Jean-Claude Trichet, current president of the European Central Bank (ECB), will preside over the lender's governing council for one more day. He departs after eight years of service and leading the institution through a historical crisis. Raising interest rates before the Lehman fall in 2008 and again in 2011 are the two calculation errors that earned the French banker 'barely passing' marks from 24 expert groups that evaluated Trichet's management of the central bank.
Apart from raising rates just before two enormous market corrections, the 24 firms that collaborated to rate Trichet's abilities also considered Germany's delayed but imminent decisions as factors. They fired him after he earned a 5.5/10 rating.
The analysts also could not overlook the risky decisions that Trichet took in 2008 before the financial system went under, much less that he repeated the same mistake again this year when raising interest rates when most other central banks maintained them or lowered them to counter prevailing economic weakness and mitigate fears of another recession that market and macroeconomic data was forecasting.
"Despite raising interest rates, he yielded to pressure from Germany and put their interests ahead of those of the EU and rest of the world," experts from XTB explained. Gestiohna pointed out that Trichet did not consider matters of conventional monetary policy that differ between strong economies like Germany, France and Holland and the weaker peripherals. Trichet walks out holding a stack of reproaches. Six people gave Trichet a rating less than 3/10.
