Europe's response to the financial crisis and recession has suffered from a lack of effective co-operation among eurozone governments and their leaders, the outgoing head of Europe's employers' association said yesterday. “The great weakness we've felt in the crisis is the weakness of the eurozone institutions. Not the European Central Bank, which has been extremely efficient. If we'd had a hesitant or technically weak ECB, we would have been in chaos,” said Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of BusinessEurope.
“But you could have had the 16 eurozone governments meeting together and assessing the situation together with the central bank – as you've seen in the US,” he told the Financial Times in an interview.
Mr Seillière, 71, is to leave BusinessEurope on June 30 and will be replaced by Jürgen Thumann, 57, a businessman who served for the past three years as head of the Federation of German Industry.