I also think cutting the UK out of SAFE is a bad lack of pragmatism on Europes side.

You want Antwerp to be statistically annexed by Schland too?

I know I’m playing a losing hand. Desperation move.

Although one hears the Dutch tax sandwiches are not as juicy as they used to be.

This is a German Dutch spat! Haha

Hahaha.

It's a really rich corpse Pepijn, flush with tax money, and a juicy sovereign wealth fund.

Thank you Ian!

Exactly

Sure but the link to the mandate is weak too. The ECB is not the logical dance partner in this one imo

In any case: the EU should strongly support Ukraine.

But the ECB providing bridge loans to EU governments with no eurozone macroeconomic justification or link to any element of its primary mandate (inflation, monpol transmission etc) was clearly not going to fly.

8/8

It’s entirely reasonable to call for a reformed ESM to provide Ukraine loan liquidity. The world has changed and the ESM has not.

But that also shows there’s real reticence and constraint on real ESM reforms - the pandemic didn’t cut it, why would the Ukraine war?

7/

In other words the EU’d have to make the ESM an EU institution, build a proper European treasury and could then build tools to insure Ukraine loans.

Alongside @lucasguttenberg.bsky.social I’ve been making the case for true ESM reform for years (see eg from 2021) - but we’ve been unsuccessful.

6/

An obvious alternative is making the ESM great again, the eurozone’s money box that is collecting dust in Luxembourg.

But a sine qua non for using the ESM is bringing it into the EU legal order first, so that its bailout/firewall function can be replicated, resources freed up.

5/

If you think of the ECB mandate this is totally different from say, TPI, meant to protect the transmission of monetary policy in the eurozone.

Difficult to see a mandate based argument for backstopping a Ukraine loan - since it is not yet an EU let alone eurozone country

4/