ROME (MktNews) - European Commission President Romano Prodi said the euro's recent fall on foreign exchange markets underlines the need for more co-ordinated European economic policies and a so-called 'Mr Euro' to figurehead them, according to an Italian newspaper interview published Friday.
"If on days like this there were already a Mr Euro, we would all be calmer," Prodi told the Rome daily La Repubblica on Thursday evening, after the day's strong euro-dollar selling.
"If the instruments of a European economic policy were already defined, and if the Commission had the powers to manages them, we would be better off," he said.
On the same theme, he added, "the Federal Reserve has the US Treasury beside it, the ECB has nothing. Independence and solitude are two different things, and here we have both."
Despite these observations, Prodi maintained that the euro's recent fall was "inexplicable;" said the most recent eurozone economic data were "not very different from ten days ago;" and that the ECB "is working well."
"We certainly have to be attentive, but the real economy is okay," he reassured.
Looking at the origins of the euro's most recent decline, Prodi said: "this tempest originated from negative psychological indications from Germany," an apparent reference to the IFO February business confidence index published Wednesday.
"If a chain of negative sentiment is created, that can set of a self-generating process," he warned, "but at the moment, I don't see any objective justification for it."