European Central Bank and the Euro

Speech by Chris Huhne MEP delivered to the European Parliament on Tue 3rd Jul 2001

Mr President, given the time constraints and also the feeling in my group that the ECB has essentially been doing a good job in difficult circumstances, I would like to concentrate on some remaining structural issues concerning communications and accountability. As Mr Duisenberg will remember, Parliament has repeatedly adopted a transparency package advocating five separate measures to increase transparency. I am delighted to report that the ECB has so far agreed three of them, and we must give them credit for this. We have had no problems in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in inviting members of the governing Council to appear before us. Last year, we had eleven such appearances.

Secondly, the ECB began to publish regular forecasts or, as they prefer to call them, "projections" in the December 2000 monthly bulletin, and that was a very welcome development. In addition, econometric models are now published in the working paper series. It would be nice if they were in more user-friendly form, for example, on CD-ROM, but there is progress.

The two remaining measures that Parliament is again calling for are a publication of a "Beige Book" setting out conditions in each Member State and publication of summary minutes giving the views for and against interest rate changes. In addition, this year we are asking the ECB Governing Council to deal with a specific problem it has faced in a couple of recent interest rate changes. There was confusion in the markets about what was perceived as an unpredictable decision and the marketplace was clearly not prepared for that decision. Indeed, some people went as far as to say it was arbitrary, so we are calling for the publication of votes on an anonymous basis.