain’s minister of finance, Pedro Solbes, said Jan. 24 that “there’s significant debate” inside the European Central Bank about whether or not to cut interest rates as the global slowdown looms over Europe. But then again, he faces re-election in March — and no one seemed to mind too much about interest rates being too low during the Spanish real estate bubble that began bursting last year.

Property prices nearly tripled in Spain between 1997-2007, thanks to a wave of British expats in search of a perma-tan and the sudden collapse in borrowing costs that preceded the birth of the euro in 1999. Mortgage rates went from 11% in 1995 to below 6% and then 5% as the single currency delivered the hope of German-style monetary policy and interest rates.

Across the sea in Ireland, house prices trebled in just seven short years after the introduction of the euro. But not even a peak of just 4% in the eurozone’s cost of money could keep the bubble inflating forever.

Now “Spanish banks are issuing mortgage securities and asset-backed bonds on a massive scale to park at the European Central Bank,” reports the London Telegraph, “using them as collateral to raise money at favorable rates from the official credit window in Frankfurt.

“The rating agency Moody’s said lenders had issued a record €53 billion [$78 billion] of mortgage- and asset-backed bonds in the fourth quarter of 2007, yet almost none of the securities have actually been placed on the open market. Most have been sent directly to the ECB for use in ‘repo’ operations.”

So for all its tough talk on inflation, the European Central Bank is still feeding the growth of credit and money supplies in Europe. Any wonder the broad M3 money supply is swelling at a three-decade record rate? Any surprise that consumer price inflation is surging beyond the ECB’s grasp?

And does anyone really imagine this isn’t a problem?

“Living in a credit era,” wrote Robert L. Smitley in his 1933 classic, Popular Financial Delusions, “we cannot go back to a currency era without massive upheavals. The cause of the great boom was credit expansion to an abnormal degree — the same cause as that for all booms under a credit system.”

The world’s central bankers know this all too well. Few of them, if any, believe a return to “cash only” possible, let alone desirable. So if the world’s consumers and investors choose to shut down the credit markets — both as borrowers and lenders — and pile into cash instead, then the world’s central banks will just have to destroy cash in the hope of forcing a flight back into credit.

How else would you characterize a cut of 125 basis points in the rewards paid on dollars inside eight days?

The panic starting last August — a panic that closed the West’s mortgage markets almost entirely — can be beaten by central banks buying mortgage-backed bonds themselves if need be. The stock market panic of January — a panic that knocked almost one-tenth off the value of equities worldwide — can be reversed by historic cuts to interest rates and a fresh flood of short-term loans to the banks.

Or so the central banks think. But the panic they’re then causing as a direct result — a panic revealed by the surging gold price since August — might prove worse than the flight into cash that they’re fighting:

A complete loss of faith in all official currency.

Might that lead to the one single money that daydreaming economists think can cure the world’s evils? Whatever comes when the dust settles, you can be sure the world won’t turn to using gold coins again.

Yes, Ben Bernanke’s depression theories might be disputed — and yes, his current credit inflation panic looks absurd. But history would seem to make clear that during the 1930s deflation those nations that abandoned the gold standard soonest turned the corner the fastest and began to recover.

The “barbarous relic” of tying the supply of money to a real quantity of gold bullion can’t make a comeback for as long as “deflation” and “depression” are still blamed on gold hoarders.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t hoard a little real wealth in the meantime. You might want to consider it if you’re losing your faith in government money.

Regards,
Adrian Ash
BullionVault
February 5, 2008

The Global Effect of the U.S. Dollar was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

“Who suffers most from inflation? Who suffers most from rising prices? It’s the poor, not the rich. The rich can protect themselves from inflation; poor people can’t.”

— Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank (ECB)

THE FINANCIAL TIMES CHOSE JEAN-CLAUDE TRICHET — head of the European Central Bank (ECB) — as its 2007 Person of the Year.

OK, so Time magazine had to settle for Vladimir Putin — the former KGB spook now rehearsing his puppeteer skills at the Kremlin. But was the FT’s shortlist really that bad? Couldn’t Lindsay Lohan clear a space in her party schedule to claim the award instead?

At least the inebriated actress delivered as promised last year, denting only good taste in the process. Monsieur Trichet’s inflated celebrity, on the other hand, now threatens to cost the world dearly.

Trichet’s No.1 task as president of the ECB is supposed to be delivering “price stability” to the 320 million citizens of the eurozone (Malta and Greek-speaking Cyprus joined the fun on New Year’s Day).

Put another way, his 2% inflation target means €1.00 of living expenses today should cost no more than €1.02 by this time next year. But anyone shopping in euros last Christmas, however, found the cost of living 3.1% higher on average than in December 2006 — or so says the Eurostat agency.

Europe’s festive inflation outran even November’s seven-year record. It came close to undoing almost 14 years of inflation fighting by the ECB and its pre-euro ancestors. And things had been going so well too!

For 2007 as a whole, consumer price inflation in Europe averaged 2.14%. But curiously, that’s exactly the rate it hit in September, before racing higher as Christmas drew nigh. What changed in the summer of Trichet’s star year? “One of his strengths is his ability to manage a crisis — he enjoys that,” says Olivier Garnier, adviser to the ECB chief in his former life at the French Treasury in the early 1990s. And by golly, but Trichet got a crisis to relish this summer!

Relaxing in the sleepy French fishing port of Saint-Malo, Jean-Claude Trichet awoke one August morning to find “the first financial market crisis fought by BlackBerry from the beach” surging across the Atlantic toward him, gushes the Financial Times.

“As the ripple effects of the collapsing U.S. subprime mortgage market caused global finance to seize up, the ECB announced it would unilaterally pump in unlimited overnight liquidity: In the end, it added almost €95 billion ($136 billion, £69 billion)…

“Initial shock at this unexpectedly radical intervention gave way to admiration of [the ECB’s] steady hand,” the newspaper goes on, hardly able to contain its praise.

“As the drama unfolded, the ECB appeared to be setting the pace among central banks. In the ultimate compliment, the venerable U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England copied the tactics of an institution not yet 10 years old.”

Hurrah for Trichet! Three cheers for unlimited liquidity! Hosing Paris and Frankfurt with overnight loans, Monsieur Trichet secured his place in history as “one of the few to emerge from the turmoil with his reputation enhanced,” the FT declares. He certainly helped save the blushes of BNP Paribas, proximate cause of the interbank lending panic when it suspended three investment funds on Aug. 9 after the “complete evaporation of liquidity” in the subprime U.S. mortgage bond market.

But our brave little pompier actually hosed so much cash into Europe’s money market, he’s since felt the need to mop up the puddle 14 times in the last 14 weeks, draining a total of €390 billion in Christmas week alone.

In the 456 weeks between the ECB’s birth and October, by contrast, the bank drained “excess” liquidity from Europe’s money market only a total of 21 times, offering government bonds in exchange for cash.

It’s a pity, in fact, that Monsieur Trichet didn’t think to take a couple of euros out of the market before last summer’s turmoil began…

Under the European Bank’s first president, Wim Duisenberg, the ECB’s open-market liquidity auctions averaged €64.6 billion. Since “Tricky” Trichet took over on Nov. 1, 2003, that’s more than trebled to €204 billion.

Indeed, our chart seems to show how the real hosing came to end when the world’s money markets froze back in August. But the number of ECB auctions helped pick up the pace, reaching 7.8 on average per month, versus 5.5 averaged per month during the preceding eight years. The average value, meanwhile, has risen to €136 billion, from €130 billion between 1999-2007.

Was this flood of short-term liquidity really needed to help save the world’s financial system? Funnily enough, said Trichet himself to the European Parliament on Dec. 19, “There has been little evidence that the financial market turbulence since early August 2007 has strongly influenced the dynamics of broad money and credit aggregates.

“Indeed, the expansion of loans to households and nonfinancial corporations has remained robust, which may suggest that the supply of credit has not been impaired.”

No fooling, Jean-Claude!

Controlling growth of the money supply is supposed to make up one half of the ECB’s policy tool kit. Indeed, capping the number of monetary units in circulation used to be the “first pillar” of the grand anti-inflation stance it adopted at the dawn of Christendom’s third millennium.

But the idea of actually using Bundesbank-style discipline to deliver German-style low inflation soon lost out to watching “broad economic data” instead. Now playing second fiddle to what Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times tellingly calls “the real-world view” of economic growth, consumer prices, and trade-weighted exchange rates, the ECB’s initial money-supply target — under which the broad M3 measure of liquidity would grow by no more than 4.5% per year — has quietly slipped from the ECB’s speeches, press releases, and official statements.

Unloved and unmentioned, it’s come to look like some ridiculous ex-spouse…still bent on sending a Valentine’s card each year but using his left hand to scrawl “Guess who…?” Since the euro became flesh at the start of 2000, however, actual growth in Western Europe’s money supply has outpaced the “reference value” by more than one-third. It met or fell below that target for barely 10 months.

And right now, the quantity of euros in circulation — both physical and digital — is growing at a pace 2 1/2 times faster than the ECB’s initial prescription, taking the eurozone back to the runaway credit inflation of the late 1970s.

No wonder, then, that “At a global level, the risks for [price] inflation are on the upside,” as Monsieur Trichet told the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, on Jan. 7.

No wonder, either, that the gold price in euros has exploded as a result. The citizens of France, Germany, and Italy saw the gold market scoot higher toward €600 per ounce as Monsieur Trichet’s year of 2007 reached its end.

Will his policies at the ECB cap inflation — and stall the surging value of gold prices — in 2008? Here at BullionVault, we think a fireman hosing a burning house with kerosene would have a greater chance of saving the furniture.

“There is a danger of second-round effects on headline inflation,” as the FT’s Person of the Year told the BIS. Perhaps he was thinking of Berthold Huber — head of Germany’s IG Metall union — promising his members “a mega year” for pay awards, starting with demands for an 8% increase in the steel sector.

Or maybe Jean-Claude Trichet was thinking of the six public sector unions now threatening to strike over higher wages and pensions in his homeland, France…or the failure of above-inflation pay awards in Italy’s public sector to prevent fresh strikes this month…or maybe the current wage talks in Spain, where annual pay awards are still linked to inflation — which is currently running at 4.1% from this time last year.

In Germany, even the very poorest workers — those who “suffer most from inflation,” according to Trichet himself in an interview with EuroNews last year — have come to expect an inflation-beating pay raise this year. The Social Democratic Party is pushing for a minimum wage of €7.50 per hour (some $11) in the world’s third largest single economy. Sharing power with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in her “grand coalition,” the SDP might just force the issue too.

Several big unions, however, are pushing for an even greater “second-round effect” of the ECB’s failed inflation busting, worth a massive €11 per hour (more than $16).

In short, “There is no room for complacency [on inflation],” as Monsieur Trichet, a former member of France’s militant PSU party, told his audience in Basel. But what else beyond complacency would explain the surging M3 money supply…now growing fast enough to match the surging rate of monetary expansion in the United States and not far behind the wanton inflation of Britain and China?

It’s the poor — and the poor middle classes, especially pensioners on fixed incomes — who pay most when money loses its value. Top earners, led by Europe’s hottest financial hotshots in Frankfurt and La Defense, can look after themselves.

Not least with a flood of central bank money so great, it needs mopping up by the very firemen themselves!

So for all the good he’s done defending the value of euros, Trichet may seem a weird choice for 2007 Person of the Year. But for saying one thing and doing another…and for helping the forces of inflation to mass, even as he claimed to stand firm against them…he has corralled the spirit of our financial age better than even Ben Bernanke at the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Jean-Claude Trichet, we salute you. Truly, you are the man of the moment!

Regards,
Adrian Ash
January 23, 2008
BullionVault

Euros, Gold and the FT’s Person of the Year was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder