The scene takes place on Tuesday, July 2, in a luxury hotel in Sintra, near Lisbon, Portugal. On the stage, three of the world’s leading central bankers are giving a conference: Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jerome Powell, head of the American Federal Reserve (Fed), and Roberto Campos Neto, governor of the Central Bank of Brazil. All three are, in their own way, under pressure, at the heart of political anger. After four decades of seeing their independence strengthened, “the wind is turning”, says Davide Romelli, an economist at Trinity College Dublin.
The Brazilian governor has been the target of virulent attacks for months from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who accuses him of being his “adversary” because it maintains interest rates considered too high – currently at 10.5%. ” [M. Campos Neto] has a political bias. His work does more harm than good to the country”Lula thundered again two weeks earlier.
In the United States, Jerome Powell, who was appointed to this position in 2017 by Donald Trump, is a regular target of the former White House occupant, who accuses him of favoring the Democrats. The theme comes up again and again and the Republican presidential candidate repeated it at a press conference on Friday, August 9: “The president should at least have a say [dans les décisions de la Fed]. I believe that very strongly. In my case, I’ve made a lot of money, I’ve been very successful, and I believe that my instincts are often better than the people who are at the Federal Reserve.” The billionaire has promised not to reappoint Mr Powell to a third term when his term expires in May 2026.
For the ECB, the pressures are of a different kind. In early July, before the second round of the French legislative elections, the question was whether it would come to the rescue of a government in the event of a panic on the markets. Mme Lagarde carefully avoided answering, but she knew that she would inevitably be at the center of the debates in the event of a French disengagement. Moreover, in recent years, Emmanuel Macron has allowed himself, on several occasions, to criticize the Frankfurt institution. In April, the French president thus considered that the ECB’s mandate, focused on inflation, was “lapsed”, and that he was ” essential “ to add to it “a growth objective, even decarbonization, or at least climate objective”.
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