Five years after Draghi’s ‘bumblebee’ speech, euro normalisation is real option
Frankfurt — Five years ago today, Mario Draghi was talking about bumblebees. The European Central Bank (ECB) president’s speech in London on July 26 2012, became instantly famous because of his pledge to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro. But for all the power and clarity of that phrase, he started his remarks more obliquely. "The euro is like a bumblebee. This is a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but instead it does. So the euro was a bumblebee that flew very well for several years. And now — and I think people ask ‘how come?’ — probably there was something in the atmosphere, in the air, that made the bumblebee fly. Now something must have changed in the air, and we know what after the financial crisis." At the time, the currency bloc was being buffeted by soaring bond yields in peripheral nations as speculators bet that the union’s fundamental flaws would rip it apart. Draghi’s answer was to state unequivocally that the immediate crisis fell under the ECB’s respon...
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