In 2008, Trichet ranked fifth on Newsweek's list of the world's most powerful along with economic triumvirs Ben Bernanke (fourth) and Masaaki Shirakawa (sixth).

In this capacity, he also chaired the Paris Club of creditor nations in the mid-1980s and was closely involved in debt problems that struck Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Under a compromise laid out by German Finance Minister Theo Waigel, Duisenberg would resign midway through his eight-year term to make way for Trichet.

[12] Trichet was a member of the Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, which was established by the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors for the period from 2017 to 2018.

[13] In early 2021, Trichet was appointed by the G20 to the High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on financing the global commons for pandemic preparedness and response, co-chaired by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Lawrence Summers.

[14] At the height of the euro crisis, Trichet publicly criticized President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had agreed at a meeting in Deauville in 2010 that sovereign debt could be restructured in a bailout to make private investors pay their share; the plan was never implemented.

[33] As part of a 2015 investigation launched by Austria’s parliament into defunct lender Hypo Alpe Adria, then opposition party NEOS named Trichet among 200 people it wanted to question.

[36][37] He was also criticized when he refused to answer a question about a possible conflict of interests concerning his successor's involvement at Goldman Sachs before taking charge as head of the ECB.