The European Central Bank is failing to hit its own target for price stability. The difficulty is that the bank’s governing council may be unable to agree on effective measures, largely because of splits on national lines. That might prove very dangerous.
Give credit where credit is due. The announcement of the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions programme in the summer of 2012 – and the prior statement by Mario Draghi, its Italian president, that the bank would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency – restored confidence. The ECB won the battle without having to fire a shot. After the announcement, yields on Italian and Spanish government bonds fell to far more tolerable levels.
But the ECB has been far less successful in securing price stability. True, its target is neither as unambiguous nor as symmetrical as the ones adopted by other central banks. Its aim is to achieve inflation “below, but close to, 2 per cent over the medium term”. Yet in the year to February 2014, headline inflation was 0.8 per cent. This is hardly close to 2 per cent. It is also highly dangerous, as is cogently argued in a blog by senior members of the IMF’s European department.