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Aren't there other ways the E.C.B. could try to get Europe out of its low-inflation trap? There are, but Mario Draghi, the bank's president, has resisted the preferred tool of the American, British, and Japanese central banks, which is "quantitative easing," or buying longer-term securities to pump money into the financial system.If European central bankers think Europe is protected because it doesn't stoop so low as to simply print money into existence, they have another thing coming. Being so completely enmeshed in the petrodollar system means Europe will burn along with the US when the dollar collapses and hyperinflation hits the Western world. It's going to take more than tweaking interest rates, albeit in innovative ways, to pull Europe out of this fire.
It would be politically risky for the E.C.B. to buy bonds issued by European governments, a no-no in the founding mission of the common central bank. And private European debt markets are not as developed in the United States, so it would be hard for the E.C.B. to emulate, for example, the Fed's strategy of buying mortgage-backed securities that fund home loans in the United States.
That brings us back to NIRP. Now central bank watchers will get to watch yet another monetary policy experiment in an era that has been filled with them.
Comment: Prescient observations from the author, but for all the wrong reasons, as we now know.
It's unlikely that the plot to overthrow Yanukovych was hatched at this specific conference - which had been running annually for 8 years by that point - but it's nevertheless revealing that this event in Crimea had turned into a kind of 'Eastern Bilderberg'. Incorporating Ukraine within the West's empire was clearly a big deal to these people.
Thankfully, at least, the people of Crimea have been spared from these snakes in suits. But the bloodshed in the rest of Ukraine is a direct consequence of the ruthless and alien mindset of this slew of pathological characters.