Ewald Nowotny

Who is Ewald Nowotny?

Ewald Nowotny is an Austrian economist and social democratic politician and currently president of the National Bank of Austria and member of the European Central Bank ’s governing council.

He graduated with a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1966, took his habilitation at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in 1972 and has been a full professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration since 1982.

Since 1974, he has held various functions in the Austrian Social Democratic Party.

He was a member of the Nationalrat, the more important chamber of the Austrian parliament, from 1978 to 1999.

From 1999 to 2003, Professor Nowotny was vice president of the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg. From the beginning of 2006 until mid-2008, he was the CEO of BAWAG P.S.K..

Since September 2008 he has served as the Governor of the Austrian National Bank and member of the ECB governing council. With the 2011 round of the Greek financial crisis, "[s]ome analysts [saw] signs of growing tensions between European officials and the ratings agencies" and Nowotny gave voice to the concern, saying "that ratings companies were making it more difficult to stabilize the Greek debt situation. 'We have a somewhat strange situation. The banks themselves are ready, because they also have an interest in that, to stabilize Greece,' Nowotny said in Vienna, according to Dow Jones Newswires. 'The ratings agencies are being in this European matter much stricter and more aggressive than in, for example, similar cases in South America.'” European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said it’s the ECB’s responsibility to decide whether or not to accept Greek debt as collateral in case rating agencies slap the country with a default rating. “At the end of the day it has to be the decision of the ECB. The ECB should not be totally dependent on rating agencies,” Nowotny said in an interview with CNBC. “It is our own responsibility, our own decision. We have proved this in the case of Ireland, Greece and Portugal, with regard to what kind of collateral we accept.”