Eurobloat #0057 • January 2015
January 2015 opened with a new currency, a new presidency and a fresh determination to spend money nobody had voted to create. By the end of the month the central bank had promised more than a trillion euros, the surveillance enthusiasts had found their excuse, and Greece had voted to leave the asylum. A new start, they called it.
Folly of the Month: A trillion euros, conjured from nothing
On 22 January Mario Draghi committed the European Central Bank to printing at least 1.1 trillion euros, buying 60 billion euros of government bonds every month until September 2016. Germany objected, was outvoted, and watched a central bank with no democratic mandate quietly mutualise the debts of nineteen governments by the back door. The official justification was deflation. The actual effect was to spare spendthrift treasuries the discipline of paying real interest, while German savers funded the holiday. When a single unelected banker can summon a sum larger than most national budgets and call it monetary policy, the question of who governs the eurozone answers itself.
→ ecb.europa.eu → bloomberg.com
1. Lithuania volunteers for the euro on its way down
On 1 January Lithuania became the nineteenth member to adopt the euro, swapping a currency it controlled for one managed in Frankfurt by people it cannot vote out. Three weeks later that same currency embarked on a trillion-euro printing spree. Welcome aboard. Mind the deflation.
2. Parliament discovers that members might know their own farms
On 13 January MEPs voted 480 to 159 to let member states ban genetically modified crops on their own soil, even where Brussels has approved them. A modest outbreak of sovereignty, and welcome. The only puzzle is why permitting a country to decide what grows in its own fields took the European Union four years of deadlock and a directive to arrange.
3. After Paris, ministers reach for your flight records
Within days of the Charlie Hebdo murders, interior ministers meeting in Riga resolved to revive the Passenger Name Record scheme, hoovering up the travel details, payment methods and baggage of every passenger in Europe. Parliament had rightly killed the idea in 2013 on privacy grounds. The attack changed no terrorist's plans, but it changed the Union's, which seized the moment to log the movements of the innocent millions who had nothing to do with it.
4. The court's lawyer blesses the trillion-euro habit
On 14 January, eight days before Draghi opened the taps, the Court's Advocate General declared the earlier OMT bond-buying scheme broadly lawful. Germany had asked whether a central bank may underwrite governments without limit. The answer, predictably, was that it may, provided it promises to be careful.
5. The Monti group sketches an EU tax
Carried into the new year, Mario Monti's high-level group laid out its first assessment of the Union's own resources, the report it had delivered in December and which now landed before the Parliament's leaders. The polite phrase is reforming how the EU is financed. The plainer one is finding a stream of money Brussels can raise itself, without the bother of asking national treasuries, or the citizens who fill them.
6. Latvia takes the wheel, promises more digital Europe
On 1 January Latvia assumed its first Council presidency under the banner Competitive, Digital, Engaged Europe. Translated, this means more single-market harmonisation, more EU-wide digital rules and more engagement, the diplomatic word for spending. Three adjectives, no mention of doing less.
7. The promise to scrap roaming charges, quietly watered down
As the telecoms package moved into the Latvian presidency's hands, the Council set about weakening the net neutrality rules and shelving the pledge of free mobile roaming, offering instead a meagre allowance and a review in 2018. Brussels had spent years promising travellers cheaper calls. The deliverable turned out to be a smaller promise and a longer wait.
8. Greece votes to escape the bailout
On 25 January Greek voters handed victory to Syriza, which had promised to tear up the bailout terms dictated by its creditors. Whatever one makes of the party, the verdict was clear enough: a nation told for years that there was no alternative had found one at the ballot box. Brussels prepared to explain why democracy had voted incorrectly.
9. A new Commission promises to undo its old self
The Commission's 2015 work programme, carried into the new year, vowed to withdraw or amend eighty pending proposals and trim the rulebook under the REFIT banner. Cutting red tape is always welcome. One simply notes that every yard of it was laid by the same institution now charging itself for the clean-up, with nobody held to account for the years of burden in between.
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