People's concerns about rising prices at gas stations, supermarkets and elsewhere are growing.

In the euro area, inflation rose to 5.1 percent in January.

Even the cautious Ifo Institute is now expecting inflation of four percent in Germany over the current year.

The increase may be moderate compared to periods of hyperinflation, but it is extreme when compared to the past few decades.

It's no wonder that the criticism of the European Central Bank (ECB) is increasing: many think it should have stopped buying bonds and raised interest rates much earlier.

It could now be too late for a “soft landing”, i.e. a return to price stability without economic upheaval.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Inflation, once it's there, has the unpleasant quality of fueling expectations of further inflation.

Citizens prefer larger purchases because they fear they will become more expensive later.

The unions add the expected inflation to their wage demands.

Victims and beneficiaries of inflation are very unequally distributed.

Germany's 82 million monetary politicians

The discourse on inflation is in full swing and at an exponential pace.

The database of the FAZ archive provides exactly 5947 entries of the word "inflation" for the year 2021. In the previous year there were not even half as many.

If you extrapolate the entries since the beginning of January alone - it was 2010 - you would come to over 24,000 entries by the end of 2022.

People talk about inflation.

Are they even allowed to do that?

My current favorite economic tweet comes from Marcel Fratzscher.

Under the headline “Questions for the German ECB critics”, the President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) recently tweeted: “How about we just put our trust in the ECB and respected its independence?

How about if we didn't want to believe anymore

What does the DIW President, a former ECB employee, want to tell us?

From Fratzscher's point of view, it is a violation of independence to even comment on the ECB's policy.

Whatever the central bank does is beyond criticism.

Fratzscher does not provide a reason.

He only appeals to a "trust", which should therefore probably be called "blind".

There are very few exceptions to the ban on commenting: one of them is Marcel Fratzscher himself, who constantly comments on ECB policy – ​​and of course likes everything.

Note: Comments are allowed as long as they are affirmative.

Now the ECB is actually independent in the tradition of the Deutsche Bundesbank.

Advice, even directives from the executive come to nothing.

The bank is independent of the politics of the European governments and their fiscal or labor market policies.

And it is just as independent of the collective bargaining policy of the social partners.

It does not have to keep an eye on the consequences of its monetary policy, even if this – like the zero interest rate policy of the past decade – affects the income distribution of the citizens and increases inequality (which is controversial).

The fact that the German Federal Constitutional Court ordered the ECB to carry out a monetary policy impact assessment in a prominent judgment from 2020 is, to put it mildly, a misunderstanding.