Eurogroup

Nothing happening in the European Union is your friend.

ECB President Christine Lagarde announced to go live at the Eurogroup meeting.

She says, now Pontus is to summarize it quickly for you.

It's a digital Euro made available for banks so they can transact amongst themselves using tokenized assets and distributed ledger technology, said Lagarde during a Eurogroup meeting.

Pontus leaks market distributed ledger technology platforms, the Euro systems target services and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Gosh, this is so boring.

Well, first of all, I understand he has clarified the comments subsequently in relation to the global tax regime and that he is as much as referring to the US and China in relation to the global tax regime.

But just to be factual on this, obviously Ireland, under the president of the Eurogroup at that time, Pascal Donoghue, led the way in the OECD and the base erosion and profit shifting process, which brought about the Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 rules.

And subsequently, we know the story, a lot of major economies did not go forward and ratify that agreement.

We saw subsequently where the US got an agreement with the EU and that was a long drawn out process.

And it's very difficult for government to plan on that basis.

But in terms of the budget, you can be absolutely sure that it will be a strong budget for working families.

In terms of the budget for business then, I know the president of the Eurogroup, Periakakis, will be joining yourselves at Fine Gael's small business and enterprise conference this weekend.

And as I say, the small business will be in attendance there.

Nevertheless, I still maintained the hope that the European Union, through this kind of, I call it governmental disobedience as opposed to civil d- disobedience.

Here I was a finance minister being disobedient to the Eurogroup, that through this clash we could convert the European Union.

We could have a Green New Deal for Europe.

I worked very hard even after s- I, I resigned, even I was crushed by the European Union.

First, the EU renews debate over frozen Russian assets.

EU finance ministers meet in Dublin next week, a Eurogroup session on September eighteenth, followed by an informal Ecofin meeting on the eighteenth and nineteenth.

The big topic will be a renewed push led by Sweden and the European Parliament to actually seize the frozen assets rather than simply freeze them.

The push follows a letter from a hundred and twenty-two MEPs calling for the use of two hundred billion euros in Russian assets to help Ukraine, plus an earlier letter from Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, and Poland.

Termina la semana y los chipriotas salen a tomarse unas aceitunas y unas cervezas que pagarán con euros.

Al día siguiente, 16 de marzo, el Eurogrupo se reúne en Bruselas y acuerda que necesita cinco mil ochocientos millones de euros del dinero que los chipriotas guardan en su sistema bancario.

Una hora después de aprobar la medida, el Banco Central de Chipre cierra el sistema de pagos.

Los cajeros se vacían esa misma noche.

And he saw it well even before the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

The European politicians, I saw this when I was in the Eurogroup, I was in ECOFIN and so on, I could actually see in slow motion the painful delivery, in reality, of the Kaldor missive, of the Kaldor prophecy.

So, Wolfgang, I spent the 2000s together with the former Member of Parliament from the Labour Party, Stuart Holland, a man who nearly became the leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s, with my great friend and economist, Jamie Calderbraith, putting together proposal after proposal after proposal of how to save the Eurozone from this political dynamic that would make a political union impossible.

I remember I was giving speeches in the European Parliament in 2001, 2002 on this.