In defense of OMT ahead of Karlsruhe

Next week, the German constitutional court will debate and consider the legality of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transaction programme (OMT). After the court had preliminarily approved the ESM in September last year, Karlsruhe will evaluate in the current hearing  the scope and boundaries of the ECB’s monetary policy mandate and the OMT programme and its consequences on the budget right of the Bundestag. In last consequence, the court could force the German government to bring the ECB to the European Court of Justice or, even more dramatically, request Germany to leave the eurozone as the former constitutional court judge Udo di Fabio argued.

So. is the ECB acting beyond its mandate? The answer is clearly no. The situation in the eurozone was dramatic before the announcement of the OMT programme. Nominal interest rates had hugely diverged, banks’ access to finance was severely hampered, and the eurozone’s financial system was deeply fragmented. Changes in the monetary policy stance of the ECB were not transmitted and the ECB was therefore not able to fulfil its mandate of ensuring the proper conduct of monetary policy in the euro area.

To fix this untenable situation for the ECB, bold action was required. The ECB’s governing council decided on the OMT programme, which consists of the option to buy unlimited quantities of sovereign debt with a maturity of less than 3 year in the secondary market if the necessary but not sufficient condition of an agreement on an ESM programme is fulfilled.

The decision has led to a dramatic improvement in the monetary policy transmission. Sovereign bond yields in Spain and Italy fell by 100 and 50 basis points in the first month after Draghi’s ‘whatever it takes’-speech in July 2012 and are now 300 and 230 basis points lower. Financial fragmentation was reversed and the so-called Target2 net liabilities fell by EUR 134bn in Spain and EUR 38bn in Italy between July 2012 and April 2013. Contrary to the possibility of a pure ESM programme, the OMT programme was thus successful in re-establishing the monetary policy transmission, even though the transmission mechanism is not fully restored yet.

Why was the OMT programme so successful? It was so successful primarily because it addressed a fundamental problem of the monetary union: A monetary union with decentralized fiscal policies is inherently unstable. Countries in the eurozone do not have direct influence on monetary policy, but issue debt in Euros. This constellation resembles a situation where governments issue debt in a foreign currency– and the breeding ground for a self fulfilling crisis is established. Once investors start losing trust in the government’s fiscal sustainability, they will start selling bonds and push up interest rates. Yet, it is only raising interest rates that eventually render government debt unsustainable and thereby the initial doubt is self-fulfilling.

Only the ECB has the capacity to address this problem and to credibly prevent a self-fulfilling crisis. An ESM programme alone could not achieve this. It is impossible for a pure ESM programme to address the sovereign as well as the resulting private sector fragilities due to the large size of capital withdrawals in case of a crisis. The credibly flexible scope of the OMT programme was thus necessary in order to fix the monetary policy transmission,

So, has the ECB with its OMT programme taken on board excessive budgetary risks? Has this undermined the budgetary sovereignty of the German Bundestag? The answer is again a clear no. Arguably, before the OMT announcement, the budgetary risks for Germany were higher due to its exposure in the standard liquidity operations by the ECB. Only the OMT programme managed to bring down financial fragmentation and thereby helped the ECB to reduce its current role as a financial intermediary between banks in the fragmented financial system.

Overall the ECB clearly acted within its mandate of ensuring the proper conduct of monetary policy. The pure announcement of a potential OMT programme helped to reduce fiscal risks and to coordinate markets in a good equilibrium. Going forward, it is desirable for the euro area to move ahead with further fiscal integration in order to complement centralized monetary policy and to deal with unsustainable fiscal fiscal situations, for which the OMT programme is not designed.   

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