Benoît Cœuré: Interview with Cinco Días Interview by Mr Benoît Cœuré, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, with Cinco Días, conducted by Mr Bernardo de Miguel, published on 10 September 2014. *  *  *  Q: The ECB’s projections envisage less growth and lower inflation. Is there anything else in the pipeline if the measures adopted so far fail? A: New measures were adopted on Thursday and I cannot speculate on what can be done in the future. The ECB staff projections for 2014 and 2015 have been revised downwards, both in respect of growth and inflation, and the Governing Council is also seeing risks to growth being on the downside. Growth lost momentum in the second quarter and we want to prevent this weakness feeding into a fall in investment and creating a vicious circle. Furthermore, we have recently seen a change in inflation expectations, which have moved further away from 2%. Q: Isn’t it a little late to realise that, after a year of inflation below 1%? A: We have to decide on the basis of the data. And until the summer, growth in the euro area was expected to accelerate. Then came other, more worrying data showing that it was at risk of losing momentum. Q: However, the measures were not adopted unanimously by the 24 members of the Council. Who voted against? A: We don’t comment on that. You know that from January onwards we will begin to publish accounts of our meetings.
Q: Would you be in favour of the binding agreements proposed by Angela Merkel? A: Binding agreements are one way of achieving this. However, in my view, it is better to stay within the Community framework. It should be a multilateral discussion and not a bilateral one between the Commission and each Member State. There should be shared sovereignty as far as structural reforms are concerned, because there is a common interest. Q: The stress tests are nearing completion. Can we expect many failures and are there likely to be any surprises? A: We are checking the results, which will be available in the second half of October, so I cannot make any comments on them at present. Q: Will the tests be credible after what happened with Portugal’s Banco Espirito Santo (BES)? It collapsed despite the fact that the ECB and the rest of the Troika had been supervising Lisbon for the past three years. A: In the BES case, it appears that information was being kept from the supervisor, which was the Banco de Portugal and not the ECB. The ECB, the European Commission and the IMF were in Lisbon to analyse financial stability and macroeconomic outcomes. The ECB had neither the instruments nor the mandate to supervise banks, as this was the role of the national supervisor.