'..Key to the success of the Outright Monetary Transactions programme, however, is its credibility. Investors must be convinced that the ECB is fully committed to the programme, or they will hesitate to step into the peripheral countries’ sovereign bond markets and the ECB will have to make unsustainably large purchases. The trouble is that the credibility of the OMT programme is not guaranteed, mainly because of the opposition of the Bundesbank and its president, who is taking every opportunity to campaign against it. The Bundesbank is seen by most Germans as the guardian of monetary and financial stability. When its head mounts the barricades to tell the German public that the ECB is on a path that will destroy Germany’s stability, he is organising German hostility to the ECB and the euro. Sooner or later, this hostility will be unstoppable and may lead to German exit from the eurozone. This guerrilla warfare by the Bundesbank president is based on a failure to understand the role of a central bank in a modern economy. Central banks were created to deal with the endemic problem of financial capitalism: its instability and the impact this has on the banking system. This has led to the consensus that the central bank should be a lender of last resort in the banking system to ensure that the bubbles and crashes that are part and parcel of capitalism do not bring down the banking system. Should this role of lender of last resort also be extended to the government? It must be, if financial stability is to be maintained, because the sovereign and the banks hold each other in a deadly embrace. When the banking system collapses, this threatens the solvency of the sovereign. When the sovereign defaults on its debt, it pulls the banks into default. This means that the banking sector cannot be stabilised if the sovereign is unstable. A central bank that wishes to stabilise the banking sector is condemned to also stabilise the government bond market. Failure to do so leads to a banking crisis, forcing the central bank to provide huge amounts of liquidity to banks that it refuses to provide to the sovereign. Standalone countries such as the US and the UK understand this ... weiter FT ----------- contrarian investors are buying / selling the divergence between fundamentals and expectations |