Energy price falls spark drop in German and Spanish inflation – Headline pressures ease but investors bet ECB will have to raise interest rates in May.
Some members of the governing council have called for the bank to adopt a more cautious approach after raising interest rates by half a percentage point this month.
The turmoil in the banking sector has also opened up the prospect of a potential credit crunch that could slam the brakes on both inflation and growth in the coming months.
That means overdraft credit. You know, when money is withdrawn from your bank account and the available balance goes below zero?
Sure comes in handy. Take this lady here. Please. She glanced at her banking app during breakfast one morning and was rather surprised to discover that the grocery store chain Rewe had just booked 8,590,000,000.42 euros from her account – with a friendly “Rewe says thanks!”
After some quick calculations she realized that a mistake had been made. Accidents will happen, folks.
Bank zieht Frau vermeintlich acht Milliarden Euro ab.
Like, duh. Because they’re the ones who have it all.
But the real point isn’t that Germans love cash. It’s that—for the same historical reasons—they loathe debt. (Armchair anthropologists have also long noted that German word for debt—Schulden—comes from the word for guilt, Schuld.)…
In other words, the German tendency to settle up in cash undeniably reflects the fact that for much of the last century, Germany has been either on the brink of, in the midst of, or struggling to recover from, disaster. And traumas like that are bound to leave, if you’ll excuse the pun, a mark.
Observing Hermann 