Unlike the Fed, the ECB's Q€ program is far more opaque, far more ad-hoc, and far more improvised (and at the rate it is soaking up already negligible collateral as JPM explained yesterday [7], soon to be far more abbreviated). In fact, without a daily POMO preview (such as what the Fed used to provide) nobody has any idea what is going or what the ECB will be buying until a week after the fact. Today, for the first time, the ECB provided the bare minimum data on its "Public sector purchase program" i.e., how much debt it had purchased in the first week of the ECB's QE [8]. The answer: only €9.8 billion.
CBSPP3, ABSPP and PSPP cum. settled purchases as at 13/03/2015: 56,947 mln, 3,754 mln & 9,751 mln respectively. Website update to follow.
— ECB (@ecb) March 16, 2015 [9]
[10]
This being the central bank which refused to respond to a Bloomberg FOIA seeking to uncover [11]what the ECB knew when, about Goldman's Greek FX swaps, don't expect any additional data breakdown, such as which CUSIPs the ECB has purchased, or which nations benefitted the most from the ECB's money printing generosity. All of that information may lead to the heads of ordinary European peasants exploding, and who can blame the ECB. After all this comes from a central bank servicing a current Commissioner [12]who said "there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties" and whose former Commissioner said "democratic governments are often wrong. If you trust them too much they make bad decisions."
In fact, it is best to not give any information to these "democratic governments" and their constituent peasantry at all. Because a few central-planning BIS bankers always know best.
Snyde comments about Europe's democratic union aside, the take home from the above table, and why we said "only", is that a mere €9.8 billion in bond purchases was enough to break the European bond market, to expose the complete lack of collateral and in the process soak up all available liquidity (as explained before here [7]).
So less than €10 billion down, €1.1 trillion to go, and the ECB hopes to have something resembling a bond market left afterwards?
Good luck.
