Frankfurt: When inflation surged to the highest level in three decades in Germany, Simon and Lena Wendland, parents of newborn twins, said that their lives became more uncertain.
Their power supplier has just announced it doubled the electricity price, while the property price looks “a bit scary”.
“We don’t know where this will lead us,” Simon Wendland told AFP.
From energy and food, to paper and rent, prices have lined up with mercy higher in Germany and throughout Europe.
The latest data places inflation in the largest economy of Europe in five percent year-on-year, a level that is not seen in the last 30 years.
Bild, the best-selling newspaper in the country, blamed the European Central Bank for failing to control prices and even add problems with the cheap money policy.
ECB based in Frankfurt argues that low interest rates record and 1.85 trillion-euro ($ 2.15 trillion) the emergency purchase program Pandemi Pandemi is needed to sustain the economy which is damaged by the Coronavirus crisis.
However, in Germany, Saver believes that the ECB’s zero-interest policy is eating far at the value of their assets.
Bild recently branded Christine Chief Christine Lagarde as “Madame Inflation”, said he was “wearing channel clothes” but “mocking the fate of retirees, employees and savers”, even if the President of the Central Bank has expressed concern about the increase in prices of basic food ingredients in supermarkets .
With ultra-loose monetary policy from the past few years, the ECB has long been a Bugbear for German savers.
Bild has been dubbed the predecessor of Lagarde Mario Draghi “Draghila”, comparing it with vampires “sucking our account to the last decline”.
After the destruction was carried out by the 1920s and 1970s inflation crisis, Germany had an ingrained fear of meat, carsten brzeski economists said.
Lagarde’s repeat statement that the recent surge in prices is the transition filled with distrust in the most populous country in Europe.
“According to Madame Lagarde, we will overcome all of them in the middle of next year, but that’s what he said,” said Marlott Kroeber, a former 72-year-old teacher.
German bankers have also voiced skeptics about Lagarde’s assessment.
“There are more indications that this price surge is not temporary and we must live with it outside this year,” said Commerzbank’s Head Manfred Knof.
Christian sewing, his colleagues at Deutsche Bank, have encouraged the central bank to “find ways to get out of their very accommodating monetary policy,” and “better better”.
– The last defender – German Central Bank Head Jens Weidmann recently dropped a bomb by announcing the resignation from a strong Bundesbank at the end of this year.
Weidmann, who has led the Bundesbank for a decade, is often regarded as a voice alone to the Ultra-loose ECB policy.
So with him left, “The last defender from the German saver has surrendered,” said the newspaper Die Welt in tribute to the central banker.
However, analysts argue that the ECB has protected the eurozone prosperity with its policy.
Critics forget “that the agency also ensured that the economy continued to be given support, that the euro zone was maintained and the German work market saw the boom” not visible in 20 years, said Brzeski.
Employees can also benefit from a strong economy while the country has been able to take loans at a negative price.
Therefore some consumers are still in the ECB camp.
Retired Hermann Vogt for one believes that the central bank “does most of what is needed” for the interests of the 19th zone.