About 60 years ago, Nobel laureate Thomas Shelling published a book titled “The strategy of conflict”. It was written during the cold war and reflects the typical worries of the…
Publications
The left-liberal newspaper The Guardian recently published “Has Covid ended the neoliberal era?” by Adam Tooze, Professor of History at Columbia University. The article embodies a renewed vigor on the…
According to a scientific paper just published, lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a mere 0.2% on average, while the economic costs were enormous. This is…
The ECB Report on a digital euro states explicitly that a digital euro would support the role of the European Union as a sovereign entity and foster the international role…
On January 22, the Italian Parliament set out to elect the President of the Republic succeeding president Sergio Mattarella. It was an important event. Although the Italian president does not…
Today, personal data have become the resources driving much of current online activity in our global economy. Internet has torn down national borders in many aspects of our daily life.…
In recent times, the EU authority has been challenged by Romania and Poland, both of whom have asserted the primacy of their domestic laws over EU treaty law in certain…
Central banks increasingly consider combating climate change by pursuing a “green monetary policy”. The European Central Bank is also venturing into the field of climate protection. The ECB can support…
Lest our readers might consider that our seemingly disparate range of monthly topics are randomly chosen, we summarise below how our newsletters attempt to form a pattern enabling some overall analysis of ECB thinking to be deduced. We see increasing parallels between the ECB/ Eurosystem’s approach to creative accounting and masking of its debts, and the banking system’s use of financial engineering to conceal exposures in off balance sheet vehicles.
Public debt in the whole world keeps growing. As recently reported in “A Mountain of Debt: Navigating the Legacy of the Pandemic” and “The Aftermath of Debt Surges”, it is just the last “debt wave” in a long-established tendency. Yet, the rise has accelerated during the Covid-19 Pandemic: during 2020, public debt increased by 16 percentage points to 120% of GDP in the advanced economies, and by 13 percentage points to 97% of GDP globally. What are the possible ways out?