Jean-Claude Trichet stood on a stage at Washington’s Willard Hotel, leafed through his prepared speech, and cast it aside. The reason for the European Central Bank president’s Sept. 23 ad-libbing: a desire to rebut what he called the “particularly gloomy” economic outlook of the previous panel featuring former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Pacific Investment Management Co. chief executive officer Mohamed El-Erian. “The overall picture when you look at the euro area as a whole is very, very different from the perception,” Trichet said in his Washington speech to a conference organized by the Bretton ... (full story)