MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

ECB president Trichet calls for deep changes in the EU treaty

“The lesson of the cost of negligence” underlined Trichet (Photo by EPA/BGNES)

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said the European Union's treaty should be changed to prevent one member state from destabilizing the rest of the bloc, and urged stronger governance of the Euro zone.

“In my view it is necessary to change the treaty to prevent one member state from straying and creating problems for all the others,” Trichet said in interview broadcast on French radio Europe 1 and iTele television on Sunday.

Asked whether this would mean getting rid of vetoes for member states, he said: “To do this, one even needs to be able to impose decisions”.

But he added that he expected existing governance rules would be applied much more rigorously in the future, even without a change in the treaty.

“I think that the lesson of the cost of negligence, of the cost of lax management is sufficiently potent that in future the rules -- which have also just been reinforced -- will be followed much more strictly.”

All advanced economies were being affected by a crisis at the moment but Europe's particular problem was that some countries had not respected treaty rules, Trichet said.

“We don't have a federal budget, we don't have a political federation so we have to fully respect the constraints and the mutual supervision rules that exist in the euro zone,” he said.

“It is the case that in Europe we have a bigger problem than others and this is a problem of supervision and governance within the euro zone,” he added