Smug and self-satisfied Trichet heads for St Malo.

The head of the ECB announced that euro interest rates will be held at 1% during a news conference today, while boasting of the ECB's eleven year record in keeping inflation down in accordance with the bank's mission. He repeatedly boasted of the credit soon to be earned by the ECB for its recent actions! The silver tongued and similarly white-haired manipulator of markets, amongst whose many disgraceful battle honours can be numbered the Credit Lyonnaise collapse and the european Exchange Rate Mechanism fiasco, has neatly bluffed the markets, so that like all good eurocrats he can depart for his lengthy undeserved summer vacation, secure in the knowledge that the fog he has dispersed will remain mostly impenetrable until well after his return to Frankfurt. Where has all the dodgy debt once held by Eurozone banks disappeared? Wait until the fouth quarter of this year and all surely by then must begin to become clear! Even ex-P.M., Gordon Brown, by his almost complete disappearance from view, must finally be suspecting that his actions were not as sound nor sensible as he so often maintained! Trichet boasting of the ECB's achievement in maintaining the best price stability since WWII over the past eleven years, reminds me very much of the demented Prime Minister Brown, as he slitheringly repeats that the mostly likely next stage will be further, albeit less robust second semester growth, more likely IMO, will be a Weimar style hyperinflation, or the closed border negative growth, siege economy wished upon the EU by Trichet's countryman President Sarkozy with his anti-parliamentary plans for pan-European Economic Governance. St Malo is a great holiday destination in the hot summer month of August. I am glad I have no plans to visit there this year, however, and I hope the same is true for the Frankfurt financial press corps forced to listen to this propaganda on a monthly basis.