Nielsen
The decision on the ECB’s PSPP.
On Tuesday, May 5, the German Constitutional Court (GCC) will announce its final ruling on the ECB’s Public Sector Asset Purchase Program (PSPP), aka QE, namely whether it is in violation of the German constitution. As my colleague, our Chief German Economist, Andreas Rees, has argued repeatedly, the GCC is almost certain to follow the European Court of Justice’s decision and legitimate the PSPP. As you may recall, the GCC has been thinking about this issue since 2015, when it was brought to the court by several complainants, including Peter Gauweiler (a former CSU member of the Bundestag) and Bernd Lucke, (the former party head of the AfD). In July 2017, the GCC temporarily suspended the case to send a number of questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), since it had concerns that the PSPP might violate various parts of EU Law, in particular those related to the prohibition of monetizing public deficits and the mandate of the ECB. However, in December 2018, the ECJ ruled that the PSPP is in line with all EU laws. As Andreas argues, there are two key reasons why the GCC will rule in favour of the ECB. First, in 2016 they allowed the Bundesbank to participate in the more extensive OMT program, which allows unlimited government bond purchases of single eurozone countries (but based on policy conditionality). In comparison, the PSPP is finite (but without policy conditionality). With such precedence, it would be really odd for them to now rule the PSPP illegal. Second, while the outcome is decided by judges, they are not detached from the political reality outside the court in Karlsruhe. As former deputy chancellor Joschka Fischer quipped when the case was accepted by the GCC, “the GCC does not have the mandate to derail the European project”. Specifically, if the GCC were to rule that the PSPP is non-compliant with German law, it would solely prohibit the Bundesbank from participating in the program and, strictly speaking, not block the PSPP itself. But it would put the Bundesbank in an untenable position because it’s legally obliged to follow ECB decisions. With the Bundesbank thus stuck between a rock and a hard place, the PSPP program could only limp on (without the Bundesbank) for a short while. This would surely bring the existence of the eurozone at risk, thereby sending this most fundamental of European issues back to the lawmakers to clarify - urgently. I have no doubt about the outcome of that political process, not least at a time when the euro enjoys recordhigh support throughout the eurozone, including in Germany. But these things would take time, and in the interim we would see unprecedented political, financial and economic turmoil – in the middle of the pandemic. Without a doubt, the GCC in Karlsruhe knows this, and it’s not an outcome they would want to trigger. But it’ll be good to get this issue behind us