ECB’s Paramo Urges ‘Bold’ Step on Fiscal Union

European Central Bank Executive Board member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo urged euro-area politicians to take bold steps toward fiscal union to end the debt crisis, and said they should not rely on the ECB. “Governments cannot expect the ECB to finance public deficits,” Gonzalez-Paramo said in a speech in Oxford, England, yesterday. “It is now a time for politicians to be bold and courageous” and “complete as soon as possible the great project begun 60 years ago towards ever closer union,” he said. Germany and France said yesterday they will make proposals to amend European treaties in coming days to impose greater fiscal discipline on euro-area countries as they struggle to win back investor confidence. French President Nicolas Sarkozyalso agreed to stop pressuring the ECB to do more after resistance from German ChancellorAngela Merkel. Gonzalez-Paramo said there is a need for “more economic and financial integration for the euro area, with a significant transfer of sovereignty to the EMU level over fiscal, structural and financial policies.”

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