I expected something calmer

LONDON – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told CNBC she believed her tenure at the Frankfurt-based institution would have been a bit “calmer”.

As head of the euro zone central bank since November 2019, Lagarde has faced major challenges, the most important of which is the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was very different from what I initially expected. I didn’t expect a walk in the park, but expected something quieter than what we had,” said Lagarde to CNBC’s Annette Weisbach in an exclusive interview Thursday. .

“The first thing that really hit our radar screen was the Covid crisis, where, you know, one country after another locked up, stopped its activity and where we had to react extremely quickly,” she said. declared.

The ECB was the first European institution to react to the ongoing crisis in March 2020, proposing different sets of stimulus measures to support the euro area.

But there was much more to Lagarde’s plate.

Two months after the first Covid-19 lockdowns in Europe, the German Constitutional Court ruled that parts of previous central bank stimulus measures were illegal under German law. This raised legal questions, but also monetary policy, without precedent.

“Then I had some issues with a national court that wanted to challenge the validity of what had been done,” Lagarde told CNBC.

“I had originally planned to launch a strategy review – which hadn’t happened in the last 17 years at the central bank. We started it, we put it on hold and we started it again, and now we’ve finished it, so all together it’s been a very, very busy years with a massive commitment to support economic activity, ”she said.