Recovery Arrives by Stealth

Abstract

The sign of times: “I am not as worried today as last year”, said Chancellor Angela Merkel in a conference in Berlin on 8 January 2013. Early 2013, in my speeches I stressed that staying the course of reform is key for stability and growth. By early May 2013, the discourse of realistic optimism about the state of the European economy had been properly established and noted in the markets. The ECB’s determined action to go for negative policy rates in June 2014 and for quantitative easing in 2015 was a sine qua non for containing the danger of deflation. In the light of the recent years’ economic recovery and job creation, the ECB’s pragmatism has thus been vindicated.