On the European Central Bank’s rate-setting governing council sit six executive board members and the 19 governors of the eurozone’s national central banks. I would wager that most of them have read George Orwell’s allegorical fable Animal Farm and its famous line: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
At the risk of sounding impertinent, so it is with the ECB. Isabel Schnabel, a board member from Germany, is one of the farm’s more influential voices. Yannis Stournaras, Greece’s governor, though one of the council’s most experienced members, having held office since 2014, has less sway.
So when Schnabel spoke out last month at a central bankers’ get-together in Jackson Hole in favour of forceful action against inflation, markets sat up and listened. They noted similar comments by François Villeroy de Galhau, the powerful French governor. But they attached less weight to a more dovish speech made by Stournaras a few days later at the European Forum Alpbach.