Fed's 2012 Transcripts: Fed Officials Opined on 'Complicated Game' ECB's Mario Draghi Played With Germans in Eurocrisis

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said Mario Draghi was "playing a careful game" in the early days of his tenure as president of the European Central Bank, which he began in November 2011 by surprising financial markets with an interest-rate cut to fight a worsening debt crisis.

Transcripts of the Federal Reserve's Jan. 24-25, 2012, meeting showed officials saw Mr. Draghi as having "escalated in the dimension of what central banks can do and what is clearly within the province of the ECB as far as providing liquidity," according to New York Fed President William Dudley.

At a time when eurozone heavyweights like Germany were pushing crisis-hit economies to implement fiscal austerity measures, Mr. Bernanke said Mr. Draghi "has actually been very hawkish fiscally, and I think the purpose of that is to give comfort to the Germans in particular, in the hopes that they will, given these reassurances, be more forthcoming themselves. It is a complicated game."

-- Harriet Torry

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 05, 2018 12:54 ET (17:54 GMT)