Mersch studied international law in Paris and is a member of the Luxembourgish bar. In 1973 he received his master's degree in Law from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in 1974 he finished his Postgraduate degree in International Public Law, Master of Political Science from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and in 1975 he earned his Postgraduate degree in Political Science, from the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Career
Mersch served as assistant to the IMF’s Belgian executive director between 1976 and 1978 and later held a short-term position as financial counsellor at the Permanent Representation of Luxembourg in New York. Between 1989 and 1998, Mersch served as Director of the Treasury and as personal representative in the Ministry of Finance for the negotiations leading to the Maastricht Treaty. He turned down an opportunity to run a European CommissionDirectorate-General under PresidentJacques Santer in 1995. He participated in the 1988 European Council meeting in Hannover that re-launched the monetary-union process. In 2010, Mersch lost out against Vítor Constâncio who was appointed vice president of European Central Bank, for an eight-year mandate, in a banking supervision capacity.
Mersch has been a member of the European Central Bank's Executive Board, succeeding José Manuel González Paramo, since December 2012. The Government of Spain under Prime MinisterMariano Rajoy had previously blocked Mersch’s appointment, instead putting forward ECB lawyer Antonio Sáinz de Vicuña for the role. The European Parliament had also opposed his appointment, arguing that the ECB board should contain at least one woman; the parliamentarians' refusal left the bank's top management understaffed for six months. The President of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, assigned Mersch to working jointly with Constâncio on the Eurozone banking union. Since both Governors of National Central Banks and members of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank sit on its Governing Council, Mersch has been a member of the Governing Council since its beginnings.
Public statements
On 19 March 2008, Mersch admonished banks for inappropriate risk management, but perhaps more unusually struck a doveish tone with regard to the future path of the European economy. Mersch has been regarded as relatively hawkish on interest rate policy. While in May 2010 he voiced concerns over Jean-Claude Trichet’s unconditional debt-purchasing programme, he – unlike Jens Weidmann of Germany – supported Mario Draghi’s conditional plan to buy government bonds. In late June, 2011, speaking while at the annual general meeting of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, he said, "it is chaos," when asked what would happen if Greece were to default on its debts. He was described as "a key member" of the ECB Governing Council in the report.
