ECB purchases of govt bonds for last week amounted to EUR 4 billion,
matching previous week and bringing total to EUR 55 billion:
Week Purchases Total
1 16.5 16.5
2 10.0 26.5
3 8.5 35.0
4 5.5 40.5
5 6.5 47.0
6 4.0 51.0
7 4.0 55.0
That’s a lot of greek bonds, presumably the ECB is buying enough to support rates sufficiently so they can refi themselves.
Here
is the link to the Greek CB BS as of end March
Here
is the link to the Greek CB BS as of end May
Assets on BS have grown by almost 30B over these 60 days (I believe this is in excess of 10% Greece GDP, US $1.4T+ equivalent)…
perhaps some of this growth is the Greek Govt bonds.
I might try to leave it to Ramanan to try to id if/where their Govt bonds may have landed on the Greek CB BS. Perhaps the the Greek CB may just be buying the Greek Govt Bonds on “behalf” of the ECB.
Resp,
PS
Here
also is end of Jan 2010….So it looks like the BS is really growing. Will have to wait a few weeks to see what happened in June.
Matt,
Its impossible to figure out the government bonds. Damn. The big change seems to be lending to the credit institutions
Item 5 in assets
“Lending to euro area credit institutions related to monetary policy operations denominated in euro”
89,433,400,000 in May versus 66,994,871,950 in March.
Thats the MRO and the LTRO, not surprising because of bank troubles.
Item 7 seems relevant.
http://www.ecb.int/press/pr/wfs/2010/html/fs100629.en.html
is the combined balanced sheet, latest.
Yes typically one would expect the NCBs to buy the government bonds. In fact when they started, the Bank of Finland said that all NCBs have started buying which means that the NCBs were buying.
Quite possible that once the NCBs buy, the ECB buys it from them.
Item 7 in Assets seems to be the important one.
Here’s a guide to the items in the balance sheet
http://www.ecb.int/ecb/legal/pdf/l_20220090804en00650081.pdf
Given the exceptional nature of the asset purchases, it only makes sense to me that they would be done directly for the books of the ECB (which is not the booking point for regular monetary policy). It is still possible however that the NCB’s excute on behalf of the ECB.