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Mario Draghi is back.
Just a few short months ago, the consensus seemed to be Europe was about to fall into a Japan-style lost decade of inflation, but with higher unemployment and the extra nationalist tension.
Nobody was sure that the European Central Bank (ECB) chief could do anything about it — he was facing crippling opposition within his own board, and from some of the governments in the eurozone.
I admit that I fell into that camp of people — I thought more QE was a good idea but I didn't think Draghi either had the desire or the support to really do "what it takes."
At the time, all analysts seemed to talk about was the fact that the ECB couldn't do very much (if it was done at all) — it would not be "a panacea", "a silver bullet" or "a magic wand." Of course, nobody had suggested it would be.
And as recently as December, some people even suggested Draghi was about to flee the horrors of the European Central Bank (ECB) and become President of Italy.
But Draghi has a lot of reasons to be cheerful now. Even the protester who burst into the ECB and showered him in confetti shouldn't dampen his spirits.
For starters, he won the internal battle over the ECB's QE programme. It was about twice as large as analysts generally expected. And opposition to the scheme has evaporated, and even German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble seems to have begrudgingly conceded that the programme seems to be going well.
Pretty much every indicator is looking up at the moment: Consumption is particularly explosive at the moment, with car sales up by 13% in the last year, led by a 40% boom in Spain.
It's hard to disentangle the onset of QE from the plunge in oil prices, but inflation expectations have now stopped tumbling.

Oxord Economics
Mario Draghi is back.
Just a few short months ago, the consensus seemed to be Europe was about to fall into a Japan-style lost decade of inflation, but with higher unemployment and the extra nationalist tension.
Nobody was sure that the European Central Bank (ECB) chief could do anything about it — he was facing crippling opposition within his own board, and from some of the governments in the eurozone.
I admit that I fell into that camp of people — I thought more QE was a good idea but I didn't think Draghi either had the desire or the support to really do "what it takes."
At the time, all analysts seemed to talk about was the fact that the ECB couldn't do very much (if it was done at all) — it would not be "a panacea", "a silver bullet" or "a magic wand." Of course, nobody had suggested it would be.
And as recently as December, some people even suggested Draghi was about to flee the horrors of the European Central Bank (ECB) and become President of Italy.
But Draghi has a lot of reasons to be cheerful now. Even the protester who burst into the ECB and showered him in confetti shouldn't dampen his spirits.
For starters, he won the internal battle over the ECB's QE programme. It was about twice as large as analysts generally expected. And opposition to the scheme has evaporated, and even German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble seems to have begrudgingly conceded that the programme seems to be going well.
Pretty much every indicator is looking up at the moment: Consumption is particularly explosive at the moment, with car sales up by 13% in the last year, led by a 40% boom in Spain.
It's hard to disentangle the onset of QE from the plunge in oil prices, but inflation expectations have now stopped tumbling.
Oxord Economics