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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