When Angela Merkel, the frontrunner to become Germany's next chancellor in September, is asked these days whether she considers the ECB's current policy to be appropriate, she carefully avoids any clear answer. This is not surprising. You can't win a German election by criticising the central bank, but you can well lose one. Indeed, there is still some kind of Pavlovian conditioning in German society that immediately triggers scepticism about those who express doubts vis-a-vis the monetary