Booted out
I WONDER how many votes Helmut Kohl got in the Bundesbank's stony corridors. His country's central bank is or was its most respected institution and he has twice walked all over it in cleated boots. When Germany was reuniting, he laid down, in the face of the facts, that a mark from the east was worth just as much as a mark from the west. When the Bundesbank's presi- dent, Karl Otto Poehl, protested, Mr Kohl brushed him aside and forced his resigna- tion, and the problems of monetary union in one country duly followed. (The voters in what was East Germany seem to have taken them out on him.) Undeterred, he pushed ahead towards monetary union in a dozen countries. This will deal with the mark by abolishing it, and as for the Bundesbank, it will be reduced to the status of a minority shareholder in the upstart European cen- tral bank across the road in Frankfurt. Wim Duisenberg, the new bank's president, has been telling his shareholders to hurry up and bring their interest rates into line with one another's and, of course, with his own. This, too, flies in the face of the facts. It would be hard to persuade the Bundes- bankers that what is right for Germany's economy is right for Ireland's, when Ire- land's is now growing three times as fast. Mr Kohl walked all over these objections in his usual way, but they survive him. A shame that the mark and the Bundesbank didn't.
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