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Both of them have been keeping aggregate debt to gdp ratios above 60%, for most of the decade, but the quote doesn't discuss that bit of their fiscal position. Germany should have been running budget surpluses in the boom years in order to bring the deficit down but instead they - together with France - forced a redefinition of the Growth and Stability Pact when it suited their excesses, and kept running deficits throughout. The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter
Demanding that neither the Eurozone nor the individual nations in the Eurozone take on the responsibility of the economic sovereign for maintaining economic stability is indeed a trick of the plutocrats. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
And how about this?
Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union [PDF]
Article 123 (ex Article 101 TEC) 1. Overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility with the European Central Bank or with the central banks of the Member States (hereinafter referred to as `national central banks ') in favour of Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public under takings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the European Central Bank or national central banks of debt instruments. 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to publicly owned credit institutions which, in the context of the supply of reserves by central banks, shall be given the same treatment by national central banks and the European Central Bank as private credit institutions.
It seems highly likely that there is some artifice by which the functional equivalent of an overdraft facility can be provided ... after all, when a government "borrows" to "finance" deficit spending, it is "borrowing" purchasing power brought into being by that deficit spending ... so someone who knows how the economy actually works may indeed be able to work out an instrument that follows the rules of the neoliberal fantasy while in fact relying on the actual working of a reserve banking chartalist money system in the real morning. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
The Government gets an overdraft facility from a politically connected major private bank, and the private bank uses ECB repos to fund that facility. The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter
This evolved, of course, in the aftermath of an entrenched anti-central-bank ideology among agrarian populists, so that chartered "third Bank of the United States" would have been politically much harder to get established than the "network of clearing houses".
Quite the same trick could be done to provide for EU central commission overdraft facilities in some privately owned but publicly governed bank. The pretext, being a pretext, would be any useful function that would involve a subordinate clearing house role ... it could be related to trade promotion (say, with low-income nations), with regulating some variety of transaction, or insuring deposits in some class of institution ... , and with the privately owned shareholder banks being under some legal requirement to hold some share of their Eurobank reserves on account with the subordinate clearing house by transfer to its own Eurobank reserve account.
That gets around the letter of the law regarding discrimination between public and private institutions. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Ah, we have found a use for the much maligned Spanish Cajas de Ahorros, German Landsbanken and Sparkassen, etc... The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter
Thanks for confirming that the fantasy world of neoliberal belief is encoded in the European Union's treaties.
[Europe.Is.Doomed™ Alert] and I don't mean to snark. The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter
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