The Vice-President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Luis de Guindos, on Thursday 7 May justified the very accommodating monetary policy pursued by the Frankfurt Institute in response to recent criticisms by the German Constitutional Court of the quantitative easing operation to buy back securities, especially public securities, launched in 2015 to combat low inflation (see EUROPE 12480/17).
Speaking before the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, Mr de Guindos noted that the ECB is subject to the EU regulatory framework and acts under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, which validated the quantitative easing operation at the end of 2018. He also reaffirmed the two principles guiding the ECB's action: "price stability, independence from governments, from lobbies".
"We do not put monetary policy in a sort of ivory tower" the former Spanish Finance Minister said. When we make our decisions, "we try to look the interactions with other policy instruments", mainly fiscal and structural reform policies, and "we take into account con side effects of our decisions, continuously, by means of constant proportionality assessments, he added. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)