During the euro crisis, the European Central Bank supported the solvency of banks with a very generous provision of liquidity. This policy met with fierce criticism among German economists, among others. Its two main accusations were that the ECB was bailing out failing banks under the pretext of securing liquidity ("delaying bankruptcy"), which violated its mandate.
And in return for its loans, the ECB accepts collateral with a questionable value ("garbage chute"). Such scandalous behavior, according to the findings at the time, was at least dubious.
In the crisis at Credit Suisse, the Swiss National Bank supports the solvency of Credit Suisse and UBS with a very generous provision of liquidity. This policy has met with fierce criticism in the Swiss media, among others. The two main accusations are that politicians have also restricted the independence of the central bank in the course of applying emergency decrees to rescue Credit Suisse.
This restriction, and this is the second accusation, consists in the granting of central bank loans without any collateral, which is actually prohibited for good reason. The "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" writes of "potentially unlimited blank loans" to Credit Suisse and of a "breach of monetary policy taboo" that one would not have expected from a "conservative" central bank.
The two examples show why regulatory considerations remain necessary even in our time. The role of a central bank in modern financial market capitalism, in which the formerly separate concepts of monetary stability, financial market stability and sustainability of government debt are combined, requires a calm but also goal-oriented debate.
Traditionalists who dream of the return of central banks, as there were 40 years ago, may call the call for such a debate another breach of taboo. However, future-oriented order thinking will only experience a renaissance if it deals with today's challenges without prejudice.