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Originally Posted by Wiener Zeitung
From climate emergency to intelligence emergency
Under the pretext of climate protection, a bureaucratic planned economy is emerging in Europe.
So far, we have actually believed that the most important task of a central bank - such as the European Central Bank - is to keep monetary value stable and thus create an important prerequisite for a functioning economy. However, we owe the new ECB President Christine Lagarde the rather astonishing finding that regulation of the air temperature on this planet has recently also become the competence of the central bank.
Ms. Lagarde, she recently said, wants to focus monetary policy on "climate change, environmental protection and sustainability as additional core tasks"; combating climate change is of "mission-critical importance". Her highly scientific justification for this: "If we do nothing now against climate change, we will be toasted, roasted and grilled in 50 years."
To prevent this, the ECB should in future prefer to buy securities from companies that behave in a climate-friendly manner. A kind of cadastre should answer whether they do that, which will be drawn up by the EU bureaucracy by 2022 and will then differentiate between "good" and "bad" companies from a climate policy perspective.
This is a development that is extremely problematic in several ways. By pursuing climate policy, the ECB performs functions without any democratic legitimation and without any rule of law that are the responsibility of governments and parliaments in a balanced democracy. These - and only these - are legitimized by the voter to pursue any climate policy. The ECB, on the other hand, is clearly not.
In addition, under the guise of climate protection, the ECB will start to pursue industrial policy by
it ultimately decides which ("good") companies receive loans on better terms and which ("bad") do not. The ECB would thus become a kind of planning authority without a democratic mandate.
That may be, Ms. Lagarde is French, owing to the traditional and fateful French tendency towards planned economy thinking, but it would ultimately be political fraud. After all, when the euro was introduced, we were promised that the ECB would provide a hard and stable currency based on the example of the Deutsche Bundesbank. We are now a long way from that - which Ms. Lagarde doesn't seem to care. Just as little as the fact that important experts in monetary policy consider this dangerous.
Jerome Powell, head of the US Federal Reserve, recently said before Congress: "Climate change is an important issue, but not primarily for the Fed. It is the job of elected officials, not ours." That's the way it is. But economic reason and market economy thinking seem to be among the first victims of climate change. Last but not least, the climate emergency declared by the EU seems to go hand in hand with a no less critical intelligence emergency.
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12-14-19, 09:51 AM
Why does nobody declare a state of intelligence emergency?
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