Jürgen Stark

Who he is: Jürgen Stark has been a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) since June 2006, responsible for Economics and Monetary Analysis. Stark is often referred to as the ECB's 'chief economist,' which is not an official title. Stark asserts that the countries of the European Union need to restore their countries' competitiveness via adjusting the relative prices and costs of their goods.

The next step, according to Stark, toward a sustainable economy would be to implement strong consolidation efforts, fiscally, as well as to adopt effective rules that would anchor the fiscal prudence in the future budgetary decisions. Third, higher productivity needs to be encouraged. This means that any remaining rigidities in the product and labor markets need to be removed via structural reforms.

Stark also believes that countries with high levels of indebtedness, both public and private, should be watched. These procedures should be semi-automatic and limit the political interference into the process. Stark opposes the use of fixed exchange rates on a global level, asserting that a process that works domestically is too stable for the global world.

When one unbundles his views, Jürgen Stark is just another EU soft-authoritarian, believing that state power should be used to repress citizens and keep them involved in the EU's central banking economy with all its ruin and inflation. One wishes there were more to the story, but Stark is nothing but another socialist bureaucrat posing as capitalist financier. There are many like him.

Background: Jürgen Stark was born on May 31st, 1948 in Gau-Odernheim, Germany. Between 1968 and 1973, he studied economics at the University of Hohenheim and Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen. In 1975, Stark attained his doctorate in economics from the same university. From 1973 to 1978, Dr. Stark was a research assistant at the University of Hohenheim. He became an Official in the Economic Policy Department, Federal Ministry of Economics, in 1978, until 1988. For one year, 1982 to 1983, he was First Secretary at the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in Geneva. In 1988 to 1992, Dr. Stark headed the Foreign Trade and Payments, Money and Foreign Currency, Financial Markets department for the Federal Chancellery.

From 1995 to 1998, Dr. Stark was the State Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Finance, as well as the Personal Representative of the Federal Chancellor for G7/G8 Economic Summits preparation. From September 1998 to April 2002, he was Vice-President of the Deutsche Bundesbank (1st term), a member of the Central Bank Council, and had been deputized for the President on the Governing Council of the European Central Bank.

Dr. Jürgen Stark served a second term as Vice President of the Deutsche Bundesbank from May 2002 to May 2006. Stark was also responsible for International Relations and Internal Auditing. In June of 2005, he was made an honorary professor of Economics at Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen. From 1995, to 2006, Dr. Stark was the alternate governor and delegate for Germany to the International Monetary Fund and from 1998 to 2006, he had been a member of the Committee on the Global Financial System.

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