BERLIN (Reuters) – Olli Rehn, an ECB policymaker, said that the U.S. administration must be encouraged to avoid leveraging “unnecessary and very harmful” tariffs on Europe through a negotiations solution.
“The simple conclusion is that we should aim at a negotiated solution,” said the Finnish central bank governor at a policy panel in Berlin on Thursday.
The European Union is set to impose counter tariffs on 26 billion euros’ ($28 billion) worth of U.S. goods from next month, ramping up a global trade war in response to blanket U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium, but said it remains open to negotiations.
Rehn said the ECB is carefully monitoring how the Trump administration treats the independence of the U.S. Federal Reserve and added that he hoped the U.S. Congress could be counted on to maintain checks and balances on the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to cryptocurrencies is also on the ECB’s radar, said Rehn, adding that it was monitoring whether there would be some involvement of taxpayers’ money, and maybe links to stablecoins and thus links to the dollar-based system.
If that were to be the case, “then this has quite serious potential to create systemic risks,” he said.
(Reporting by Miranda Murray, Editing by Friederike Heine)
