To avoid leaving the European Central Bank (ECB) at the endless mercy of legal uncertainty surrounding its mandate, it is urgent that EU leaders finally engage in a long overdue revision of the EU Treaty’s monetary financing prohibition rule. This week, the German Federal Constitutional Court has released a dramatic ruling which will have important long-term consequences for the futur...

Funding the public response to the corona crisis without increasing debt and austerity. With Europe in lock-down, awareness is rising that monetary financing is the appropriate way to fund the public response to the corona-crisis. Member States should not be forced to look for funding on the capital market. Instead, they should receive targeted funding directly from their national centr...

Preventing financial crisis by issuance of euros The corona crisis causes a sharp increase of debt. As interest rates rise debt burdens become untenable. A health crisis threatens to become an overall financial crisis. The ECB can prevent this by using its exclusive power to authorise the issuance of emergency euros. The European System of Central Banks (ESCB) can contain the coron...

For years, the ECB has been shooting with bazookas. It has rarely hit its target. Criticism is growing. How do we arrive at effective monetary policy? This is a regulatory issue which transcends the competence of the ECB. The legislator must act and change the institutional order, to enable the ECB to govern the euro sensibly. The ECB is stuck in a straitjacket which it cannot undo o...

Building on the power of collective intelligence, international monetary experts and activists are coming together this March in Copenhagen at the Copenhagen Business School (pictured above), for two important back-to-back events:  The Future of Money Conference on March 21, 2020, followed the IMMR Annual Meeting for Members, March 22-23. THE FUTURE OF MONEY CONFERENCE Gode Penge in De...

The age of digital money by Joseph Huber In technical terms the new era is about the digitisation of money. Digital money is any transferable currency unit in the numerical form of binary digits that are processed electronically. Until some years ago, digital money just referred to cryptocurrencies. Their emergence has triggered the entire hype surrounding anything 'digital'. In the me...

Dominant currency and dominant money by Joseph Huber The approach of dominant money as outlined in this paper has in a way been inspired by theories about the internationally dominant currency as deve­loped in recent years by Gopinath and colleagues, Eichengreen and, prior to them, Hudson.[1] Those theories deal with the dominant role of the US dollar in today's international currency ...

On Monday 2 December 2019, a group of NGOs including Positive Money Europe met with the new President of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde to hand over a letter calling on the ECB to accelerate its efforts in the fight against climate change. Lagarde subsequently confirmed climate change will be in the agenda of the ECB’s review next year. The meeting, which took place place...