Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard sees the European Central Bank’s latest reflationary moves for what they are:

[ECB president] Mario Draghi has played a weak hand with skill, as always. He is a superb actor. Yet the package of measures unveiled by the ECB yesterday is pitifully small and mostly window dressing, an effort to buy time with a mix of vague gestures and outright gimmicks, a substitute for decisive action.
“This is a classic ECB play of the kind we have seen so many times over the last three years,” said Andrew Roberts, credit chief at RBS. “There is huge smoke and mirrors at the time of the announcement, but when you go through the figures 24 hours later you realise it is nothing like what you thought.”
The delirious reaction of market traders is interesting, but essentially just noise. What the ECB did will not move the macroeconomic dial by one iota.
As Christian Schulz from Berenberg Bank puts it, the latest rate cuts are a screen to “paper over divisions”. The ECB could not secure German political consent for genuine reflation, so it put on a pantomime instead.

When it comes to the problems of the post-2008 world, Evans-Pritchard writes from an essentially Keynesian point of view (to oversimplify), but whatever you might think of that, he is right to make clear that this is not simply a matter of politics, however much the Financial Times and others in the reflationary camp might like to pretend.

Evans-Pritchard again (my emphasis added):

The cut in the discount rate to minus 0.2pc is clearly intended to drive down the euro, so far successfully. It is however a hazardous strategy, which is why the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England never went this far. Much of Europe’s €900bn money market industry is sliding under water. We can expect an exodus over the next two months as maturities expire.
The ECB is twisting itself in knots, undertaking ever more complicated operations because it will not bite the bullet and launch plain vanilla QE, a €1 trillion blitz of sovereign bond purchases, starting immediately, and with no ifs and buts.
It is not doing this because Germany has a de facto veto, and everybody knows that there will be a challenge filed at the German constitution court the moment any such action is taken. This is not a criticism of Germany. I entirely agree with German patriots who say that QE is fiscal union by the backdoor and an assault on the budgetary prerogatives of the Bundestag, an evisceration of German democracy. It is a criticism of the irredeemably hopeless construction of monetary union. My argument has always been that EMU should be dismantled because it is a creeping danger to democracy.

Indeed it is. That was, of course, always the idea. The EU is, after all, a post-democratic project, a project of a parasitic class, unified primarily by greed, a shared misreading of history and a deep contempt for the ballot box. The monetary union should indeed be dismantled (starting with its division in two), and it should be followed into history by the notion of “ever closer union.”

There is, of course, a profound irony that the most effective way of extricating the euro zone from the worst of its current mess would involve an attack on Germany’s postwar constitutional order.

The EU, you may recall, supposedly exists to stop Europe repeating the mistakes of its twentieth century past. As such, one would have thought that a German constitutional democracy was a good thing.

Apparently not, it seems. Not if it gets in the way of the euro.