Asmussen statement

>   
>   (email exchange)
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>   On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:02 AM, wrote:
>   
>   You are totally right about him, I sent you a word doc with his exact words
>   (emphasis mine)
>   

Repeat: Asmussen: ECB Wants To Eliminate Doubts About Euro
2012-08-20 05:36:05.371 GMT

–First Ran On Mainwire At 2257 GMT/1857 ET Sunday


FRANKFURT (MNI) – The European Central Bank wants to remove any doubt about the permanence of the common currency, ECB Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen said in a newspaper interview published in Monday’s edition of the German daily Frankfurter Rundschau.

The German board member told the paper that financial market certainty regarding the continued existence of the euro was a necessary condition for the currency’s stability.

The ECB’s planned new bond-buying program is superior to its predecessor, the Securities Market Program, and the Governing Council will work on details at its next meeting, Asmussen said.

Noting the high risk premia for some sovereign bonds in the euro area, which he said were in part due to concerns about the reversibility of the euro, Asmussen said that such an exchange rate risk was theoretically not admissible in a currency union and was leading to the incomplete transmission of ECB monetary policy to some euro area economies.

“Our measures attempt to repair this defect in the monetary policy transmission mechanism,” he said. The worries about the euro’s permanence are no wonder, he added, given “how carelessly” the currency is talked about in Europe.

“It is precisely these concerns about the continued existence of the euro that we want to rid market participants of,” he said.

Asmussen asserted that the ECB is acting within its mandate, adding that “a currency can only be stable if there is no doubt about its existence.”

The new bond-buying program meant to address this issue “will be better conceived” than the SMP, he said, repeating that the ECB will only act in tandem with the EFSF or ESM and that interested countries must submit a request and satisfy “comprehensive economic policy conditions.”

The ECB’s Governing Council “will decide in complete independence whether, when and how bonds are purchased on the secondary market,” he added.

What happened last summer with Italy, which failed to use the time bought by ECB bond purchases to make necessary adjustments, cannot be allowed to happen again, he said.

Moreover, in the new program the ECB will deal with the problem of senior status, which interferes with affected countries’ return to capital markets because private investors fear being disadvantaged vis-a-vis the ECB, he said.

Asked if the new program could be successful because it will be unlimited in time and scope, Asmussen confirmed that ECB President Mario Draghi had said as much.

“But wait and see,” he said. “We are working on the design of the new program and will occupy ourselves with these questions in our next meeting.”


Credit and money growth in the euro area are “moderate,” and “inflation expectations in the entire Eurozone are firmly anchored to our target,” he said. “We are monitoring price developments very closely and have all the necessary instruments to fight possible inflationary dangers effectively and in a timely manner.”