Former Handelsblatt Editor Exposes EU’s Green Finance Bubble Conspiracy

Dec. 5, 2019 (EIRNS)—Gabor Steingart, former editor-in-chief of Germany’s business daily Handesblatt, is the first figure with the “established” media to blow up the EU Green finance conspiracy in Germany, after EIR and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Steingart is a well-known journalist who founded his own multimedia group and is a frequent talk show guest. His newsletter is circulated for free to 100,000 readers and his podcast has up to 500,000 viewers. His economic views are not Hamiltonian, but his criticism hits the point.

“The ECB in Frankfurt, the [EU] European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, and the EU Commission in Brussels are pursuing together a grand plan, with risks and side effects that no national parliament has been informed of. Europe wants to rescue the world climate—with the money printing press. Whatever it takes,” wrote Steingart, in a guest column today in Focus Online.

“The secret script has already been written. It looks like this:

“• The EU Parliament establishes the climate emergency, as they did last Thursday [Nov. 28]. Everything should be subordinated to the purpose of ‘limiting global warming to below 1.5° Celsius.’

“• The new EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accordingly will put the ecological transition at the center of her inauguration speech. ‘I want the Green Deal to become Europe’s trademark,’ she said. The continent of the industrial revolution is to be de-carbonized in order to achieve ‘climate neutrality.’

“• The main instrument for the operation is, on one side, the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, led by German economist Werner Hoyer.... The multilateral bank should draft, implement and finance eco-projects worth €1 trillion by 2030.

“• The ECB accompanies this, with printing press money. In the context of its already active purchase program, the ECB should now invest in green stocks and bonds. ECB President Christine Lagarde seems not to recognize a border violation: here: ‘Climate change and environment protection should be in the focus of every institution,’ she told the European Parliament....”

“Greta Thunberg’s alarmism and John Maynard Keynes’ interventionism are joining hands,” writes Steingart. A new chapter of European economic history is being opened, with central banks “going from bailing out banks to bailing out the climate.” While Steingart wrongly calls this “French-style planning,” he correctly reminds the German reader that the ECB action is backed by taxpayers’ money, which is what ECB member-states paid as ECB capital. “They back the ECB balance sheet with already about €200 billion. That is the equivalent to the Bundeswehr budget for five years.”

The Parliament deputies know about these plans but are acting “sleepy.” Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann has mumbled something about it, but he is careful not to be too loud.

From the standpoint of the ECB’s own statutes, the climate bailout plan is “a complete violation of European Treaties, which explicitly prohibit state financing through the central bank,” says Prof. Klemens Skibicki of the Cologne Business School.