Even people who have known Axel A. Weber for years are not quite sure why he has breached European Central Bank etiquette — and dimmed his chances of becoming Europe’s top central banker — by discussing policy spats outside the clubhouse, the International Herald Tribune reported.
As the default favorite to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet as president of the bank a year from now, the safe path for Mr. Weber would simply be to keep a low profile. Instead, Mr. Weber has stridently voiced his dissent on decisions that most on the bank council have made since May to combat the European sovereign debt crisis.
Normally, little inside information escapes the conference room high in the European Central Bank headquarters, where members of the governing council meet twice a month around a large doughnut-shaped conference table.
Does Mr. Weber, now the president of the Bundesbank, not want Mr. Trichet’s job? Is he simply not able to keep his views to himself? Or is he simply making sure that European heads of government know exactly what they are getting if they put him in charge of monetary policy for the countries that use the euro?
“My own judgment is that he is certainly not making it easier to select him for the job,” said Jan Pieter Krahnen, a professor of finance at Goethe-University Frankfurt and director of the Center for Financial Studies.
“He clearly states that ‘I will not be an easy person to deal with. With me you will not get a dependent central bank,’ ” said Mr. Krahnen, who was co-director with Mr. Weber of the center from 1998 to 2002.
Mr. Weber surprised analysts and investors when, in May, he made it clear he did not support the E.C.B.’s unprecedented decision to buy government bonds to slow a sell-off of Greek government debt and other troubled sovereign paper.
Mr. Weber surprised them again when — despite the furor his first round of comments provoked — he repeated his criticism last month during a speech in New York, where he called on the E.C.B. to end the so-called Securities Markets Program.
There are signs that other countries are seizing on Mr. Weber’s behavior to try to block his appointment. French newspapers reported last month that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France now considered Mr. Weber unacceptable.
But there are few other obvious candidates who would pass political muster and also possess the stature and intellect to do a job that could be the most powerful in Europe. Read more.
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