Peter
Boehringer
European
Central Bank and Corona Crisis
AfD
Kompakt, March 19, 2020
[Peter Boehringer is an Alternative für
Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria and is chairman of the Bundestag
budget committee.]
It
is true that extraordinary times like the present Corona crisis require
extraordinary action. Yet is is also to be noted that the ECB [European Central
Bank] is figuring on expanding the loans purchasing program which in the past
was highly controversial and to which the Federal Constitutional Court has not
to this day given the green light. The renewed monetization of loans is, in
addition, counter to the mandate, although in the time of the Corona pandemic
is at least understandable. Yet there is a price to be paid for the more than
five years that the ECB has abused its mandate – since 2015, the presently
employed, instrumental accounts have been abusively plundered.
Tragically,
the ECB, absent an existential crisis in past years, has for the most part
fired its powder, so that the purchase program foreseeably will calm the
capital markets only for a short period. Today’s new “Whatever it takes” will,
by repetition, lose its effect; the euro will further weaken because it is
increasingly distrusted by men and by capital markets.
The
exceptional and emergency measures presently employed would be more effective
if the ECB had at its disposal more room to lower interest rates, and if, shortly
before the Corona crisis, the ECB had not effected loan purchases of over 3
trillion euros! The present measures, along with the crisis, can only soon
become inflationary – this time also for consumer goods prices. People with
particularly weak incomes will then suffer under these measures.
The
AfD Bundestag delegation therefore demands that:
- These measures, being the clear economic policy of the ECB (though far from its mandate), be strictly limited to the time of overcoming the Corona crisis.
- They ought not to be limited to loan purchases, since only banks and large firms are generally capable of emitting loans.
- There must be some way (perhaps through non-bureaucratic, state securities) with this ECB money of saving the independent and small and mid-sized firms, instead of yet again the banks and the big businesses.
- The buoyant billions must be apportioned through the regular credit-granting process of the commercial banks to the people and thus not through the direct loans of the ECB, contrary to the well-founded mandate.
- It is unfair to enforce, concealed under the shelter of the Corona crisis, additional bailouts of banks and as well as of states insolvent long before Corona. That money, to a great extent collateralized by German credit, ought to be for the good of, among others, the distressed German people and businesses, and not simply for the euro bail-out and the EU banks.
It is a matter of great concern that, according to
media reports, the Federal Minister for Finance, along with the ECB, wishes to
first of all “support EUropa” and then, secondly, to save the Germans.
[Translated by
Todd Martin]
