ECB’s Nagel: Europe Must Become Powerful to Negotiate Better on Tariffs

22 January 2025

ECB’s Nagel: Europe Must Become Powerful to Negotiate Better on Tariffs
Joachim Nagel, president of the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking in Sintra, Portugal on June 28, 2023. Photo by Sérgio Garcia/Your Image for ECB, under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Joachim Nagel said on Wednesday that Europe needed strength to wage a tariff discussion.

In an evening reception on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Nagel, who heads the Deutsche Bundesbank, said that ‘tariffs have losers on both sides’.

Europe had to ‘become powerful on the ground’ to be in a better place in a potential negotiation on tariffs, he said. ‘But we need to prepare ourselves.’

Everyone wanted to see Germany ‘coming back’, he said.

‘What I expect from the new government is good news, action, not just doing the analysis we all know’, he said. ‘Now we need action. This is necessary.’

Regarding the German debt brake, Nagel said that despite having worked well in the last 15 years, ‘now we are in a world driven by tectonic changes and we need to address these tectonic changes.’

 

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