Money & Finance

Your new and improved digital currency is brought to you by: The World Economic Forum! (whether you want it or not)

3 May 2023 | The lobby of the largest international corporations has networked central banks working on digital central bank currencies and published a “toolkit” to guide the decision making process. Central banksare actually using this guidebook. This might help to explain why the interests of citizens count for so little in this matter, while those of financial corporations are promoted without restraint.

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Vattenfall vs. Germany: A Disgraceful Settlement of a Scandalous Claim

16 March 2021 | On March 5, 2021, it was announced that the Germany had reached an agreement with the Swedish state company Vattenfall to settle a claim valued at up to €7 billion, over the phase-out of nuclear energy in the wake of Fukushima. The government pay Vattenfall €1.4 billion, much too much, argues Juan Carlos Boué in this guest comment.

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Juan Carlos Boué: The World Bank Sausage Factory

13 December 2020 | Investor State Dispute Settlement, those special tribunals which foreign investors can use to sue a host government for alleged infringement on their rights, have drawn criticism for being one sided. Investors can sue governments, but not vice versa. Arbitration counsel Juan Carlos Boue describes a case, which drives this to the extreme. An investor drags a government in front of a tribunal because the government is suing the investor at regular courts. 

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All the good things a digital euro could do – and all the bad things it will

10. 11. 2020 | Few other documents have been sent to me as often as the recent deliberations of the European Central Bank (ECB) on a digital euro. There is obviously a great deal of suspicion with regard to plans of a digital euro. The following analysis will try to answer the question if this suspicion is justified.

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Book Review: An ECB manager on the long and successful history of monetary financing

May 21, 2020 | In his path-breaking history of central banking in Europe, a high-ranking manager of the European Central Bank shows central banking to be much older than the Anglo-Saxon historiography would admit, and that central banks have historically quite often served the purpose of financing public expenditure.

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