19 January 2018 | The EU-Ombudsman has just called it maladministration on the part of the ECB to let Mario Draghi be a member of that secretive bankers’ club. This should invite the question: What about Mark Carney and the Bank of England? The British press, apparently, couldn’t care less. The governor of the Bank […]
Ride-hailing platform operator Uber is often accused of undermining labour market regulations and of overpricing at times of peak demand by “surge pricing”. Uber defends itself against such accusations not only by using high-profile lobbyists, but also with the help of top-notch economists, who cooperate in exchange for exclusive data and lucrative consultancy assignments. Even reputable journals […]
How many companies have merged into corporate groups in Germany? We don’t know. The official figures are completely unconvincing. We have a Monopolies Commission which, together with the German Federal Statistical Office, has the legal mandate to monitor market concentration. Germany’s parliament wanted to ensure that the necessary information about the possible emergence of problematic […]
19 November 2017 | The ECB has answered questions posed by the European Ombudsman to president Mario Draghi regarding his membership and his participation in closed-door meetings of the Group of Thirty (G30), a Group in which the world’s most central bankers and commercial bankers comingle. The 17-page reply manages to evade several questions, is […]
Legal scholar Jane Kelsey from New Zealand has assembled an extremely well-informed report about the negotiations for the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). You learn about the main corporate sponsors of these negotiations, organized in “Team TiSA”, which have privileged access to official negotiators. Kelsey also exposes, how the TiSA sponsors took many of their […]
Emily O‘Reilly is the EU Ombudsman, an arbiter for the public’s complaints about EU-institutions. She has earned a reputation for being tough. She wants written answers from Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, the EU’s monetary and banking surveillance institution. He has to explain how he makes sure that he does not divulge insider information or […]
In its April monthly report, Deutsche Bundesbank explains that banks create money ex-nihilo and rejects the proposal of 100%-money. The full English version is now online. The arguments employed to discredit 100%-money are a mix of sophistry and misleading or false statements.