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In November,
2002, two of the most significant flagships of the financial press,
the German Handelsblatt and the American Wall Street Journal, had a
brilliant idea: we will create, they said, a "shadow council",
consisted of some of the most important academic economists, but also
economists from the private sector. The council will conduct monthly
meetings prior to the ECB board of directors, for the purpose to
suggest whether the base interest rate should be increased, reduced,
or, remain stable.
Despite the
fact that this council has no institutional characteristics, its
existence as a consulting tool was planned by the Maastricht Treaty.
Soon, it was transformed into an informal "institution",
the decisions of which are reaching the headquarters of the ECB in
Frankfurt.
Essentially,
the target of this shadow council, as was mentioned sometime by Wall
Street Journal, was to build a bridge for the big gap between the
British central bank and the German Bundesbank.
From the
first day, Handelsblatt's Norbert Häring, has been set the president
and coordinator of the council. He participates in every meeting,
without the right of voting. When I met him a few days ago in
Brussels for the filming of the documentary This is not a coup, I was prepared to face another
passionate supporter of the European institutions. Speaking at phone,
however, he warned me that his view does not express the decisions of
the shadow council. But there was nothing that could prepare me for
the "bombs" he would attempt to plant at the euro-system
foundations.
At the start
of the interview, he told me that “It
is scandalous the fact that a central banker, like Stournaras, can
state publicly that he had blocked the attempt of the [Greek]
government to create a parallel currency, without ending in prison.”
He also said that “This
time, we don't have a silent coup”,
like in the case of Cyprus, Italy, or, Ireland, “but
a real coup that violates the responsibilities of the central bank
and interferes to the political life of a country.”
According to
Häring, the ECB has been transformed now into a powerful player who
speaks directly with the biggest banks of the planet without being
controlled neither by the institutional tools of the EU. He explains
to me that “The so-called independence of the ECB and of
national banks is iconic. The fact that the elected governments are
not able to affect ECB's decisions means that the influence of other
players increases. I refer of course to the big financial
institutions. ECB always lies on the side of the big banks.”
According to
Häring, ECB is able now to decide whether will sustain a government
in power, or, will let this government collapse under the pressure
of the markets - and that's exactly what happened with Berlusconi
administration in Italy.
He says that
“The national central banks consist part of the ECB system and
have a terrifying ability to blackmail governments.” Through
the exchange of big bond packages, they provoke big interest rate
fluctuations, forcing governments to give them anything they want in
return. At the same time, “they continuously give information to
the ECB, through which it can blackmail the governments.”
Häring's
words appear to verify those who were considering the central banker
as the "fifth column" of the ECB. The question now is
whether there were indeed some people who believed that a government
would be in position to exercise independent policy next to an
"independent" central bank.
Key
part from the article by Aris Chatzistefanou under the title
“Stournaras should be in prison” translated from the original
source :
With this
confession, the term European Financial Dictatorship (EFD), that is
used by this blog to refer to the eurozone, is absolutely confirmed
and justified.
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