Paris (AFP)
Budget surplus countries, including Germany, "have not really made the necessary efforts" in terms of fiscal stimulus to consolidate fragile growth, said Wednesday RTL microphone Christine Lagarde, who will take office Friday at the head of the European Central Bank.
The stimulus policies were "well coordinated in the immediate aftermath of crisis" but "since then, countries and especially those with fiscal space have not really made the necessary efforts, we are obviously thinking of countries that are chronically in budget surplus as the Netherlands, Germany, a number of others in the world, "said the new boss of the ECB.
"Why not use this budget surplus and invest in infrastructure - which we need between us, contrary to what we imagine - why not invest in education, in innovation to allow a better rebalancing in the presence of current imbalances? ", continued the successor to Mario Draghi, whose accommodative monetary policy has regularly been the subject of strong criticism across the Rhine.
"Central banks, as a whole, have done their job," said Lagarde while regretting that they were sometimes "a little alone in the maneuver".
In the euro area, "there is not enough solidarity in a single currency area," she says.
"We share a currency, we do not share a lot of fiscal policy for the moment," she regretted.
"There is not, and we can deplore it - I know that some deplore, of course - a common budget to the euro area", even if "the finance ministers of the euro area seem to have anchored the elements of 'a budget' which must now be approved by Heads of State and Government.
On the same line, Laurence Boone, chief economist of the OECD, also regretted that there was no more budget support to support the monetary policy of the ECB, comparing the euro area and the United States experiencing one of the longest growing growth cycles in their history.
"What makes Europe so different from the US In Europe, we quickly tightened the budget and let monetary policy do all the work", which led to an imbalance, she explained during a meeting with the Association of Economic and Financial Journalists (AJEF) in Paris.
"After a while, if we really tighten the budget in the whole (of the euro zone), we put a brutal brake on growth and suddenly it was monetary policy that had to overcome," he said. she said, in reference to the austerity policies put in place in the euro zone after the financial crisis.
"If we had more budget support (...), we would have more growth and more sustainable," she said, rejecting criticisms of measures taken by the ECB, which have recently publicly opposed countries like Germany and the Netherlands to outgoing ECB President Mario Draghi.
"To blame (the ECB) seems absolutely unbelievable to me as it is the only tool that has been there continuously for ten years." We must question the action of those who could have done something else beside to accompany him ", without mentioning a country, unlike Ms. Lagarde.
"We have to recognize that monetary policy has worked, and in Europe 11 million jobs have been created, which is not nothing," she said.
International financial institutions, such as the IMF and the OECD, have for years been calling on Germany, the leading economy in the eurozone, to invest more to boost Europe's sluggish growth.
© 2019 AFP