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Germany and the euro

You Kant do that

Many Germans fear that the European Central Bank is not on their side

HORST SEEHOFER, premier of Bavaria, sums up German attitudes to the European Central Bank (ECB). Based in Frankfurt, but run by Mario Draghi, an Italian, the ECB said on September 4th that it would cut its interest rate to 0.05% and start buying asset-backed securities from banks to get them to lend. By opening the money tap, taking on debt and buying “junk”, Mr Seehofer told Bild, Germany's biggest tabloid, the ECB frightens people. “It must be our job to criticise these policies.”

Like others on the centre-right, Mr Seehofer frets that a new anti-euro party, the Alternative for Germany, will poach voters by bashing the ECB. The Alternative has just got into its first state parliament and may get into two more on September 14th. But scepticism about the ECB is growing across the country. Hans-Werner Sinn, boss of Munich's Ifo Institute and an economist, echoes Mr Seehofer: the ECB has “cut interest rates by too much”; and it is not authorised to buy bonds “as this is a fiscal and not a monetary-policy measure. Such a policy would be at the expense of European taxpayers, who would have to pay for the losses incurred by the ECB.”

Mainstream views in Germany are diverging from those elsewhere in the euro zone and in Anglo-Saxon countries. The world outside Germany is afraid of deflation. Germans, however, worry that cheap money could lead eventually to inflation. This may be surprising, since prices in the euro zone are rising by only 0.3% a year, far below the ECB's 2% target. But inflation fears have been etched into the German psyche since the hyperinflation of 1922-23.

Many are cross that cheap money is crushing interest rates on savings accounts and capital life-insurance policies, a common form of retirement planning. Real returns on such savings are laughable, just when greying Germans need them. Low rates may boost shares and property, but ordinary Germans shun such assets. One argument they use against low rates, indeed, is that they create asset bubbles.

But the roots of German scepticism are more fundamental, argues Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, in a forthcoming book, “The Germany Illusion”. Anglo-Saxon economists are guided by the utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham, asking merely if a policy works. Germans side with Immanuel Kant, believing that nothing works except through law, and are horrified when the ECB strays from its narrow mandate.

Germans felt it was doing this in 2012 when Mr Draghi announced that the ECB would, under certain conditions, buy the bonds of euro countries in crisis. Outside Germany, this is considered the most effective step in the euro crisis to date. Inside Germany, it is seen as illegal. The ECB would indirectly finance governments when it may only manage the money supply, ruled the German constitutional court in February (though it referred the issue up to the European Court of Justice).

Buying asset-backed securities from banks is, by this logic, another step in the wrong direction. Worse, Germans fear that it could lead to “quantitative easing”: printing money to buy bonds. “Breaking the rules destroys trust,” warns Ralph Brinkhaus, a Bundestag member from the centre-right party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. And it sends the wrong message to crisis countries, he adds, by reducing the pressure on them to reform.