ECB prepares to defend monetary policy in German court Germany's top monetary policy officials prepared to go head-to-head in the country's constitutional court on Tuesday in the first of two days of hearings into the European Central Bank's pledge last year to save the euro. Although the court has no formal jurisdiction over the ECB and will in any case not rule for months, the hearings are being closely watched as a barometer of both elite and popular German sentiment about eurozone crisis-fighting measures in the run-up to a September election. At stake are two competing visions of monetary policy. One, represented by Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president, is that central banks must cleave narrowly to their job of controlling inflation and ignore almost everything else, which must be left to elected politicians to deal with. The other view, to be represented in court by Jörg Asmussen, ECB executive board member, is that the central bank is allowed under the treaties that established it to conduct unorthodox crisis-fighting measures like the Outright Monetary Transactions bond-buying programme it announced last September. "It is one of the most important court cases in history," the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper wrote in a front-page editorial on Tuesday, highlighting the depth of feeling the debate arouses in some circles in Germany, if not necessarily a sober assessment of the case's impact. In fact, the court cannot rule on whether the ECB has exceeded its mandate, as the Bundesbank has come close to accusing it of doing. At most, it can refer the case to the European Court of Justice or impose conditions on the German government that would somehow seek to limit the independent central bank's room for manoeuvre. Germany, the largest eurozone economy and, through the Bundesbank, the largest ECB shareholder, plays a key role in all eurozone decision-making. In a sign of how seriously the ECB takes the potential negative consequences on German public opinion of the court hearings, Mario Draghi, ECB president, gave a rare broadcast interview to Germany's ZDF television on the eve of the hearings. "The risk to German taxpayers is considerably lower today than it was a year ago," Mr Draghi said, addressing the fundamental concern in Germany that its citizens will eventually end up paying the bill for economic problems elsewhere in the eurozone. "I can guarantee that we won't simply inflate our way out of debt," he added, taking on another commonly held German concern. Part of the savings my family left us three children was destroyed by the inflation in Italy in the late 60s, early 70s. I have early memories about the damaging effects of inflation. The hearings into OMT have been added to an already running case into the legality under German basic law of the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone's permanent bailout fund. The court did not block the ESM from becoming operational last September but is still considering its final verdict on the matter. As such, Wolfgang Schäuble, finance minister, will also appear in the court on Tuesday.