Euro, not Brexit, is the EU's biggest threat

[exchemist]

That's a blunder, it doesn't have to happen, and bankers should know better. One expects bankers to know better.

You believe in democracy, I take it? One of the criticisms of the EU is that its management has been hived off to be the preserve of an unelected elite of technocrats.

While a central bank is supposed - in most modern democracies - to be largely independent of the government of the day, you cannot expect it to be wholly independent of national culture. The Bundesbank is inevitably a product of German national consciousness. There is in fact no consensus that its attitude is wrong - you get economists arguing both ways - though my feeling is that the ECB and Draghi would push austerity less hard were it not for the German influence. Anyway it is a fact.

And you cannot blame the German people for refusing to write an endless series of blank cheques to Greece. You may say the bankers should lecture them on the imperative need to do this, but all that will do is make the Germans anti-EU!

 

[iceaura]

While a central bank is supposed - in most modern democracies - to be largely independent of the government of the day, you cannot expect it to be wholly independent of national culture. The Bundesbank is inevitably a product of German national consciousness. There is in fact no consensus that its attitude is wrong - you get economists arguing both ways - though my feeling is that the ECB and Draghi would push austerity less hard were it not for the German influence. Anyway it is a fact.

That seems a reasonable autopsy of the blunder. Blunder it remains.