•/Chronoillogical. Stanley Fischer’s ambiguous timeline on US interest rates at a CNN-sponsored debate brought to mind the words of the poet Carl Sandburg, who once confessed: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way”. In the same vein, the US Federal Reserve vice-chair empathised with those seeking clarity on Washington’s precise ambitions for tighter monetary policy, admitting: “We ourselves don’t know. It all depends on the data.” He then muddied the waters further, venturing that while a reasonable guess might be “sometime in the middle of the year”, the Fed would “do things differently” if the data changed.
•/Temper, temper. At the same lively debate, Richard Quest had a go at Jeroen Dijsselbloem. Bristling at the CNN presenter’s insistent needling over the dearth of eurozone growth, the Eurogroup president hit back. “How can anyone know what is enough?” Dijsselbloem snapped, noting that some of the ECB’s promised accommodative monetary measures had not even been implemented.
•/Can buy me love. Spotted at Dulles Airport: the outgoing chairman of French super-lender BNP Paribas Baudouin Prot being whisked through the VIP immigration lane with his chief executive, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. Never mind that the hoi polloi were forced to queue for hours, or that the French pair arrived on a private jet, refreshed and in the mood for some quality conference face-time. Clearly, after BNPP coughed up a record $8.9bn fine to the US for breaking sanctions in Sudan, Iran and Cuba, all is forgiven.
•/That sinking feeling. Tuvalu, a pocket handkerchief-sized island state, may be rapidly sinking beneath the Pacific waves as sea levels rise, but that hasn’t stopped finance minister Maatia Toafa extolling the virtues of his country. His home country was so peaceful, you can “spend all night lying on the runway of the airport watching the moon and the stars and no one bothers you” Toafa told Out Of The Woods. Whether the minister has sought al-fresco solace under the gaze of the heavens was unclear, given that he heads home every day at 4pm. What Tuvalu would give for some global cooling.
•/Ties that bind. Ilan Goldfajn was put in an indelicate situation when quizzed about the Brazilian presidential elections at a panel on Latin American growth. Who would win the second round run-off between left wing incumbent Dilma Rousseff and her business-friendly opponent Aécio Neves? The portly Goldfajn, chief economist of Itaú Unibanco, Brazil’s largest bank, said his view depended on whether his tie happened to hang to the left or the right. A short silence was broken by Laura Alfaro, Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, who noted acerbically: “Your tie hangs to the left.” So it’s official: four more years of Rousseff.