Wolfang Schauble, the former German finance minister and now president of the Bundestag, rightly or wrongly considered the leader of the economic hawks, pays military honors to Mario Draghi, with whom personal relations have always been good, but remains convinced that expansionary monetary policy risks, beyond its intentions, delaying rather than promoting the reforms needed to relaunch the economy.
“Mario Draghi – Schauble declared to Corriere della Sera – is one of the most esteemed monetary policy experts and thanks to him the euro has played a leading role in international monetary structures. And in a critical phase, in which the states could not have done it alone, he has done a lot to stabilize the single currency ”. But, having said this and specifying that politics and the ECB have different tasks, Schauble does not hide his difference of opinion with Draghi on the effects of monetary policy.
"Politics - argues the president of the Bundestag - takes popular decisions only if it has no alternatives and this is a more serious problem than Mario thinks". In other words, Draghi's monetary policy was inevitable in a very difficult economic phase for Europe but ended up allowing states and political forces not to carry out reforms, despite Draghi himself continually repeating that monetary policy does not can replace fiscal and budgetary policy and that only by making reforms could the economy of the Old Continent, and in particular the Italian one, have been able and can recover. A discussion that will probably continue also under the ECB presidency of Lagarde, who has already anticipated that she wants to continue Draghi's monetary policy.
