From Overseas Press

What more can a banker want?

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-05-04 10:53

The US economy is strengthening, businesses are spending, and companies are starting to hire again.

In Europe, manufacturing is picking up, the jobless rate is holding steady, and retail sales probably flipped back into positive territory in March after a February slump.

What more could the head of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, want to convince them that it is safe to start lifting benchmark interest rates from record lows?

For starters, resolving Greece's debt troubles and assuring that fiscal strains won't be allowed to destabilise larger European economies such as Spain would help to neutralise the latest source of global financial unrest.

Some re-assurance may come this week as European leaders and the International Monetary Fund race to finalise a Greek aid package expected to be worth as much as $160bn.

That probably won't be enough to embolden Trichet when the ECB holds its policy-setting meeting on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters see virtually no chance that the ECB will hike its benchmark interest rate from the current 1percent, where its stood since May 2009.

Of more interest is how Trichet responds to questions about the ECB's role in stabilizing Greece. ECB Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said talk of the central bank providing more liquidity or buying government bonds was "just speculation."

Even if Greece's debt troubles are cleaned up quickly, most other advanced economies – particularly in Europe – are shouldering heavy fiscal burdens as well. Restoring debt to sustainable levels will likely slow growth, giving central bankers another reason for caution.

"Heavy-duty fiscal medicine is rapidly coming Europe's way, and well beyond Greece. This will keep growth in Europe in the slowest lane, with implications far and wide," said Douglas Porter, an economist with BMO Capital Markets in Toronto.

"The lesson from the Asian crisis in the late 1990s and the financial crisis a decade later is that real trauma in seemingly minor markets can quickly cascade around the globe."

For the US, which has its own fiscal cleanup project looming, Greece's impact has been limited to some stock market volatility, a jump in the value of the dollar against the euro, and a decline in Treasury debt yields as investors looked for safer havens.

Greece's repercussions, so far, have amounted to nothing more than a "gentle cross breeze for the near-term outlook here," said Citigroup economist Robert DiClemente.