Falcons fly to Tokyo. After New York, the Bundesbank decided to open a representative office in the Japanese capital to manage part of its foreign currency reserves directly from the Asian financial markets (at the end of 2011 they were 29,4 billion euros, mainly in dollars, plus 132,9 22,3 billion in gold and 184,6 billion in credits from the IMF for a total reserve of XNUMX billion).
"Based in the Tokyo representative office - announced the Bundesbank - we will open a trading office from next September". The goal is to buy assets denominated in Asia-Pacific currencies, starting first in yen and Australian dollar-denominated securities with the option to later expand to include the yuan, won and Southeast Asian currencies. In short, more and more Asia in Buba's portfolio. Instead, it has increasingly raised the barricades against the debts of the peripheral countries of the Eurozone, especially Italy and Spain, opposing any intervention by Mario Draghi's ECB in favor of the government bonds of these countries.
Not without a hint of hypocrisy: in 1975 the Bundesbank bought German debt securities and also securities linked to German post and telecom, for a value equivalent to 1% of West German GDP. The episode was recalled in recent days by the French analysts of Bnp Paribas and triggered the curt response of the research office of the German Commerzbank: "While in that period the Bundesbank wanted to support the economy (in a similar way to what it is doing today the Fed), the ECB is trying to prevent some countries from going bankrupt”, recalling that the ECB instead will be forced to intervene if politicians do not intervene, just as Greece's recent plans are demonstrating…Exit Strategy? None available".
Beyond the technicalities, it does not go unnoticed that today at the helm of the Bundesbank, which has just celebrated its 55th anniversary, there is the most hawkish hawk of all beyond all predictions: Jens Weidmann, economist, adviser from 2006 to 2011 by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yes, because when he was named, many had doubts. And not so much, as the Financial Times recalled a few days ago, because Weidman, at 44 the youngest president of the Buba, with a calm voice that is never angry, did not represent the grizzled image of his predecessors. Rather because, as one of the men closest to the chancellor in the last 5 years, the fear was that he might not be able to keep a firm grip on the autonomy of the institution that embodies German monetary discipline.
But today, with his firm opposition to Draghi's line, he has changed many minds. Not only that, Weidmann has turned into Angela Merkel's Thomas Becket, to use another happy comparison by Quentin Peel of the Financial Times. Already because, after Draghi's London speech (The ECB is ready to do everything for the euro, within its mandate, including the aim of keeping the monetary policy transmission channel in force, he supported in summary), while from Berlin the government hastened to reaffirm its support for Draghi, from the Buba in Frankfurt the "niet" and the word "mandate" echoed ever more strongly and distinctly.
“The question – writes Peel from Berlin – is whether the man put there by Angela Merkel suddenly turned into her Thomas Becket, who was made archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century by King Henry II to curb the power of the Church and instead he has become its greatest defender, a thorn in the side of the Monarchy”.
