FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The European Central Bank’s super easy monetary policy is necessary and its benefits far outweigh its side effects, ECB board member Isabel Schnabel said on Saturday, pushing back on a court challenge from her native Germany.
“Without the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, we would probably have found ourselves by now in the middle of a severe financial crisis with unforeseeable consequences for the economy, employment and price and wage developments in the euro area,” Schnabel said in a speech.
Germany’s constitutional court ruled last month that the ECB overstepped its mandate with a separate bond purchase scheme and ordered the Bundesbank to quit, unless the ECB could prove within 3 month that the buys were proportional.
(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Alex Richardson)
