Jean-Claude Trichet: Interview with the Börsen-Zeitung Interview with Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, and the Börsen-Zeitung conducted by Dr Jürgen Schaaf on 16 December 2008, published on 31 December 2008. *  *  *  Question: Do you believe that the citizens of the euro area will one day have a similarly strong relationship to the euro as the Germans used to have to the Deutsche Mark? Answer: Confidence in the currency, in the central bank as an institution and in the independence of the central bank to deliver price stability is crucially important. When asked whether they considered the ECB’s independence from politics to be an important condition for price stability, 78% of the 320 million fellow citizens of the euro area said “yes”. And that was before the recent intensification of the financial crisis. Question: And now? Answer: All evidence suggests that, since then, the sentiment of our fellow citizens on the importance of the euro and of the ECB as an independent institution has even increased. Question: Studies have shown from time to time that the support of the population for the stability of the currency is even more important than the institutional independence of the central bank. Has the euro already achieved this status? Answer: As a symbol of European unity, the euro is already extremely successful. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, the euro and the ECB have become, even more visibly, a central anchor for confidence.
This impulse is, at the moment, far from having been fully transmitted to the economy. That being said, as I always stress, we are never pre-committed and we always do what is necessary to solidly anchor inflationary expectations in the medium term. 4  BIS Review 1/2009