Cracks showing in Germany's fragile truce with ECB

Liverpool

MICHAEL Stuebgen, a conservative member of the German Parliament, was speaking with the head of a local savings bank recently about the European Central Bank's quantitative easing (QE) programme.

"He told me the bond market was being emptied out," Mr Stuebgen recalled. "He likened it to going into a supermarket where everything has been bought up. You might find a shrivelled old carrot or potato. Pretty soon you're starving." Mr Stuebgen, a spokesman on European affairs for Chancellor Angela Merkel's party in the Bundestag, credits the ECB and its president Mario Draghi with saving the eurozone from collapse four years ago.