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The ECB's perfect nightmare
From robinjbrooks.substack.com
The ECB has a big problem. Its main tool to cap yields of high-debt countries - Italy, Spain and increasingly France - is the transmission protection instrument (TPI), which was introduced in July 2022 to prevent excessive widening in the spread of these countries over Germany. However, the ECB is now running into a version of Goodhart’s law - “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure“ - because the global rise in long-term interest rates is driving up yields for Italy, Spain and France, even as their spreads remain tight. This isn’t a scenario in which the TPI can conceivably be ... (full story)