Sometimes 13 does bring bad luck. At any rate, for Robert Habeck, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, Chart 13 in the Federal Government’s Annual Economic Report for 2022, which he has just presented to the press, is not a stroke of luck, to say the least. It shows that the BMWK, as he calls himself, is making the climate his big issue, but is unmistakably walking on the shaky wooden paths of his predecessors when it comes to the economy. What the BMWK does not (yet) understand: Those who cannot master the economy will also fail in climate protection.
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Just imagine that the European Monetary Union (EMU) had never existed, the European Central Bank (ECB) had never been founded, Germany was still directed by the Deutsche Bundesbank in monetary matters, and there were the same post-pandemic shortages and the same speculation-induced price increases for individual products as at present. What a disaster that would be!
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Eastern Europe has become the talk of the political town. While it was hoped in Western Europe that the region would become a new power house in Europe after the Great Reunification in the early 1990s, from which the West would then also benefit, disappointment now prevails. The region is characterized by the emigration of many workers, the dominance of Western companies and enormous political instability, even open turning away from Europe. What has happened?
Eastern Europe: The Forgotten and Misunderstood European Hinterland weiterlesenEnglish version of our article:
https://www.flassbeck-economics.com/has-the-debt-brake-proven-its-flexibility
The realignment of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policy target resembles a revolution: After twenty years, the Central Bank Council has changed the target figure on which monetary policy is based and against which it wants to be measured. From now on, the inflation rate targeted for the euro zone will no longer be „below but close to two percent“, but two percent in the medium term. And it has done so in such a way that deviations from this target rate, both upward and downward, are equally undesirable, as the statement on the ECB’s monetary policy strategy puts it. This means that if the actual inflation rate in the euro area is below the target rate, this is considered just as negative as if the inflation rate is above the target rate.
Light and shadow – the new goal of European monetary policy weiterlesenThe Corona crisis is shaking the economy very differently than all previous crises in the economic history of the western industrialized countries in the last 75 years: Its extent is extreme in terms of geographical scope, impact, duration and, above all, the structure-shifting effects. This also applies to Germany, as can be seen from the more detailed data on macroeconomic development in the first quarter of 2021, which the Federal Statistical Office has recently published.
After the slump in consumption: Will reduced savings pull us out of the swamp? weiterlesenAt the end of April, the European statistics agency Eurostat reported that the gross domestic product (GDP) in the European Monetary Union (EMU) had fallen by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 and that GDP in the European Union (EU) had fallen by 0.4 percent. Both time series had already been in decline (-0.7 and -0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020). Now, in mid-May, Eurostat has confirmed this first estimate: two quarters in a row with a negative growth rate, according to which Europe is in a recession (see Figure 1).
read moreHeiner Flassbeck has created a shorter version of our article „Die Türkei und das Kreuz mit der Währungssouveränität“ in English which is available on flassbeck-economics.com.
Last week Konjunkturanregung: Besser mehr als zu wenig by Heiner Flassbeck and Friederike Spiecker went online, and meanwhile there is an english version of this text available.
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