What Is Mario Draghi Complaining About?

What Is Mario Draghi Complaining About?
Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), attends the European Banking Congress in Frankfurt am Main on November 20, 2015. DANIEL ROLAND/AFP/Getty Images)
Valentin Schmid
Updated:

NEW YORK—Being a central banker is a tough job. Even when things aren’t falling apart, people blame you for everything in the economy that isn’t perfect.

In the case of the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, he himself is complaining about something he should be rather happy about.

The problem in Draghi’s eyes is the old foe of the central bank: inflation.

“Central banks are unable to truly control the trend in inflation,” he said at a meeting at the Economic Club of New York on Dec. 4.

More specifically, he thinks that the ECB isn’t meeting its objective of price stability. For the layman, if there is no price stability, there must be lots of inflation.

It turns out, there isn’t any inflation in the eurozone: Prices only increased 0.1 percent in October compared to last year. Looks pretty stable to the uninitiated. 

(European Central Bank)
European Central Bank
Valentin Schmid
Valentin Schmid
Author
Valentin Schmid is a former business editor for the Epoch Times. His areas of expertise include global macroeconomic trends and financial markets, China, and Bitcoin. Before joining the paper in 2012, he worked as a portfolio manager for BNP Paribas in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
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