Professor Terrence McDonough:

Certainly. This is very much a trend internationally. We have been moving further and further away from democratic influence on economic decisions. The model, in a certain sense, is the independence of the American Federal Reserve. The American Federal Reserve has a double mandate. Its mandate is, on the one hand, to control inflation, but also to address the problems of unemployment when they arise. Our central bank, which is the ECB, is not mandated to address the problem of low levels of economic activity throwing people out of work. It is explicitly left out of its charter. It is solely responsible for maintaining stable prices. In that sense I think we have an ultra-monetarist central bank, much more monetarist than one would find in the United States.