Re: Re: [Pen-l] Downturn Accelerates As It Circles The Globe

[Laurent GUERBY <laurent@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 09:00 -0800, Jim Devine wrote:
> Robert Gassler wrote:
> > [EU]  Monetary policy is of course independent of everyone except the bankers, though not I think as explicitly as in the US.<
> 
> isn't the European Central Bank in many ways a reincarnation of the
> German Central Bank, which saw inflation as the only sin?

ECB has many missions given by its founding treaty, including:

http://www.ecb.int/ecb/orga/tasks/html/financial-stability.en.html
<<
Financial stability monitoring
The ECB, together with the Eurosystem, systematically monitors cyclical
and structural developments in the euro-area/EU banking sector and in
other financial sectors. 

The purpose is to assess 
      * the possible vulnerabilities in the financial sector, and 
      * the its resilience to potential shocks. 
The assessment is done in collaboration with the EU national central
banks and supervisory agencies. They are all represented in the ESCB
Banking Supervision Committee. Within the ECB, financial stability
monitoring entails extensive involvement by several business areas
(Financial Stability as coordinator, Economics, Operations,
International and European Relations and Payment Systems). The outcome
of this activity is published annually, for example, in the reports
entitled âEU banking sector stabilityâ, âStructural analysis of the EU
banking sectorâ and also in the ECBâs Annual Report.
>>

But there like the Fed the ECB did nothing about enforcing sane lending,
prefering instead to use its media power to fight unions trying to get
higher wages after a long stagnation (eg: in Germany) rather than warn
about overpaid workers in bank lending against bubble inflated assets
and risking the "financial stability" of the euro area.

Laurent


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