When a nation is fighting for its life, with its cities are under bombardment and approaching a fifth or more of its population in flight, what is its currency worth? If money functions in a matrix of public and private relations of financial obligation, authority and credit, what happens when those relationships are violently attacked by an outside force?
Excellent insight. It seems to me that a sizable portion of aid to Ukraine ought to be help to refugees. The impact per dollar/euro of refugee assistance is arguably much greater than military aid. Luckily, the West does not have to choose between the two. Do we have an idea of the split between Western humanitarian aid and military aid?
Ukrainian refugees should come more to Germany from Poland. Train transport is currently free, and they can apply for social refugee support on arrival. They just shouldn't stop at Berlin which is locally overwhelmed because of its bad governance, but drive on southwards.
The Euro area is discovering the hard way that all of their "sound finance" shibboleths are meaningless when the bullets start flying and peoples are on the move. There's a reason that ALL of the belligerents in both WWI and WWII abandoned the gold standard, eh?
Technically Bulgaria has a currency board with the ECB despite for now being outside of the Euro so I think it might be rather limited in what it actually can do. Slovakia is going to be the most important Eurosystem Central Bank in this regard as it is the only Eurozone member to directly border Ukraine.
I have no way of knowing whether this has already been tried, but it would seem to me that a fund could be established in the name of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHRC) to issue script of equivalent value to states accepting conflict-generated refugees in small denominations that will allow them to purchase consumer goods necessary for their support (food, clothing, etc.), or to defray housing costs to accommodate these refugees. Needless to say, they would need to be financial controls to ensure accountability, and protections against fraud and abuse. Such measures would necessarily improve local economies, and there could be limitations on how to script currencies might be used, i.e., prohibitions against purchase of lottery tickets, or whatever is customarily unavailable on the local economy to recipients of public assistance.
Or Europe can virtually convert every Ukrainian hrivnya based transaction to euro based transactions at a pre-agreed exchange rate and ECB bear the losses? So Ukraine unilaterally paying with Euros like Kosovo or Montenegro but not entering the Eurozone?
Is the problem fear of monetary sovereignty? The Federal Reserve is similarly reluctant to bear losses, and usually has the Treasury as its guarantor. I think that the fear instead is of central bank sovereignty.
But why isn't it correct that the EU governments should decide if & to what extent to help refugees and not the central bank ? Here again, political decision...
although you disdain bitcoin Mr. Tooze, its case has been made very profoundly by your article.
Excellent insight. It seems to me that a sizable portion of aid to Ukraine ought to be help to refugees. The impact per dollar/euro of refugee assistance is arguably much greater than military aid. Luckily, the West does not have to choose between the two. Do we have an idea of the split between Western humanitarian aid and military aid?
Ukrainian refugees should come more to Germany from Poland. Train transport is currently free, and they can apply for social refugee support on arrival. They just shouldn't stop at Berlin which is locally overwhelmed because of its bad governance, but drive on southwards.
The Euro area is discovering the hard way that all of their "sound finance" shibboleths are meaningless when the bullets start flying and peoples are on the move. There's a reason that ALL of the belligerents in both WWI and WWII abandoned the gold standard, eh?
Technically Bulgaria has a currency board with the ECB despite for now being outside of the Euro so I think it might be rather limited in what it actually can do. Slovakia is going to be the most important Eurosystem Central Bank in this regard as it is the only Eurozone member to directly border Ukraine.
I have no way of knowing whether this has already been tried, but it would seem to me that a fund could be established in the name of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHRC) to issue script of equivalent value to states accepting conflict-generated refugees in small denominations that will allow them to purchase consumer goods necessary for their support (food, clothing, etc.), or to defray housing costs to accommodate these refugees. Needless to say, they would need to be financial controls to ensure accountability, and protections against fraud and abuse. Such measures would necessarily improve local economies, and there could be limitations on how to script currencies might be used, i.e., prohibitions against purchase of lottery tickets, or whatever is customarily unavailable on the local economy to recipients of public assistance.
Or Europe can virtually convert every Ukrainian hrivnya based transaction to euro based transactions at a pre-agreed exchange rate and ECB bear the losses? So Ukraine unilaterally paying with Euros like Kosovo or Montenegro but not entering the Eurozone?
This ain’t Tooze..
Is the problem fear of monetary sovereignty? The Federal Reserve is similarly reluctant to bear losses, and usually has the Treasury as its guarantor. I think that the fear instead is of central bank sovereignty.
But why isn't it correct that the EU governments should decide if & to what extent to help refugees and not the central bank ? Here again, political decision...