Last night I was lucky to be invited to an evening with ECB VP Vitor Constancio, the Fed's Christine Cumming and other distinguished guests like former BOE deputy governor, Sir John Gieve. Unfortunately Yanis Varoufakis was due to attend but apparently was busy elsewhere. I couldn't imagine what would have kept him away ;-)
As you can imagine most of the panel questions were directed at Constancio and although he played it from the party line, there were a couple of comments that highlighted the frailty of the ECB that I wanted to re-highlight today. Both Constancio and Cumming acknowledged that for all the resolutions and backstops put in place in the banking sector, there would be no saving us from a systemic bank failure.
Another interesting comment from Constancio was that the ECB are still verifying whether they can actually buy large enough amounts of bonds to make fulfil QE and indeed whether large holders of government debt would in fact be prepared to sell it to them.
It's a potential fly in the ointment to accomplishing the QE program.
It was a very enjoyable evening and as it was a work event I even managed to put my wine glass down to get some comments from Constancio out to Eamonn as they happened.
A quick hello to some of the wonderful people I met
Markus Krebsz, Chief Risk officer at Local Capital Finance
Brian Caplen, Editor at The Banker
Rowan Bosworth-Davies, Financial Crime consultant
Chris Scicluna, Head of economic research at Daiwa Capital Markets
Some very interesting conversations, particularly with Mr Bosworth-Davies who has many many years under his belt in his field
A big thank you to Christopher Rogers at the Institute of Regulation and Risk who hosted the event at the historical Gibson Hall near Liverpool St.
