Tuesday’s ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court (the Karlsruhe Court) is a watershed moment in the European project.
The case concerns an ongoing tug of war between the EU’s supreme court—the European Court of Justice (ECJ)—and the Karlsruhe Court on the legality of the European Central Bank’s ongoing purchase of sovereign bonds.
Presently there are trillions of dollars of bonds throughout the world with negative interest rates. This is an unprecedented turn of events, and one that has many nonprofessional investors confused. Savers are understandably puzzled as to how it is possible for bonds to carry negative interest rates. After all, would an intelligent person really lend $1,000 to someone only to be paid back $950 one year from now?
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant economic strains, some protectionists and anti-immigration ideologues are trying to take advantage of this opportunity to advance their nationalist agenda. They argue that if the United States had restricted international trade and immigration more thoroughly in the past, as President Trump had fought to achieve, the public health crisis could have been curtailed.
In the early days of the COVID-19 panic—back in mid-March—articles began to appear pushing the idea of “flattening the curve” (the Washington Post ran an article called “Flatten the Curve” on March 14). This idea was premised on spreading out the total number of COVID-19 infections over time, so as to not overburden the healthcare infrastructure. A March 11 article for Statnews, summed it up:
David Flattum by email points out that in the movie The Big Short, it is said that each 1 percent rise in the unemployment rate is associated with forty thousand deaths. Another anonymous emailer suggests that the government authors of shutdowns be held accountable by international tribunals for the deaths they cause.
