People know that we never have hesitated to do whatever was necessary to restore the proper functioning of the monetary market and the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. We have been sometimes criticized but the results are there. WSJ: Do you think the euro zone’s bailout fund – the European Financial Stability Facility – should be expanded? Noyer: The European response has been an ambitious response to the present crisis and the fund has been a remarkable success. We would clearly favor the fund to be enhanced both quantitatively and qualitatively. I think increasing it quantitatively is probably the intention of governments. The fund’s firepower is limited by a number of technical constraints to get a triple-A rating. How to move closer to the original intention in terms of firepower is clearly up to the reflection of governments. It is appropriate to think about [enlarging the size of the fund] even if there is no immediate need. As far as the qualitative aspect of the fund is concerned, it seems to me that having the capacity for instance to intervene in secondary markets could probably be an interesting feature in some cases, if only to facilitate access to the market. This of course raises for governments the question of conditionality of the support … but probably they can find answers to that. Another possibility would be that of precautionary programs [such as credit lines], like what the IMF is doing.
Christian Noyer: Inflation, Europe’s response to the debt crisis, emerging-market economies and priorities for the G-20 – interview in The Wall Street Journal Interview with Mr Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements, in The Wall Street Journal, Paris, conducted by Mr Brian Blackstone and Ms Nathalie Boschat on 24 January 2011 and published on 26 January 2011. *  *  *  WSJ: The European Central Bank recently toughened its stance on inflation. How concerned are you about the risks of inflation taking hold in the euro zone? Noyer: The uptick in inflation is mostly due to the rise in oil and commodity prices. Core inflation has remained relatively subdued. By nature, that [the rise in inflation] should be temporary. Our projections show that the inflation rate should come back to a zone perfectly in line with our definition of price stability during the course of 2011. As a central bank, we are very attentive to the only risks that exist in such a situation, which is that there might be second-round effects – an acceleration of inflation due to other causes – wages and other dynamics of internal costs. This is why we are vigilant about all those evolutions. I am quite confident that we will be able to keep inflation at bay. That includes sending the message that we will never tolerate that inflation could become entrenched.