A recording of Positive Money Europe’s new webinar on the ECB’s neglected secondary mandate is now available online.
On Monday 15 November 2021, Positive Money Europe was honoured to host a webinar with Sarah Jane Hlásková Murphy (Lead Legal Counsel at the ECB), Rosa Lastra (Professor at Queen Mary University), Leah Downey (PhD Candidate at Harvard Kennedy School) and the authors of our report Jens van ‘t Klooster (Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven) and Nik de Boer (Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam).
During the webinar, Jens and Nik presented the main argument of their report, namely that the ECB has so far neglected its secondary mandate and that it should engage in coordination with competent institutions in the EU to receive guidance on how it should act on its secondary mandate.
Sarah Jane Hlásková Murphy pointed out that, rather than having been neglected, the legal interpretation of the ECB’s secondary mandate has followed changing economic views about the conduct of monetary policy, which is now recognised to consist of the use of a broad range of tools with various side-effects beyond the primary objective. She also suggested that the secondary mandate might not be as indeterminate as the authors suggest and that the indeterminacy may rather lie in the formulation of general economic policies in the Union.
Rosa Lastra focused her remarks on accountability and independence, arguing for stronger accountability practices between the European Parliament and the ECB. She posed the question of whether the broader mandate of the ECB, giving more explicit consideration to the secondary mandate, would erode the value of independence which is instrumental to the primary mandate.
The following panel discussion touched upon several questions raised also by the audience, for example on the space that will likely even be afforded to the secondary mandate due to the ECB’s discretion to justify much under its primary mandate.
Check out the recording of the webinar here.