I’m going to repeat myself until this gets through. We could be here a while

Before we get into this it might be worth opening the transcript of Thursday’s ECB presser and Q&A with Mario Draghi and doing a “ctrl+f” for the phrase “structural reform”.

TL;DR: the answer is 19. (h/t to Aurelija Augulyte). There 15 mentions in August, and 5 in July.

But what’s a central banker to do? As Marc Ostwald at Monument says, “one cannot stress enough that believing that France and Italy will deliver meaningful (and indeed ‘growth friendly) reforms is an act of faith, for which there is little or no historical precedent.”