You would have thought him a prosecutor knee-deep rooting out corruption. The man detested the very possibility of anyone scheming under his nose. But Jean-Claude Trichet wasn’t some overtly aggressive DA targeting mafiosos, he was the ECB’s boss determined to impeach businesses even local governments throughout Europe before any of them let Brent get into their heads.
Brent, of course, the benchmark oil price for Europe. In the middle of 2008, when the first part of our story took place, crude was surging in a way it hadn’t since the seventies. This immediately brought fears of another not-so-great inflation wiping out much prosperity for a second generation.
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