CES faculty affiliate Hans Helmut Kotz commentary in Project Syndicate

During the recent hearing on the constitutionality of the European Central Bank’s measures to prevent the eurozone from falling apart, Andreas Vosskuhle, President of Germany’s Constitutional Court, raised an important question: Do non-German economists condemn the ECB’s outright monetary transactions (OMT) as unequivocally as all but one of the German experts testifying?

Of course, there are German economists (not to mention Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government) who support ECB President Mario Draghi’s policies. Still, an overwhelming majority of German (and possibly Dutch and Finnish) economists seem to favor keeping the ECB on the sidelines in the eurozone crisis. It’s a fiscal issue, the typical German economist says, and monetary policy will not help; on the contrary, activating it will only make matters worse.