Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is out with his latest and it focuses on today’s ruling from the European Court of Justice.
The ruling itself isn’t necessarily a problem, he writes, but the ECJ asserting its supremacy over German courts is.
The ECJ has been drawn into a dangerous dispute with the very powerful court of Europe’s most powerful country. It has done so on the weakest possible terrain, failing to address fully the objections raised by Karlsruhe.
It claims that OMT is a monetary policy tool that does not breach the Treaties by rescuing specific insolvent states, when everybody can see that it does. Instead of pushing its claims on an abstruse case – the usual salami tactic – it is fighting over an incendiary issue that has German eurosceptics up in arms.
German monetary leaders are showing no sign of going into any kind of ECB sovereign QE without a fight and a court challenge is almost certain. It will take years to sort it out but it’s an important battlefront in the EU versus Germany battlefront for political supremacy.
