From the ports of Los Angeles to the cornfields of Iowa, the U.S.’s international trade policy is a force that shapes the lives of every American. With the presidential election looming in November 2024, discussing trade policy isn’t just an academic exercise – it’s a civic responsibility.
From the ports of Los Angeles to the cornfields of Iowa, the U.S.’s international trade policy is a force that shapes the lives of every American. With the presidential election looming in November 2024, discussing trade policy isn’t just an academic exercise – it’s a civic responsibility.
This box presents newly released data on the activities of special-purpose entities (SPEs) in the external sector of the euro area. It shows that SPEs make a significant contribution to cross-border financial linkages. Overall, SPEs account for around a third of euro area foreign direct investment positions and more than 10% of total euro area cross-border financial linkages. Their importance varies substantially across countries. Although SPEs inflate the gross external positions of the euro area, their impact on the net international investment position is limited.
This box analyses the revisions in policy rate path expectations observed in the Survey of Monetary Analysts (SMA) and identifies key drivers of these revisions. Amid the interest rate hikes of 2022 and 2023, financial markets and analysts made frequent and sizeable adjustments to their expectations for ECB policy rate levels. SMA participants’ macroeconomic expectations, particularly changes regarding headline inflation and GDP growth, played a significant role in shaping revisions to expectations for deposit facility rate (DFR) levels, especially during the surge in inflation.
In recent years rising oil prices have often coincided with a strengthening of the US dollar. A positive correlation means that oil imports priced in local currencies become more expensive for oil importers such as the euro area, adding to inflation dynamics. Historically, there has been no systematic co-movement between oil prices and the US dollar. However, recent studies suggest that a positive correlation might have become the new normal since the United States became a significant oil exporter.
Following a series of analyses on the accuracy of Eurosystem/ECB staff projections for inflation in recent years, this box shifts the focus to staff projections for growth. It shows that since 2022, the growth projections have been very reliable in the very short term but have tended to be too optimistic over one-year horizons. Private consumption and, to a lesser extent, investment, have tended to disappoint, due in part to monetary policy being tighter than initially assumed and uncertainty about its economic impact.
The Bank's Court of Directors acts as a unitary board, setting the organisation's strategy and budget and taking key decisions on resourcing and appointments. Required to meet a minimum seven times per year, it has five executive members from the Bank and up to nine non-executive members.
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