Peter Boehringer, July 5, 2022, German Trade Balance

AfD Kompakt, July 5, 2022.

What Merkel prepared in the 16 years of her anti-Germany policy, the red-green-yellow Ampel now brings home: Under the Ampel, the life’s blood of the German industry and economy will be turned off, quite consistently and almost literally. Yet its surpluses were and are the source of our prosperity! Without good export numbers – say, in the important Asiatic markets of China and Russia – there are no long-term realizable imports. It may then be that one can live on a systematic, long-term basis of indebtedness, like the U.S.A. on its world reserve currency dollar, or one may have a “Big Spender” in Europe like the EU’s southern countries, so far by means of German EU transfer payments. The Great Awakening will come even for those transfer recipients when in the future Germany can no longer be the world’s paymaster.   

If the government in all fields does not finally change course (an energy policy on a “green”, unrealistic basis, a sanctions policy with harm primarily for one’s own country, CO₂ duties mania, crippling Corona preventive measures, an EU planned economy on the basis of mountains of debt, an economically expensive and harmful immigration policy), Germany’s deficit situation will not have been a one-time slip but will become a long-term condition.

The German success model is thus acutely endangered – and with it disappears our prosperity when a future, long-term trade balance deficit of the greatest EU paymaster will also further weaken the value of the euro and so will further fire up the inflation by means of rising import prices.

As a result of rising prices in a deficit economy, the people will no longer be able to compensate for their sinking purchasing power with higher wages. With the German prosperity also disappears our ability to subsidize the entire world or in the long-term rescue the euro. Will the anti-rational government or the world come to its senses? The German poet Friedrich Hebbel already foresaw it coming 160 years ago: “It is possible that the German disappears from the world stage, for…all nations hate him, the good like the wicked. Yet if they really for once succeed in driving him out, a situation will arise in which they again wanted to scrape him out of the grave with spikes.”

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

Jörn König, June 23, 2022, Digital Euro

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/44, pp. 4569-4570.

Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable colleagues. And before all: Dear savers!

The ECB has a project of which the public knows much too little. It wants to introduce a so-called e-euro; that is, digitalized central bank money, an ECB bitcoin, almost a central bank digital euro. The project is non-transparent and will be pulled through according to the motto of Jean-Claude Juncker: We decide something and wait. If then there is no great outcry and no revolt, then we go further, step by step, until there is no going back.

            Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP): Ja, ja! You certainly know that!

We, the AfD delegation in the German Bundestag, hereby [Drucksache 20/2357] make a revolt against this central bank euro. There plainly still is a going back. We want transparency and demand first an information campaign on the formation of money in a central bank system, on the duties of the central bank and the prospects and risks of the e-euro; and then secondly a referendum according to Article 20 of the Basic Law on the introduction of the central digital euro.

Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, for the euro’s introduction there was at that time no referendum. Today we have inflation, debts, poverty and a shaky currency. The euro has already needed to be saved many times. We recall the “Whatever it takes” of debts master Mario Draghi. Thereby is to be noted: Always at the expense of Germany.

Yesterday evening on “Maischberger”, Peer Steinbrück said: The over-expansive monetary policy of the ECB is to blame for the inflation. He is right. Yet the duty of the ECB, according to charter, is the securing of price level stability. The arsonist ECB is today sold to us as a fire department.

A digitalized central bank money, as the ECB wants it, makes the two-stage banking system superfluous. Indeed in Germany we have 800 Volksbanken and 400 savings banks with a total of 340,000 co-workers. If that were a thing of the past, it would be the end of Germany as a financial venue and a definitive separation from our prosperity.

The risks of the central digital euro are enormous. The data protection is questionable. Negative interest rates could be directly subtracted from digital cash. And even the selective digital expropriation of unfavored persons would be possible; for example, from anyone who anywhere does not want to renounce his diesel, from anyone who wants to continue to make short trips by airplane five times per year, from anyone who does not want to be mRNA vaccinated. Such a central digital euro is a wet dream of Klaus Schwab and his Great Transformation. Away with that!

Just be sure that paper and coin money remain the only unrestricted, legal means of payment. To that belongs that one can settle his taxes with cash; since only cash is genuine.

Many thanks for your attention. And keep an eye on your money!

…

 

[trans: tem]  

 

Albrecht Glaser, May 19, 2022, Taxes, Debts and Democracy

German Bundestag, May 19, 2022, Plenarprotokoll 20/37, pp. 3531-3533. 

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

The draft law aims at committing the tax law as the most important instrument for the stabilization and the strengthening of the business cycle – as it says in the grounds – so as to ameliorate the economic consequences of the pandemic. The previous speakers enumerated the several measures: Degressive AfA [depreciation allowance], loss deduction, tax-free nursing bonus, extension of the home office allowance, and many other things more.

The CDU/CSU delegation’s motion to amend aims in the same direction with numerous demands which in the last two years were proposed by the AfD delegation many times. As is usual in this house, they were all also reflexively rejected by the CDU.

In this time of political agony also occurs the senseless revival of the real property tax. That was tax memorial care, the opposite of reform.

            Frauke Heiligstadt (SPD): Speak on the theme!

In these days, the owners of 35 million pieces of land receive a mountain of paper so as to ascertain their real property values. Under supplementary point 1, urgently proposed by us, a time extension for overcoming this bureaucracy monster is hereby requested. Already in the Kirchhoff proposal for authentic tax reform of ten years ago, the real property tax no longer occurs, and in the head of every tax reformer it also no longer occurs.

In the grounds for the CDU/CSU motion, it further says that the persistently high inflation and the low growth of the economy could be indicators of a stagflation. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, that is in fact the state of understanding. The inflation rate of April of this year was at 7.4 percent. The energy costs have climbed in a year’s comparison by 35 percent; natural gas with 47.5 percent has contributed to the price climb, and the heating oil with 98.6 percent.

The ghost of inflation in the EU thus comes to life – which was to be expected. For years, we were told that inflation was defeated. Then an inflation of under but near 2 percent was the new price stability – the ECB’s own house definition. As the inflation rate moved over the 2 percent line, the narrative of the symmetric inflation goals was applied so as to somehow talk away this process. These days, the ECB divulges – I cite:

We believe that inflation in the course of this year will recede and in the next and following years will be much lower than in this year.

How can one explain this degree of denial of reality? The U.S. central bank certainly needed to raise the interest rates to fight inflation. The ECB instead manages commission work for the “Club Med” of the Romance states which for years command the ECB Council – of the ECB’s independence, there is not a trace. Frau Lagarde was and is a French politician. Of economics she understands, incidentally mentioned, nothing.

The only interest of this majority and its president is to protect the over-indebted Romance countries from state insolvency. If the European interest rates are raised, the costs climb for the state debts. If inflation remains or becomes greater, the state debts melt away. That is the leading maxim of Lagarde and her Club. There, a German central bank governor has not a chance. Better therefore that he resign to take his hat, as in the case recently of two German economists.

The stock of central bank money has increased since 2008 to the end of this year from 880 billion euros to 6 trillion euros; that is a sevenfold increase of the money supply. In the same time, the GDP in the eurozone has climbed by about 32 percent. That means a money supply increase of 600 percent in the face of an economic growth of 32 percent, a proceeding which would be inconceivable with a really independent Bundesbank.

The financing of state budgets by means of central bank presses, de-coupled from real goods production, has in the history of mankind always led to state crises. The zero and negative interest rates policy for years strengthens the effect of this unchecked debts policy. The ECB in large part co-financed the members states’ debts excesses, and thereby initially enabled it. The state debts of the euro countries have grown since the financial crisis from 6.7 trillion euros to 11.3 trillion euros; more than 200 times were the stability criteria ripped up, naturally without sanctions.

            Frauke Heiligstadt (SPD): Theme!

From this 4.6 trillion euro growth of debts which produces this inflation, with which you tinker, the ECB alone has taken 76 percent onto its own books by means of the purchase of state loans. It has thereby in a striking manner violated the express ban on state financing according to Article 123 of the AEUV.

            Nadine Heselhaus (SPD): Wrong!

The EuGH [European High Court] naturally sees all of that differently because there the majority of the judges is the same as that on the ECB Council and in the [EU] Commission.

            Frauke Heiligstadt (SPD): We are speaking on the Corona tax assistance act!

            Markus Herbrand (FDP): The inflation speech, that comes tomorrow afternoon!

The EU Commission accompanies the debts madness with an additional, even so counter to regulation indebtedness of its own, to the sum of 828 billion euros for so-called resilience measures for over-indebted states.

Why all of this? A breaking apart of the EU regime shall be prevented at any price – “whatever it takes”. Who wants to transform this Union into a great state, as it is foreseen in the coalition contract, must destroy many national democracies which were united to prevent such a development. He wants and will produce an ungovernable something which takes the place of national states, which can only be democracies; only they can be democracies!

            Maximilian Mordhorst (FDP) Oh!

Precisely that is what the EU conference has aimed at as a result, with 800 biased [gezinkten] participants: 800, of 550 million inhabitants. That had to have been a partial acceptance of representative opinion.

What will now be done by this government by means of placebos for energy costs, by means of short-term relief for energy taxes and even by means of delayed improvement in the area of business taxes, is the attempt to repair at the national level the failures of the EU and the ECB. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen, this will not succeed.

The EU states find themselves in a dilemma. The inflation will lead either to a massive contraction of the population’s purchasing power and to a mass expropriation of savers, or we will again experience a state debts crisis which is not be mastered.

            Fritz Güntzler (CDU/CSU): Wrong speech!

I come to an end, Frau President.

            Fritz Güntzler (CDU/CSU): “Frau President”, that is good!

All of this will put into question the existence of the euro, whether it suits you or not. We will abstain from the draft law put forward, we will vote for the CDU/CSU motion.

Yet both, right honorable ladies and gentlemen, will change nothing of the general weather conditions which I have sketched for you.

            Fritz Güntzler (CDU/CSU): Herr Glaser, it is no longer a Präsidentin!

            Albrecht Glaser (AfD): Sorry! I cannot see behind!

 

[trans: tem]