Do you want to know why your bills are doubling? Ask the ECB
If you ask yourself why you will be paying your bills much more this winter, and if you have a business you risk a good double. The EU has not only been unable to plan anything from the point of view of energy policy, but is doing so, with the active help of the ECB, to make the crisis even more burning and prolonged over time.
Let's see what the Central Bank has studied to make the situation even worse: instead of focusing on its mandate alone, price stability 8 which it still fails to guarantee) and perhaps, in its spare time, on unemployment, it has decided to add another objective to his ever-growing list of things his career economists need to fix. According to Bloomberg, the central bank "will review the business operations of major lenders as part of climate stress tests next year, after judging that a lending book assessment alone will not provide enough information on the fallout they face from global warming. ".
The ECB – which wants to change its name to European Climate Bank – will also study the reputational and operational risks banks face, Alvarez & Marsal, a consultancy involved in the process, told Bloomberg. In other words, if a bank is found to finance natural gas exploration, it will be publicly shamed for not being one of the ESG groups, i.e. ecologically committed. The result will be even less investment in carbon development and, as green energy is still impractical without massive government subsidies and is also years away from replacing carbon as an energy source, even higher energy prices.
Meanwhile, as the ECB does not already have enough things on its plate to spoil, the Climate Bank will now take care of the commercial operations of the banks, which as Bloomberg notes poses an additional challenge for an industry that has already warned it is not ready to go. the next benchmark test of the year. The ECB is looking for more details than other central banks and, behind the scenes, has intensified the pressure on the sector to cope at the moment.
The result of this policy, completely disconnected from the economic and monetary policy objectives of a central bank, is what we are seeing: without investments in the exploitation of the only serious energy sources present, gas and oil, these fall and therefore the costs of products. related go to the stars. And why is the ECB dealing with this issue in such a counterproductive way? Because national politicians are too cowardly to ask for a vote on energy policies that would see them slaughtered in elections. So they decided to rely on an undemocratic body to enforce these policies. The result? Even the ECB, a technical deed, becomes political and therefore is part of everything that is legitimately contestable in a democratic way. If you bet the euro and lose, that too is overwhelmed.
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The article Do you want to know why your bills are doubling? Ask the ECB it comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/volete-sapere-perche-raddoppiano-le-vostre-bollette-chiedetelo-alla-bce/ on Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:17:06 +0000.