blockquote“Cutting rates by 50 basis points here and there is not going really diminish the appeal of the ruble,” said Manik Narain, an emerging markets strategist at Standard Chartered Bank Plc in London. “In terms of nominal interest rates Russia (at 9% as of 24 November) is still offering the highest yields in the emerging market space and in an environment where oil prices are remaining relatively well supported we think that the ruble will continue to be seen as an attractive way to position for global recovery,” /blockquotepbr /The world's central banks are having a hard time of it these days, having just gotten through the worst banking and financial crisis in living memory they now face a growing dilema between continuing to give support to the developed economies (which are yet to recover from those early hammer blows) and the danger of creating fresh global asset price bubbles ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /“For Austria, the actual crisis is yet to come. The decline of the eastern European economy will hit Austria in 2009".br /Peter Eigner, Professor of economic history at the University of Vienna”br /br /br /The yield difference, or spread, between 10-year Austrian securities and benchmark German bunds has been rising substantially of late, and hit 137 points on Feb. 18, the widest yet recorded (see chart below). At the same time Austria now has a higher default risk than those Mediterranean "laggards" Italy, Portugal and Spain, at least according to credit-default swap prices as quoted by CMA Datavision. Austrian swaps were trading at 253.3 basis points on March 3, compared with 17.5 points 12 months ago. That means it costs 253,300 euros a year to protect 10 million euros from default for five years. br /br /br /a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SbFfRtpHzcI/AAAAAAAAM9E/eiB4kvwG70A/s1600-h/austria+bund.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5310130193561013698" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px ...