"You may be surprised to hear that I agree with Wim," said Christian Noyer after a journalist made a blundering attempt to drive a wedge between Noyer, the European Central Bank's vice-president, and its president Wim Duisenberg. The trick question was whether the ECB should worry about unemployment as well as inflation when setting interest rates. Duisenberg's answer was no, there was no trade-off between inflation and unemployment.
The press conference on July 8 in the ballroom of the Frankfurt Marriott hotel was only the second time since the ECB started in June that Duisenberg and Noyer had faced reporters' questions. Their smiling solidarity suggested that there's little prospect of any public dissent among the members of the ECB's executive board - five seasoned central bankers and a French public servant.
"[The] policy views of members of the governing council have converged to a very large extent over the many years they have been meeting in different forums," Duisenberg says. Euromoney quizzed all six of them on their economic views and found their answers - to questions not pre-censored by Bundesbank-style spin-doctors - fiercely orthodox.
All six believe monetarism provides at least some of the answers to economic dilemmas (Noyer is the only one who appears hesitant); all believe in price stability as the ultimate goal of central banking; none would shrink from criticising governments whose fiscal policies impinged on their monetary policy.