FRANKFURT — Hans Tietmeyer, the central banker who led Germany’s transition from the deutsche mark to the euro despite reservations about a single European currency, died Tuesday. He was 85.
The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, announced his death but did not give the cause or say where he died.
As president of the Bundesbank from 1993 until 1999, Mr. Tietmeyer was the most powerful central banker in Europe and a leading advocate of policies that prized price stability above all else. But in contrast to some of his more dogmatic predecessors, he was also known as a politically savvy pragmatist capable of compromise.
In the years leading up to the creation of the euro in 1999, the Bundesbank under Mr. Tietmeyer set the tone for other central banks in Europe because of Germany’s status as Europe’s largest economy and the stability of Germany’s currency. When the Bundesbank raised or lowered its benchmark interest rates, the central banks of France, Italy, and other European countries had little choice but to follow suit.
Mr. Tietmeyer played a leading role in the years of negotiations that preceded the euro. He was among those insisting that countries joining the new currency union should be held to strict spending limits, and that the European Central Bank’s top priority should be to contain inflation.
After the Bundesbank and other central banks in the eurozone ceded power over monetary policy to the European Central Bank in 1999, Mr. Tietmeyer remained a visible and influential speaker and commentator. In a 2004 book, “Herausforderung Euro,’’ he lamented that many countries had violated the spending limits he had worked so hard to establish.
Mr. Tietmeyer expressed doubts about whether the euro could be sustained without a strong European central government to enforce fiscal discipline. “One must not underestimate the risk to the euro of faulty budget discipline,’’ he said in 2007.
His views seemed to be vindicated in 2010, when the government of Greece was discovered to have systematically concealed its runaway public debt, provoking a crisis that nearly destroyed the euro.
