ECB downplays its role as EU seeks crisis deal

The European Central Bank acted to soften a looming recession and avert a credit crunch by cutting interest rates and offering banks long-term funds on Thursday but doused hopes of dramatic crisis-fighting action in the euro area.

ECB President Mario Draghi discouraged expectations that the bank would massively step up buying of government bonds if European Union leaders agree on moves towards closer fiscal union at a crucial Brussels summit.

He said the euro zone’s EFSF rescue fund should remain the main tool to fight bond market contagion, despite the limits of its leverage, and added that it was illegal for the ECB or national central banks to lend money to the IMF to buy euro zone bonds, appearing to veto one firefighting option under active consideration.

To counter that, he announced unprecedented action to support Europe’s cash-starved banks with three-year liquidity tenders and easier collateral rules and cut interest rates back to a record low 1.0 percent.

The euro and European shares dived as markets, increasingly convinced that only the ECB has the power to protect the euro zone, focused on what Draghi was cool about rather than the measures he announced.

“One step forward, two steps back,” said Alan Clarke, UK and euro zone economist at Scotia Capital. “The euro zone leaders might as well not bother. Pack their bags, go home, enjoy the weekend and do their Christmas shopping.”

The ECB cut its main rate by a quarter-point to a record low 1.0 percent and flagged a strong chance of recession next year. Draghi admitted the central bankers had been divided even on that decision.

“The intensified financial market tensions are continuing to dampen economic activity in the euro area and the outlook remains subject to high uncertainty and substantial downside risks,” he told a news conference.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy dramatized the danger facing the 17-nation single currency area hours before their eighth crisis summit of the year in a speech to European conservative leaders in the French port city of Marseille.

“Never has the risk of Europe exploding been so big,” he told leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of the EU institutions.

“The diagnosis is that the euro, which should inspire confidence, is not inspiring this confidence,” the French leader said. “If there is no deal on Friday, there will be no second chance.”

France and Germany used the Marseille meeting to lobby for their plan to amend the European Union treaty to toughen budget discipline, which they want to have ready by March. But several countries are skeptical of full-blown treaty change.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was convinced leaders would find a solution to the euro crisis at the summit.

The new ECB chief said his remark last week that “other measures” might follow if euro zone leaders agreed to seal a new fiscal compact had been overinterpreted as hinting the bank could step up bond purchases.

“I was surprised by the implicit meaning that was given,” Draghi said, without offering an alternative interpretation.

A Reuters poll of economists found that while 33 out of 57 believe the euro zone will probably survive in its current form, 38 of those questioned expect this week’s summit will fail to deliver a decisive solution to the debt crisis.

GEITHNER ENCOURAGED

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, winding up a visit to Europe to urge decisive action, said the world could be encouraged by the euro zone’s progress in the last few weeks.

It was essential for European leaders to strengthen their financial firewall to give economic reforms a chance to work, he said after talks with new Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti in Milan. Monti is pushing through economic reforms after the euro zone’s third biggest economy found itself sucked to the centre of the debt crisis. [ID:nL5E7N81NJ]

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has ramped up pressure by threatening a mass downgrade of euro-zone sovereign ratings.

It extended that threat on Wednesday to include the European Union itself, which has had a top-notch AAA rating since the mid-1970s, and large euro-zone banks.

In one glimmer of positive news for stressed euro zone countries, two big financial clearing houses cut the cost of using Italian bonds to raise funds following some easing in the country’s bond yields.

Euro zone officials said the summit was likely to decide to bring forward the launch date of a permanent bailout fund to 2012 from mid-2013. Before Draghi spoke, one euro zone source said negotiators were close to agreement for their central banks to lend 150 billion euros to the IMF for firefighting.

However, a proposal to give the permanent European Stability Mechanism a banking license with access to ECB funding was “off the table” due to German opposition.

The EU remains divided over the need for treaty change. Summit chairman Herman Van Rompuy is urging leaders to avoid a laborious full overhaul that could take up to two years and face uncertain ratification. He wants them instead to slip stricter budget enforcement through in a protocol to existing treaties.

This infuriated Merkel and was one reason behind a gloomy briefing by a senior German official on Wednesday, who dampened hopes for a breakthrough and said some leaders and institutions still didn’t understand the severity of the crisis.

If all 27 EU states do not support more fiscal union by adapting the existing Lisbon treaty, which took eight years to negotiate, then Sarkozy and Merkel want the 17 euro zone countries to go ahead alone with more integration.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, speaking for a non-euro state, said: “We want to stick with the 27 concept of course because all of us are members of the European Union and we want to have our influence. We want to keep the European project together.”

Sarkozy and Merkel are both due to hold bilateral meetings later with incoming Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy before they head to Brussels.

“We need more binding and more ambitious rules and commitments for the euro area member states,” Sarkozy and Merkel wrote in a letter to European Council President Van Rompuy, who has made his own proposals for tackling the crisis.

The Franco-German plan would slap automatic penalties on countries that overshoot deficit targets and make countries anchor a balanced budget rule in their constitutions. The sanctions could be stopped only if three quarters of euro zone countries are against them.

Not all euro zone countries are comfortable with all the French and German proposals, with Finland opposed to their call for majority votes on major policy decisions.