“Buying the government bonds of the Eurozone countries is totally in line with the ECB's mandate and it has already been done when I was president, first with the purchase of Greek, Portuguese and Irish government bonds in May 2010 and then with Italian and Spanish securities in August 2011”. It is a blessing across the board that the former president of the ECB, the French Jean-Claude Trichet has given to the Draghi line which is preparing to launch a sort of European-style Quantitative Easing in the first months of 2015.
Speaking in Florence, Trichet then ruled out that, despite the dissent of the Bundesbank, the ECB can proceed without expanding its mandate as an “independent central bank whose objective is price stability. There are no handicaps" in this regard and above all "there are no veto rights" on the part of the Germans or others because "the decisions of the ECB are made by simple majority".
