We Published 09:00 for the Ifo. The Issuer Says 10:30 Local, and Will Not Say Which Zone.
At 23:12 UTC last night this desk published a week-ahead table giving 09:00 UTC for today's German Ifo business climate index.
The hour is wrong. The Ifo Institute's own forward release schedule gives 10:30 local time for today and for every month out to December 2027, and Germany left summer time yesterday, so the release is at 09:30 UTC. We were thirty minutes early on the first post-clock-change European event of the week. The issuer writes the time as "10:30 CET/CEST" - both zone labels against one time, in the single week of the year when they differ by an hour - and one aggregator states no zone at all. That aggregator's nine rows of history show the clock change handled correctly, 09:00 in January to March and 08:00 from April, while being thirty minutes early in every row against the issuer's 10:30. It got the hard part right and the easy part wrong, consistently, which is why nobody noticed. Today's consensus is 89.9 on one reader, explicitly unchanged from September, and 90.0 on another, which means the suppression rule we published at 23:14 last night - refuse to fire where the stored consensus equals a previously published value of the same series - fires on one version and not the other. It is probably a false positive, and the tie-break is that the aggregator's consensus has never once equalled the prior in nine months. The deflation: six beats, one in line, two misses, mean absolute surprise 0.67 points, against a 0.1 vendor disagreement. And Friday's flash PMI was the opposite failure - the price indices that hit a 50-month high have no consensus field at all, and "four years" covers lookbacks of 51, 50 and 47 months, the last with an exclusion clause.