Former chief economist Stark : ECB in 'panic'

The European Central Bank is in "panic" over the eurozone crisis and acting outside its mandate with its new bond-buying plans, the bank's former chief economist said in comments published Saturday. "The break came in 2010. Until then everything went well," Juergen Stark, the German who resigned from the ECB in late 2011 after criticising its earlier round of buying up of sovereign debt, told Austrian daily Die Presse in an interview. "Then the ECB began to take on a new role, to fall into panic. It gave in to outside pressure ... pressure from outside Europe." Stark said the ECB's new plan to buy up unlimited amounts of eurozone states' bonds, announced on September 6, on the secondary market to bring down their borrowing rates was misguided. "Together with other central banks, the ECB is flooding the market, posing the question not only about how the ECB will get its money back, but also how the excess liquidity created can be absorbed globally," Stark said. "It can't be solved by pressing a button. If the global economy stabilises, the potential for inflation has grown enormously." He added that "panic" about the eurozone breaking up was "nonsense" but that the only way to end the crisis was for member states to bring down their debts and implement structural reforms to boost economic growth. "Governments have recognised that returning to budgetary discipline is indispensable. Markets focus much more on whether states will be able to service their debts in five years' time," he said. Stark quit in late 2011, following in the footsteps of former Bundesbank head Axel Weber, who stepped down earlier in the year from Germany's central bank because of unease about the ECB's policies. Weber's successor Jens Weidmann was the only member of the ECB's policy-setting governing council to vote against the bank's new programme earlier this month. "Weidmann's arguments ... should not be made light of," Stark told Die Presse. "The way in which his position has been publicly commented upon by the ECB leadership has crossed the line of fairness."