The Case for a European Credit Council: Historical and Constitutional Fine-Tuning

Eric Monnet's European Credit Council (ECC) is an innovative, historically-grounded institutional proposal for supporting the ECB in the design of its monetary policy operations. In this commentary, I seek to strengthen the case for the European Credit Council drawing on work in progress on the history of the ECB. I first discuss the tradition of moderate interventionism as it appears in Monnet's (Monnet, E. (2018). Controlling credit: Central banking and the planned economy in Postwar France, 1948-1973. Cambridge University Press) study Controlling Credit. I show that the model of moderate interventionism was well-known to the drafters of the ECB statutes and efforts to categorically rule such policies out were simply unsuccessful. I suggest that this fortuitous choice has left ample legal space in the EU treaties for an ECC.