July 26, 2013.

Measuring Mario Draghi's Promises 1 Year On

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back at him:

WAR IS PEACE.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

One year ago, ECB President Mario Draghi uttered two short sentences that changed the course of Europe's debt crisis, and propelled a once-reluctant central bank more deeply into its role as guardian of the euro.

He took a twenty-five-cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet----everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed----no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

"Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough," said Mr. Draghi on July 26, 2012, in a speech to bankers in London.

The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past----for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapor. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and our of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

The vast majority of euro zone crisis observers consider Mr. Draghi's comment, backed up sixe weeks later with a conditional bond-purchase program called the OMT (which stands for Outright Monetary Transactions), an unqualified success. Spanish and Italian bond yields have stayed relatively low without the ECB even needed to use the facility. "It's really very hard not to state that the OMT has been probably the most successful monetary policy measure undertaken in recent time," Mr. Draghi said last month.