Asking the Right Questions
The real story of the week came from the European Central Bank (ECB). On Monday evening, Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, gave a speech at an invitation-only conference, attended by hedge fund managers, where he informed guests that the ECB would be “frontloading its purchases activity in May and June”, for liquidity reasons.
The Euro declined at the time of his remarks, but the big move was saved for the next day when the speech was publicly released, raising question marks over the ECB’s release of market sensitive information. The ECB have blamed this delay in public dissemination on an “internal procedure error”. For me, it just evokes a memory of one of Gordon Gekko’s lines, from the iconic movie Wall Street, “If you’re not inside, you’re outside!”