The ECB Shadow Council was founded in 2002 upon an initiative of Handelsblatt, the German business and financial daily. It is an unofficial panel, independent of the ECB/Eurosystem, and comprising fifteen prominent European economists drawn from academia, financial institutions, consultancies, companies and research institutes.
The Shadow Council usually convenes by telephone conference on a monthly basis (though in November it holds a physical meeting). Its discussions take place a week before the monthly official ECB Governing Council "policy" meetings, and are intended to formulate an opinion as to what monetary policy decision its members believe that the ECB's Governing Council ought to undertake, both at its forthcoming meeting and also on a three month horizon. Shadow Council members are encouraged to submit their own economic projections for euro area activity and inflation on a monthly basis, which constitutes the panel's forecast consensus as published each month.
The Shadow Council's discussions and recommendations differ from surveys of economists concerning the outlook for ECB interest rates because the Shadow Council recommendation expresses the majority view of its' members opinion about what the ECB should do, rather than what they forecast it to do (and hence the "normative" views as expressed by Shadow Council members on what they consider the ECB ought to do can and often do differ from what they might say they expect the ECB to do). This "normative perspective can, however, give an early indication of shifts in the balance of opinion in the expert community, as can be seen by comparing the historic recommendations of the Shadow Council against subsequent decisions undertaken by the ECB Governing Council.
Members of the Shadow Council base their recommendations on the ECB's objectives as defined under the EU Treaty, though Shadow Council members do not necessarily adopt exactly the ECB's specific interpretation of its mandate: most Shadow Council members consider that a medium term inflation objective of two percent with a symmetric tolerance band around it would be clearer, more realistic and more appropriate than the definition adopted by the Governing Council, which defines price stability as an inflation rate of "below, but close to, two percent", in the medium term.
Members:
| Member | Affiliation | Rate recommendation | |
| José Alzola | The Observatory Group | unchanged | |
| Marco Annunziata | General Electric | ||
| Manuel Balmaseda | CEMEX | cut 0.25% | |
| Elga Bartsch | Morgan Stanley | cut 0.25% | |
| Andrew Bosomworth | Pimco | cut 0.25% | |
| Sylvain Broyer | Natixis | cut 0.25% | |
| Jacques Cailloux | Nomura | cut 0.25% | |
| Julian Callow | Barclays Capital | cut 0.25% | |
| Eric Chaney | Axa | ||
| Janet Henry | HSBC | cut 0.25% | |
| Merijn Knibbe | Wageningen University | cut 0.25% | |
| Jörg Krämer | Commerzbank | hike 0,25% | |
| Erik Nielsen | Unicredit | cut 0.25% | |
| Jean-Michel Six | Standard & Poor's | cut 0.25% | |
| Richard Werner | University Southampton | unchanged |
Frankfurt, 28 June, 2013
Non-voting Chair of the Shadow ECB Council
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