Daily Archives: May 31, 2010

Speaking with one voice.  Singing from the same song sheet.  Communicating clearly with financial markets.  Avoiding needless disputes with governments.  These are essential attributes of high-level policymakers at a modern central bank.  So what are we to make of an extraordinary speech given last Friday in the Moroccan city of Rabat by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, an executive board member of the European Central Bank?

To put it bluntly, Bini Smaghi told the German government that it had screwed up Europe’s response to the Greek debt crisis. Germany’s ineptitude meant that the final price of the emergency rescue package ended up being far higher than necessary, he complained.

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Peter Spiegel is the FT's Brussels bureau chief. He returned to the FT in August 2010 after spending five years covering foreign policy and national security issues from Washington for the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He first joined the FT in 1999 covering business regulation and corporate crime in its Washington bureau, before spending four years covering military affairs and the defence industry in London and Washington.

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