The charts that matter: are we there yet?

Markets rallied in a week when the world's central banks unleashed a torrent of newly-printed money. John Stepek looks at what's happened to the charts that matter most to the global economy.

Welcome back.

It’s been another historic week (just for a change). The Federal Reserve – America’s central bank – started the week by promising that it would buy just about anything from anyone, then on Thursday, the European Central Bank said it would also buy anything, up to and including Italian government debt, in order to prop up the eurozone.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.