European-Central-Bank

I do not believe that there exists a more effective description of the institutional arrangements surrounding the ECB. The Author has managed to describe these arrangements and place them in their historical and political context with much clarity. Nor has he avoided controversy, such as the political autonomy question. However the approach is objective throughout. There has been disappointingly little public debate within Europe on these issues. This book will both stimulate and inform such a debate. This is its lasting contribution.

When the ECB's Chief Economist, Otmar Issing, wrote a book on the Bank's monetary policy, he made no mention at all of the policy's impact on jobs or industry. He larded the book with praise for the monetarist economist Milton Friedman, whose well-known and disastrous impact on Chile's economy was, oddly, not referred to in the book.
Thatcher's monetarist fallacy was that the battle against inflation was the overriding economic aim, because low or zero inflation would produce higher growth. But in the real world, other things being equal, low inflation was not the cause of high growth but the effect of low growth, and high inflation was not the cause of low growth but the effect of high growth. Monetarism's battle against inflation was a policy of deflation, forcing unemployment and low wages on the working class. So, just as Thatcher therefore became the deadly enemy of the working class, so now joining the euro has become the main threat to us.