It’s a strange mix of bureaucracy, oligarchy and plutocracy, that likes to think of itself as noocracy—rule by the wise. What we need now is a new word for rule by central bankers, because Europe’s on the way to being run by the officials of the European Central Bank.
I already had concerns about the ECB using its powers to interfere in politics. But the decision by the central bank’s governing council to give itself what its head, Christine Lagarde, called “sovereignty” to choose when, if at all, to support the bonds of troubled eurozone countries takes it well beyond what a normal central bank would do.
