Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-25-Speech-1-060"
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"en.20041025.13.1-060"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, there are economic theories that are astoundingly impervious to reality. One of them is the presupposition that a central bank that endeavours to keep prices stable must
also be making the best possible contribution to full employment and growth. That prices in the euro zone have been stable for years is not a matter of contention; if we disregard the effect of rising oil prices and indirect taxation, inflation in the euro zone currently stands at just above 1%, which is verging on deflation. Has this brought us less unemployment and more growth? The crisis is, of course, attributable not only to misguided monetary policy. It is due, above all, to a policy, described as one of reform, which is in thrall to profit, wrecks workers’ rights, encourages wage dumping, and privatises social security benefits, thereby helping to strangle mass purchasing power and to increase poverty in Europe.
Monetary policy does, however, bear its share of responsibility as a result of cuts in interest rates that have been too late and not enough. It is cynical to describe the European Central Bank as having pursued the goal of full employment when millions of women and men have lost their jobs in recent years – not a few of them because the high cost of borrowing has bled small businesses dry. The fact is that a central bank also has the task of sounding the alarm when ever-increasing concentration of ownership gives the private banking sector more power over the market and when cuts in key interest rates serve primarily to increase the finance houses’ profit margins, instead of being felt by smaller enterprises and consumers. In this respect, too, the ECB has failed. Those who mendaciously depict the history of the single European currency as a success story are merely showing once again which vested interests colour their view of political events in Europe: monetary union has no equal as a model of success in the eyes of the European financial elite, whose attention is fixed on conglomerates’ gilt-edged balance sheets and increasing profits. To the ECB, those who look at the world from this angle ..."@en1
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