Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-26-Speech-2-110"
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"en.19991026.3.2-110"2
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"Ortega y Gasset said that wasted effort leads to melancholy, and I, in order not to become a victim of melancholy, am not going to repeat any of the ideas which have been expressed here. I will simply highlight some of the points with which I agree or disagree.
The vice-chairman of my committee said, referring to the history of the euro, that we would have to go back as far as Charlemagne and probably Diocletian, who is the grandfather of the euro. And as a Spaniard I must mention Charles I, who wanted to unify the European currencies on the basis of the Cologne mark.
And this leads me to the speech made by an English Conservative Member, who explained what the single currency required in order for the financial markets to have faith in it. What they probably need most is for the United Kingdom to join the single currency.
Having said this and to get to the point, the Treaty of Maastricht enshrined the principle of price stability and put in place a fully independent European Central Bank to uphold this principle. But the Treaty of Maastricht did not deal with the institutional consequences of this decision, and for this reason we are talking today about the independence of the Central Bank, the relationship between the Central Bank and other institutions and the unresolved problems.
In Amsterdam, the decision was taken not to amend the Treaty of Maastricht in any way, and therefore the problems which were pending are still pending. We are now on the eve of an Intergovernmental Conference which has to deal with the consequences of the decisions which we have taken before.
Much has been said here about independence and it is true that, with the Treaty of Maastricht, those of us who believed that price stability was an essential condition for sustained development and that a Central Bank was necessary to control inflation have been vindicated, while those who believed that it was possible to implement any economic or monetary policy provided it produced short-term artificial growth, have been proved wrong. The spokesman of my group has expressed this very well and I will not repeat it.
But because we believe in this model, we also believe that we should adopt decisions so that this model does not fall apart. Firstly, we have the problem of transparency, a topic the rapporteur handled with humour and skill. We believe in the independence of the Central Bank, but this Central Bank is much more independent than the Bundesbank or the United States Federal Reserve, because it was not created by an act of Parliament and cannot be modified by one, because it does not exist side by side with a government that has its own economic policy. And this has led some people to talk of a type of platonic aristocracy composed of a series of independent experts to whom decisions regarding monetary policy are entrusted in the belief – probably correct – that money is too serious an issue for politicians to deal with.
For this reason, if we do not want this model to fall apart, it is necessary to prioritise transparency measures, and I whole-heartedly subscribe to each and every one of the measures which the rapporteur has mentioned.
Secondly, we have the problem of the relationship of the Central Bank with the other European institutions. It has been said here that the priority objective is dealing with inflation, but it is not the only one: we have to think in terms of, amongst other things, an economic focus, responsibility, the international representation of the euro and the monitoring of the banking institutions at a time of significant mergers amongst the financial institutions."@en1
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