Tag Archives: Spurious correlation

The Fed and the ECB: “Spurious Bedfellows”

Some days ago, I wrote about an interesting post by Gavin Davies on his Financial Times blog, where he argued that European monetary policy, through the actions of the German Bundesbank and now the European Central Bank, follows the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions with some delay. An observation leading him to label the FED and ECB “strange bedfellows”. The data behind the argument is seen in the following figure: The Federal Reserve’s policy intentions are throughout the period measured by the target value for the Federal Funds Rate (formally, this time series is discontinued as of December 2008, and I show the upper value of the 0-0.25% target … Continue reading

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