Christine Lagarde already has its team for the next eight years. The entry of two new members to the governing Council and gives the president of the ECB the opportunity to reshape the dome of the agency, handing out new tasks among their members. The vice-president Luis de Guindos loses the area of analysis and is left with the risk management, which had assumed provisionally on the 1st of November. Lagarde gives more powers to the new counselor German, Isabel Schnabel, who will oversee the purchase of assets. With this step, try to gain sympathies in a country which is highly critical of the policy of acquisitions of debt.

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Guindos anticipates a rebound of the economy in the eurozone in mid-2020 Lagarde, will be premiered at the ECB with a slight optimism about the economy

With the new appointments, the European Central Bank (ECB) has with the interim in which it was Lagarde from the landing in Frankfurt on 1 November. The resignation of the councilor German Sabine Lautenschläger —critical of the decision of the former president, Mario Draghi, to resume the massive purchase of bonds— and the end of the mandate of the French Benoît Coeuré forced to search for two replacements. The elect are the German Schnabel, and the Italian Fabio Panetta.

Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING, points out that these three names —the chairwoman Lagarde and the two new councilors— along with the chief economist, Philip Lane, will be “the new chariot” that will reorganize the european monetary policy. Guindos, for his part, keeps the area of macroprudential policy and financial stability.

But perhaps most interesting of the reorganization driven by Lagarde is the attribution to the Schnabel of the portfolio of market operations, responsible for the purchase of bonds, which Draghi took up the past month of September. The ironic thing is that Schnabel has admitted to be against this measure, with which the ECB aims to inject new forces to an inflation rate that shall not reach the 2% official target.

From his new role, Schnabel will oversee a program that between 2014 and 2018 injected 2.6 billion euros in the eurozone economy and that, after being terminated, was resumed on the 1st of November to a pace of 20,000 million euros. The German justice still must rule on the legality of this program. This decision, claimed to Bloomberg, Lucas Guttenberg, of the Institute Jacques Delors in Berlin, places to Schnabel in "a good position to explain the policy of the ECB from a position of authority in Germany and other countries.”

Date Of Update: 03 January 2020, 21:00