The European Central Bank announces its next monetary policy decision at 1:30pm today, and here’s hoping it’s a good one.
The eurozone is by no means fixed, and as Alphaville‘s Izabella Kaminska points out:
The ECB’s accomodative policy has failed to make an impact due to a broken transmission mechanism. Under its own mandates, this leaves the ECB open to the use of unconventional tactics to get it going again.
What sort of unconventional tactics? Well, the expected plan looks to be to begin primary debt purchases – the ECB will start to buy debt directly from the European Stability Mechanism (the organisation in charge of the eurozone bailouts).
But the really worrying possibility in today’s announcement is highlighted by Slate‘s Matt Yglesias:
Here’s Philipp Rösler, Vice-Chancellor of Germany and Economy Minister, offering the clearest account yet of how European monetary policy has gone so far off the rails:
“If you take away the interest rate pressure on individual states, you also take away the pressure for them to reform.”
The view here is that because countries ought to pursue good pro-growth structural policies, central banks ought to create unfavorable monetary conditions as a way of pressuring countries to pursue structural reforms.
Yglesias points out that this tactic makes it impossible to tell which structural reforms have actually worked, but the other massively damaging aspect is what it does to the democratic legitimacy of the Bank. They are using their one tool, not to improve the economy of the eurozone, but to cajole elected governments into doing things they wouldn’t do otherwise. It’s the sort of thing that makes a person take Nigel Farage seriously.
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