DealBook: A Financier’s Farewell to Trichet

Sebastien Pirlet/ReutersJean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank.

LONDON — At least one financier will not be sad to see the European Central Bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, retire this month.

In an unusual step, Edouard Carmignac, founder and chairman of the French money manager Carmignac Gestion, took out full-page ads on Wednesday in four newspapers to deliver an open letter to Mr. Trichet that starts: “Farewell, you certainly won’t be missed!”

The publications in The Financial Times of London, Spain’s El Pais and the French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde, come a day before Mr. Trichet is expected to chair his final meeting of the E.C.B. committee and hand over the job to Mario Draghi at the end of the month.

In the letter, Mr. Carmignac asked Mr. Trichet to cut the interest rate to 0 percent from 1.5 percent and pledge to “purchase unlimited amounts of distressed countries’ sovereign debt.” Such purchases would not accelerate inflation but “merely lessen the strength of the powerful deflationary forces” while also pushing down the euro, Mr. Carmignac wrote.

“But wouldn’t a weak euro be preferable to no euro at all?” he argued in the letter.

Mr. Carmignac also accused Mr. Trichet of worsening “the impact of the 2008 crisis by underestimating its scale and, more recently, endangered the euro with ill-considered rate hikes and clearly inadequate support for the debt of weakened European countries.”

“The situation is serious and calls for immediate actions,” Mr. Carmignac wrote. “The vicissitudes of the European construction imply that neither politicians nor any institution but the E.C.B. is in a position to act decisively. Hence, the formidable task of filling this role is yours. I sincerely hope that the zealous senior civil servant we all know will reveal himself a true statesman.”

Mr. Carmignac founded Carmignac Gestion in 1989 and is known for generating large returns by making bold bets on stocks in 2008, when many of his rivals struggled. Carmignac Gestion has almost 50 billion euros ($66 billion) of assets under management across its 19 funds.

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