Why Europe’s got it right on inflation
By
Associate Editor
David Stevenson Jun 06, 2008
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Interest rates are set to rise next month!
Don’t panic - yet - if you live in Britain, because we’re not talking about dear old Blighty. But across the Channel, Jean Claude Trichet is talking tough. He’s the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), in charge of guarding the value of the newest big kid on the global currency block, the nearly 10-year old euro.
And now he’s fast becoming the hero of inflation fighters everywhere. Because yesterday, amid the usual turgid guff that central bankers usually churn out when they’re doing nothing very much, he came up with a bit of a bombshell – an imminent interest rate rise.
Although key rates are being kept unchanged for now, the ECB’s Governing Council has been getting more and more twitchy about climbing consumer prices which have risen “significantly” since last autumn due to soaring energy and food prices. And now Monsieur Trichet and co. expect inflation to stay high for longer than it first thought, because money supply is still growing too fast.
So not only are Euro central bankers staying “in a state of heightened alertness”, they’re prepared to “act in a firm and timely manner to ensure that medium term risks to price stability do not materialize”, and to show “strong determination to anchor medium and long-term inflation expectations in line with price stability.”
In short, expect an ECB rate hike next month.
It’s certainly seems to have come as a bit of a shock to many analysts. Just a week ago, Capital Economics was fairly confidently predicting that with eurozone inflation set to ease later this year, “the next move in interest rates should be down”.
But it’s good to see that some central bankers this side of the Atlantic are still taking their jobs seriously and trying to maintain the value of their currency. Which, it seems, the ECB can do rather more easily than Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
He’d probably like to do the same as the eurozone, with UK inflation seeping above the 3% mark at which he has to pen an open letter to Chancellor Darling explaining what’s gone wrong, but his hands are tied while the UK economy is falling off a cliff. And it looks like the knots are getting tighter by the day, with the unwelcome news that Mr Darling has now decided to give Mr King some extra outside ‘help’ in “advising” the Bank about “financial stability”.
That sounds horribly like Government-speak for finding ways to fiddle around with the Old Lady’s independence, and specifically to find ways of altering the Bank’s 2% inflation mandate. That would be a serious mistake - changing the target again would just chuck any remaining financial credibility the UK has left, right out of the window.
Talking of being a credible inflation-battling central banker, US Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke certainly isn’t one, having presided over a cavalier slashing of American interest rates in the face of a worse inflationary storm than the ECB is battling. But to be fair to the Fed, not quite all his colleagues are in quite the same boat.
Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker has just ‘fessed up to his fears that the Fed’s lending to securities firms introduced in March could stoke up problems in the future, because it might “induce greater risk taking, which in turn could give rise to more frequent crises”.
In other words, we could soon be right back in the same boom-to bubble-to-bust mess from which we’re now suffering.
Thank goodness someone in authority in the US has seen the dangers. Though it’s a shame that Mr Lacker isn’t running the whole Stateside central bank show. Then we might see some rate rises over there, too.
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