After sandbagging the Fed back in January by not giving them a heads-up on the Jerome Kervial rogue trader incident, Jean-Claude Trichet now describes cooperation between central banks as “intimate”. (Some would describe the ECB failure to inform the Fed, which cut rates 75 bp in the wake of the stock market slide while US markets were closed for Martin Luther King’s birthday as a sort of forced intimacy, if you get my drift. )

The rest of Trichet’s talk at the Economics Club of New York is pretty much boilerplate.

Markets are fairly quiet for a change though equities are rebounding again, now up 112 points after absorbing some profit-taking this morning.