2009-04-18

Trichet should resign

New episode on the series I started about a year ago now: Trichet's inability to keep words and actions synced and also his failure with his mission: protecting the value of the EUR.
Trichet has been saying one thing just to do the opposite for quite some time now, which is quite annoying and has tarnished his reputation quite substantially for that matter. He has also miserably failed to protect the value of the Euro, specially if you compare its value against Gold or if you do grocery shopping. And now that the Euro has managed to fall substantially against two of the most mismanaged currencies in the world (Japanese Yen and US Dollars) one wonders why he doesn't just hand his resignation.

Nonetheless, I am suspecting that he is not doing what he wants to do, but rather what the politicians want him to do, because of all the pressure he must be baring and the need to do something. But then, it means that he has thrown the independence of the ECB away and is now just following the route decided by politicians who have no incentive in protecting the currency at all.

Then again, if he is not doing what he thinks he should be doing, why doesn't he just hand his resignation letter? Or if he has thrown the ECB's independence into oblivion, why hasn't he been asked to leave?
April 17 (Bloomberg) -- The euro fell to a one-month low against the dollar after European Central Bank President Jean- Claude Trichet said the central bank must do everything possible to restore confidence, signaling further interest-rate cuts.
[...]
Trichet said in a speech in Tokyo today that any ambiguity in the direction of policy will delay a recovery in the 16- nation region’s economy.

“Public authorities, executive branches, and central banks must do all they can to restore, preserve and foster confidence among households and corporations in order to pave the way for sustainable prosperity,” Trichet said.
[...]
“Traditionally, the U.S. economy picked up ahead of the U.K., Asia and the euro zone,” Benedikt Germanier, a currency strategist at UBS AG in Stamford, Connecticut, wrote in a research note yesterday. “Accordingly, we would favor to be long the U.S. dollar and the British pound against the euro.”
I particularly like that guy Benedikt who seem to be a complete idiot and really understanding nothing in economics — but then you wouldn't be surprised to hear that he's a currency strategist and that he is working for UBS which was particularly good at forecasting the collapse and profiting from it, right?

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