Thursday, June 13, 2013

The German central bank, the Bundesbank, will have a central role in this week's Federal Constitutional Court hearing on complaints filed against the permanent European bailout fund known as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the bond purchase program of the European Central Bank (ECB). It makes clear in its written statement that the bond purchases announced by the ECB are "to be judged critically."  The Bundesbank concedes that the purchase of bonds by central banks is a common practice, but notes that in the case of the United States, Japan or the United Kingdom, central banks only buy bonds of high creditworthiness. The ECB, by contrast, plans to buy bonds of "poorly rated member states" in order to reduce their high-risk premiums, writes the Bundesbank.   In doing so, Bundesbank officials are deliberately ignoring the fact that the budget deficits and debt levels of the aforementioned three countries are in some cases considerably higher than in the crisis-hit nations of the euro zone. The "high creditworthiness" doesn't reflect budgetary discipline there. Rather, it stems purely from the fact that the central banks in question opted for large-scale bond buying to give a clear signal to market participants: the US, Japan and the UK will never suffer a liquidity problem in the bond markets.   The Bundesbank also questioned the central line of argument of the ECB, which mainly justifies its bond purchase program by saying that the monetary transmission process in the euro zone has been interrupted. The Bundesbank gives a very good description of how such a disruption can be diagnosed. It depends, the Bundesbank writes, on whether the financing conditions in the real economy move in harmony with the ECB's leading interest rates. Which would mean in practice that companies throughout the entire euro zone could obtain bank credit at comparable interest rates.

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