By publicly berating governments for their lack of fiscal discipline, the European Central Bank is exceeding its already wide-ranging remit, argues Wolfgang Munchau in a hard-hitting opinion piece in the Financial Times.
He goes on to say that "it [the ECB] does not act like a central bank but like the eurozone's superior economic authority. The obsession with fiscal policy distracts from its own responsibilities".
The other three serious problems he identifies are:
1) Inflexibility with regard to interest rates - "the ECB has not responded adequately to the economic downturn in the eurozone and has been persistently too optimistic about economic growth. It should have cut interest rates towards the end of 2003 by half of a percentage point when economic growth declined sharply."
2) A reluctance to admit and correct mistakes plus a mistaken focus on credibility - "the choice of an asymmetric inflation target was a mistake. The ECB has defended its absurd 'close-to, but below, 2 per cent' target many times, even though there exists no intellectual support in economic literature for it. Changing it to a more sensible symmetric target of 2 per cent, with a margin of error on either side, would have greatly improved its operational flexibility. But it would have involved a loss of face. I wonder whether ECB officials confuse the credibility of their policy with their own personal credibility."
3) Excessive independence. "There is a significant body of economic literature supporting the idea of central bank independence. The ECB's independence, however, exceeds that of other central banks by a wide margin [...] The ECB sets its own target, pursues its own policies and monitors compliance. It is subject to no controls."
"Unlike the ECB, it [the Federal Reserve] has never defined an explicit inflation target. It took the view - rightly in my opinion - that such a target would have to be imposed by politicians, not central bankers. It never even occurred to the ECB's board to consult formally with finance ministers whether to set a formal target, and if so, at what level."
He says that none of these points should detract from the need for structural reforms in labour, product and financial markets but that it is important to recognise that the eurozone has also a big macroeconomic problem.
Munchau concludes by saying that Europe does not need to abandon the idea of price stability and central bank independence but needs to make them work to the benefit of the economy.
