BRUSSELS (MNI) – Growing Eurozone debt levels could cause tension
between fiscal and monetary policy, underlining the need to curtail them
as soon as possible, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet
said, according a text published in German newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung.
“Growing debt levels not only bring with them a potential for
greater conflict between fiscal and monetary policy, but first and
foremost, place a burden on the sustainability of public finances in the
affected countries,” Trichet wrote.
“It is, therefore, in the interests of each and every country to
return to sound public finances as quickly as possible,” he said.
He said the European Central Bank’s non-standard measures, used to
boost liquidity in the Eurozone, “were specifically designed in such a
way that they could be phased out relatively easily and gradually once
the environment improved.”
The non-standard measures “can now – given the normalisation of the
outlook for inflation and the prospect of a general market recovery – be
phased-out, step by step,” Trichet said.
“The goal of maintaining price stability never changed, and
meanwhile the unwinding of these measures has started,” he wrote.
He said all the European institutions – the European Parliament,
the Commission and the ECB – should play their role in the Eurosystem.
“It is also absolutely crucial that the governments themselves
exert all their responsibilities of control and surveillance of the
peers within the Eurogroup and the Council,” he said.
“For the ECB, this means continuing to fulfil its mandate – of
maintaining price stability – in a fully independent and inflexible
manner, for the future as it has done in the past,” Trichet said.
–Brussels: 0032 487 (0) 32 803 665, echarlton@marketnews.com
[TOPICS: MT$$$$,M$$FX$,M$$EC$,M$X$$$,M$$CR$,MGX$$$]
