Considerations on the Legacy of Ordoliberalism in European Monetary Policy

Abstract

The paper aims to analysis the ordoliberal legacy in European Monetary Policy between 1998 and 2020. What emerges is that although ordoliberal principles were incorporated into the guiding values of the European treaties, they did not play a key role in guiding either the monetary policy strategies fixed in 1998 and 2003 or the ECB interventions implemented between 2011 and 2020 in response to the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis. This is basically due to a) the ECB's acceptance of the New Consensus Macroeconomics (NCM) that recognises the endogenous nature of money and its partial non-neutrality, b) the ECB's constant tendency to act discretionally in order to reach different goals.