The Main Nazi Newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, Praised Roosevelt’s “New Deal” for Its Affinity with National Socialist Philosophy

The National Socialists hailed the emergency relief measures undertaken during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office as fully consistent with their own revolutionary program. On May 11, 1933, the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, offered its commentary in an article with the headline “Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.” The author wrote, “What has transpired in the United States since President Roosevelt’s inauguration is a clear signal of the start of a new era in the United States as well.” The tone on January 17, 1934, was much the same: “We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America. . . . Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold. We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.” And on June 21, 1934, the paper drew its initial conclusion about the success of the New Deal: “Roosevelt has achieved everything humanly possible in light of his narrow, insufficient basis.”

Just as National Socialism superseded the decadent “bureaucratic age” of the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter opined, so the New Deal had replaced “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the American 1920s. The paper stressed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” praising the president’s style of leadership as being comparable to Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip. “If not always in the same words,” the paper wrote, “[Roosevelt], too, demands that collective good be put before individual self-interest. Many passages in his book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist. In any case, one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.” The newspaper admitted that Roosevelt maintained what it called “the fictional appearance of democracy,” but it also proclaimed that in the United States “the development toward an authoritarian state is under way.” The author added, “The president’s fundamental political course still contains democratic tendencies but is thoroughly inflected by a strong national socialism.”

—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), e-book.

Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht Accepted Hitler’s Offer of the Position of President of the Reichsbank on March 17, 1933

Hitler also showed his pragmatic side when Hjalmar Schacht was called into his first meeting with the new chancellor. After all, Schacht was not a party member, and although he had more than demonstrated his willingness to be helpful, he was distrusted by most of the party establishment, who still saw Schacht as a collaborator of the Jewish bankers.

It was middle of March 1933.

Herr Schacht, I am sure we are agreed that the most urgent task for the new government is to end unemployment. That will need a lot of money. Do you think it can be obtained without the Reichsbank?

Schacht agreed with the immediate need to end unemployment but told Hitler it could not be done without the Reichsbank. When pressed for the amount of money needed, Schacht hedged.

Herr Chancellor, all I can tell you is that the Reichsbank should be ready to lend all assistance until the last unemployed citizen is back at work. 

 Then came Hitler’s pivotal question.

Would you be willing to resume leadership of the Reichsbank? 

 Later, Schacht remembered his reaction. Could he accept the offer from a leader “whose political methods and individual acts he found difficult to accept”? Or should he overcome his scruples “for the sake of the six and a half million unemployed”? Besides, he was quite aware that Luther, who had held the Reichsbank presidency since Schacht had resigned, had already met with Hitler and had given an unsatisfactory answer to Hitler’s question. Schacht told Hitler that he would not find it “fair” — he used the English term — to fire Reichsbank president Luther, but Hitler reassured him that Luther had already been slated for another position. Schacht then decided on the spot.

“If that is so, then I am ready, once again, to take the presidency of the Reichsbank;” and “on March 17, almost exactly three years after I had left it, I went back to work at the Reichsbank.”

He insisted that it was not out of personal ambition or agreement with the National Socialist Party or personal greed. It was for the “welfare of the broad masses of our people.”

—John Weitz, Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 142-143.

As a Sure Indication of the Disintegration of the State, Tax Revenues in Greece Covered Less Than 6% of Government Spending

Relatively mild in the Protectorate and Slovakia, inflation was a far more serious problem in Belgium, and worse still in Serbia, Croatia and Greece. Hyper-inflation was caused by the government’s inability to raise more than a small fraction of its needs from taxation and the huge increase in the money supply caused by the central bank’s printing of banknotes. By the end of the war, tax revenues in Greece covered less than 6 per cent of government spending, a far smaller proportion than anywhere else, and a sure indication of the disintegration of the state. Gold sovereign prices rose fifteen-fold in the first two years of the occupation and soared again as it neared its end.

Greece stood as a warning of what could happen when occupation economics went badly wrong and when German demands could only be met by printing money. In July 1942 Finance Minister von Krosigk warned Göring that ‘in Greece … a legal market no longer exists, nor a price mechanism which could act as a basis for stabilization and reorganization … If the war drags on, it will be necessary to prevent the countries whose potential we are exploiting, from premature economic ruin.’ A few months later, when the German commissar at the Belgian central bank wrote of dangerous inflationary pressures because of the difficulty of controlling the black market, he highlighted the risk of making ‘a monetary “Greece” out of Belgium’. German administrators did not care too much one way or the other about Greece itself, which they had not really wanted to invade, and whose value to the war effort was minimal, but they knew that the costs for the German war effort of allowing Belgium or France go the same way would be much higher.

—Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 272-273.

A Major Element of Exploiting Occupied Countries Is the Manipulation and Devaluation of the Official Exchange Rates

From the very beginning, a major element in Germany’s successful exploitation of occupied countries was the manipulation of official exchange rates. In France, German occupiers lowered the exchange rate for 100 francs from 6.6 to 5 reichsmarks—a devaluation of just under 25 percent. This automatically raised soldiers’ salaries, which were paid in francs but calculated in reichsmarks. (The franc would, of course, have inevitably become softer under German occupation, but even in late 1942 the exchange rate in Zurich was 16 percent higher than the one set by German occupiers.) Similar action was taken with the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Czech crown remained the official currency but was devalued by a third. In 1939 the Reich also intervened in Poland and in 1943 in Nazi-occupied northern Italy, where the exchange rate between the lira and the mark was lowered from 100 to 13.1 to 100 to 10. But even that is dwarfed by the 470 percent devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1941. Those responsible for the new exchange rates knew exactly what they were doing. Privately, they acknowledged that the reichsmark was “greatly overvalued in comparison with [other] European currencies.”

—Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 81.

To Ensure “Economically Just Prices,” The Reich’s Commissar for Price Formation Suspended the Operations of the Price Mechanism

In 1933 the government issued the “Law on Compulsory Cartels,” by virtue of which it assumed the right to consolidate enterprises as a means of regulating the market for their products and reducing competition. In time, Berlin forged hundreds of such compulsory cartels, which determined, under state guidance, what their member firms could produce and what prices they could charge: the normal practice until the end of 1941 was for enterprises to operate on a cost-plus basis, presenting government agencies with evidence of costs and then being allowed to add 3-6 percent profit. In 1936, the office of the Reich’s Commissar for Price Formation was created to ensure “economically just prices.” The operations of the price mechanism of the open market were thus suspended. The cartel law made new investment conditional on state approval. State authorities also regulated dividend payments: a law issued in 1934 decreed that the profits to be distributed to stockholders were not to exceed 6 percent of the paid-in capital; another law of that year provided that any excess was to be invested in state bonds for future distribution. Holders of municipal and other bonds were compelled to convert them into new issues carrying lower interest rates. Private enterprise was constantly whipped into shape by complaints of “economic egoism” and tireless reminders that the interests of the community took precedence over those of the individual.

—Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), Vintage e-book.

Brüning's “Rolling Deflation” Is Used to Argue in Favor of an International Lender of Last Resort and World Currency

It is understandable that economic and political elites fear deflation, but it is not so clear why almost all economists have developed a deflation phobia. It was this fear of deflation that has ensured that we are still stuck in the monetary system which was about to melt down in 2008. Unfortunately, at the time In Defense of Deflation was not out there to help combat the myths about price deflation.

There are all kinds of myths about price deflation that inhibit the surge of free market institutions, because these myths are used to justify interventions. The fear of a deflationary spiral is only one, albeit probably the most important of them. An almost equally harmful myth is that the rate of the growth of the money supply must be at least as high as the rate of economic growth, because otherwise there would be a harmful price deflation. This is an argument that even well-trained economists bring forward against the introduction of a gold standard or against the chances of bitcoins to become money.

Another myth that has become very relevant recently is that policies aiming at lowering costs, especially wages, and reducing public budget deficits would drive an economy into recession. Indeed, in the European sovereign debt crisis, austerity is branded as a harmful deflationary policy. Commentators recall the supposedly fateful deflationary policies of German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in the early 1930s as a deterrent example of austerity. Moreover, the “rolling deflation” of 1931 is even used to argue in favor of an international lender of last resort, a step close to the introduction of a world currency. In this book all these myths are rebutted. There is even an historical analysis of Brüning’s policies, showing that they helped to speed up recovery.

—Philipp Bagus, preface to In Defense of Deflation, Financial and Monetary Policy Studies 41 (Cham, CH: Springer International Publishing, 2015), viii.

As Europe “Reinterpreted” the Maastricht Treaty to Avoid Catastrophe, Ben Bernanke Launched His “QE-Infinity” Policy

Towards avoiding the feared 2nd Lehman crisis, which incidentally would sink the re-election prospects of their commander-in-chief, President Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke were prepared to put US taxpayer funds on the line by way of swaps with the ECB even though under some scenarios the ECB might itself become insolvent. As part of the deal Chancellor Merkel was persuaded to put at stake a much larger amount of German taxpayer funds, either directly via the new EU bail-out entities, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) or European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), or indirectly by standing (albeit to an unknown extent) behind the ECB’s vast loan programs. The LTROs [Long-Term Refinancing Operations] were highly dubious in terms of constitutionality — with critics arguing that the Maastricht Treaty specifically banned such bail-out operations. What followed was even more dubious, and to such a degree that we describe it here as a coup against the monetary constitution in the Treaty.

This coup played itself out in Summer and Autumn 2012 as the Spanish government debt market plunged and another crisis of survival erupted in EMU, this time with the centre of the storm in Spanish banking collapse. ECB Chief Mario Draghi, buttressed by the US Treasury Secretary, persuaded German Chancellor Merkel that the only way to avoid ‘catastrophe’ in Europe would be to ‘re-interpret’ the Maastricht Treaty so as to allow direct monetary financing of weak sovereigns, albeit subject to certain conditions. Simultaneously Chairman Bernanke launched his QE-infinity policy setting no time or quantity limit to massive monetary base expansion.

—Brendan Brown, Euro Crash: How Asset Price Inflation Destroys the Wealth of Nations, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 217-218.

How the TARGET2 Balances of the European Central Bank Worked BEFORE the European Financial and Debt Crisis

With the national central banks being part of the Eurosystem, the intra-euro area rescue measures became reflected in the TARGET2 balances of the European Central Bank. TARGET2 (Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System) is a real-time gross settlement system for payments within the euro zone, which is used to clear cross-border transfers in the euro area. Before the European financial and debt crisis, the national central banks’ positions in the TARGET2 system were widely balanced, because private capital flows were matched by respective payment flows resulting from goods markets transactions. For instance, German (Greek) capital exports (capital imports) corresponded to payments receipts (payments) for German goods sales (Greek goods purchases).

—Gunther Schnabl, “The Failure of ECB Monetary Policy from a Mises-Hayek Perspective,” in Banking and Monetary Policy from the Perspective of Austrian Economics, ed. Annette Godart-van der Kroon and Patrik Vonlanthen (Cham, CH: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 140.

On the Two Major Risks with the Euro: Sovereign Default and Redenomination or Intra-Euro Currency Risk

Currently there remains a strong strand of belief (particularly in euro zone countries) that exit is impossible. As we have already seen in 2010–12, markets are constantly probing and re-evaluating the probabilities and scale of alternative outcomes, and managing their investment and derivative positions accordingly. To date, most of the market pricing of euro stress has been concentrated in the sovereign debt markets. But this represents just one of two risks within the euro — the risk of sovereign default. The other risk — the risk of redenomination (or ‘intra-euro currency risk’) — has so far found little direct expression in the markets.

With a euro exit, this belief would be shattered and, once that happened, almost all of the advantages that a single currency had over an exchange rate mechanism would evaporate. It is likely, if there are any exits from the euro zone, that markets will begin to discriminate in favour of ‘strong’ (predominantly northern) debtors and against weak (predominantly southern) debtors on the basis of perceived exit risk. This could lead to a rapid emasculation of southern countries’ banking systems as southern depositors moved their deposits north for little or no cost or loss of interest.

—Neil Record, “Managing the Transition: A Practical Exit Strategy,” in The Euro: The Beginning, the Middle . . . and the End? ed. Philip Booth (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2013), 148-149.

Germany Broke Free from the Worldwide Dollar Standard (Bretton Woods System) By Floating the Deutsche Mark in May 1971

US monetary chaos has been both a hugely creative and a destructive force in the history of EMU [European Monetary Union].

If monetary stability had reigned throughout in the US there would have been no impetus to monetary union in Europe at least in its modern gargantuan form. Each country there might well have adhered individually to an international US dollar standard. . . . 

Instead the inflationary path taken by the Martin and Burns Federal Reserves fanned direct US monetary conflict with Germany where monetarist titans had assumed power in the Deutsche Bundesbank. Eventually Germany ‘broke free’ from the deeply flawed worldwide dollar standard often described as ‘the Bretton Woods system’, floating the Deutsche mark in May 1971. The calculation in Frankfurt and Bonn was that that the gains for the German economy from domestic monetary stability now possible would more than match the losses from exchange rate instability. Even so there was considerable concern about those possible losses.

—Brendan Brown, Euro Crash: How Asset Price Inflation Destroys the Wealth of Nations, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 210.

The Axis Joining the Berlin Chancellery to the ECB Would No Longer Be Able to Support German Export Companies with a Cheap Euro

Hence the big German export companies would face a Day of Reckoning. The axis which joins the Berlin Chancellery to the ECB [European Central Bank] (at present the Merkel-Draghi axis) would no longer be able to support them (via a cheap euro). Under these changed circumstances, the euro falling apart may be their most promising road to future success. Yes, a re-incarnated DM [Deutsche Mark] would press down on export profit margins; but the menace of US-German or US-EU trade war would recede.

The CDU [Christian Democrat Union] could have new scope to move towards the right and away from the prevailing euro-centrism of the Merkel era, so winning back voters from the parties on the far right while also gaining some middle-class support from savers long disgruntled with the soft euro and negative interest rate euro. The feared descent of Germany into Weimar-style political chaos as could occur if the CDU remains frozen in euro-centrism (eventually joining up with the Greens in coalition and thereby fanning support for the extreme parties) could be aborted.

Yes, Italy would fall out of the euro-zone. The potential for sound money renaissance in Europe, possibly with France, Holland and Germany getting together in a new monetary union, would be real. Europe’s monetary future would no longer hang on a US thread. This possible window of opportunity might be short, given the potential danger of a US inflation storm further ahead as stemming from devastatingly weak public finances.

—Brendan Brown, “How a Fragile Euro May Not Survive the Next Crisis,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 84-85.

The Death of the Euro Will Occur in Response to the Sudden Emergence of a “Deflationary Interlude”

A big US monetary inflation bang brought the euro into existence. Here’s a prediction: Its death will occur in response to a different type of US monetary bang—the sudden emergence of a “deflationary interlude.” And this could come sooner than many expect. . . . 

We find the existential vulnerability of the euro and the next US monetary shock will present the severest test yet. The shock is most likely to take the form of a sudden arrival of a “deflationary interlude” in a long and likely intensifying monetary inflation over the long-run beyond.

Specifically, as the virulent asset inflation stoked up in the present global monetary cycle (as always led by the Federal Reserve) proceeds into the final stage of unwind (asset deflation) and recession, there will be a period of overall credit contraction. This will be reflected most likely in the broad money aggregates. Prices and wages could come under some downward pressure, though this is not in itself evidence of monetary deflation.

In this asset deflation phase, accompanied by global slowdown or recession, Europe would be in a particularly dangerous situation. The vastly over-extended export sectors of Northern Europe are vulnerable, not least to the emerging market credit bubble turning to bust. Weak banks and sovereigns across Europe would descend into an insolvency zone. The weak euro and market share boosting measures of the big northern European exporters are likely to attract Trumpian ire.

There would be zero tolerance in Washington for continued or new-style monetary radicalism in Europe. If this is what holding the euro together requires, meaning that currency’s perpetual weakness, then it should not be held together.

—Brendan Brown, “How a Fragile Euro May Not Survive the Next Crisis,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 81, 83-84.

Conditions Today Were Last Seen in 1929 When Smoot-Hawley Tariffs Coincided with the End of a Long Phase of Credit Expansion

Germany, whose fastest growing market was China, has been driven into recession, with last Monday’s purchasing managers’ index headlined as “simply awful”. With Germany being the locomotive pulling along all the other Eurozone members, this is already leading to deepening concerns for the Eurozone’s outlook and a resumption of asset purchases by the ECB (quantitative easing) is now due in November. It is also very bad news for Germany’s hard-pressed banking community, represented in New York by Deutsche Bank. . . . 

Clearly, the conflict between America and China has escalated well beyond just tariffs, making it difficult to visualize how the damage to global trade can be corrected. The economic outlook is therefore set to deteriorate further, with no end to it in sight. From a banker’s viewpoint, a global recession is the greatest threat to his business as a financial intermediary between failing borrowers and nervous depositors. He can only survive by taking anticipatory action to avoid potential losses.

Some bankers will have been clinging to the hope that the Fed, by reducing interest rates and if necessary, reintroducing quantitative easing, will rescue the US economy from outright recession and that economic growth will resume. Without doubt, this is the advice being given to management by in-house economists, unfamiliar with today’s destructive dynamics of tariffs combining with a failing late-stage credit cycle. These conditions were last seen in 1929, when Smoot-Hawley tariffs coincided with the end of a long phase of credit expansion. However, there is little statistical evidence so far that the US economy faces anything more than a pause in economic growth, which is why stock prices and other collateralized assets have held their values.

The reality is that a credit crisis cannot be avoided, only deferred. It is also hard to see how zero interest rates reduced from current levels can be enough to rescue markets that, on the evidence from the repo market, are beginning to price growing counterparty risk into interbank loans. Recent experience and central banking models suggest that dollar interest rates should be reduced by at least four or five per cent to stabilize the situation, putting them deep into negative territory. And as for negative rates, there is no development more likely to drive depositors into gold, silver and other media to escape from the taxation of negative rates on deposits.

—Alasdair Macleod, “The Ghosts of Failed Banks Have Returned,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 63-65.

A More Worrying Comparison between Deutsche Bank and Northern Rock Is with the Credit-Anstalt Crisis of May 1931

Returning to the subject of bank relationships, a more worrying comparison between Deutsche Bank and the Northern Rock episode could be with the Credit-Anstalt crisis of May 1931. It was the largest bank in Austria, just as Deutsche is the largest in Germany, a far larger country with a more important economy. Then in Austria and today in Germany, European economies were tipping into recession, forcing large losses onto their banks. Following the 1931 crisis, within months not only Austria but other European countries endured financial distress, the gold exchange standard began to disintegrate, and the international flow of goods was disrupted by growing protectionism as governments tried to batten down the hatches.

The flight of foreign creditors triggered by these events rapidly turned a major crisis in a minor country into a major crisis for all Europe and beyond. Today, if the same fate were to happen to Deutsche Bank, not only would it be on a far larger scale, but there is the additional question of the gross notional value of its derivatives book of nearly $50 trillion and the future of the euro itself. Is it any wonder, if Deutsche is indeed at the centre of last week’s repo crisis, that other major banks,  have decided to step back and refused to accept its collateral in a repo?

—Alasdair Macleod, “The Ghosts of Failed Banks Have Returned,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 58-59.

We Are Seeing (October 2019) the Ghosts of Past Bank Failures, Most Recently in the UK (2007) with Northern Rock

I have a strong suspicion we are seeing the ghosts of past bank failures, most recently in the UK, the sorry tale of Northern Rock which I closely observed. For non-British readers, a short reminder: as a licensed bank, Northern Rock was a mortgage lender which got into difficulties in September 2007, before being nationalized the following February. An old-fashioned run with customers queuing outside its branches seeking to withdraw their deposits had alerted the general public to Northern Rock’s problems. It was unable to tap wholesale money markets, because other banks were unwilling to lend to it on an uncollateralized basis.

The establishment missed the point. As Gillian Tett wrote in the Financial Times at the time, there were increasing concerns over how Libor [London Interbank Offered Rate] was operating. There was a growing divergence in the rates that different banks were quoting in the various currencies priced in Libor, discriminating against the smaller borrowers (actually, an indication of growing counterparty risk, not a supposed failure of Libor). Furthermore, larger banks were reducing their exposure to Libor by sourcing funds from the treasury operations of large companies and using the developing repo market (which is collateralized, unlike Libor — a further indication of increasing systemic concerns) to maintain their overnight balances instead.

—Alasdair Macleod, “The Ghosts of Failed Banks Have Returned,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 55.

On a Key Difference between How the ECB and the BoJ Plus the SNB Have Administered Negative Interest Rate Policy

The subject: a key difference between how the ECB on the one hand and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) plus the Swiss National Bank (SNB) on the other have been administering negative interest rate policy in this cycle.

The powerful bank lobby in Germany has been asking why the ECB does not copy the SNB and BoJ in only charging banks negative rates on a marginal slice of their deposits with the central bank rather than the entirety.

Chief Draghi has not provided a direct or frank answer but admits that the issue is “under review.” His reticence hints at some of the disturbing motives behind negative rate policies.

In puzzling out why the ECB is administering negative rate policy in harsh fashion as regards the banks which are plush with reserves let’s start by identifying what common purpose it could achieve with the BoJ and SNB by keeping to a lighter touch (imposing negative rates on only a small marginal slice of deposits placed with the central bank by its member banks).

This common aim is currency manipulation.

The national money (or union money in the case of the euro) depreciates as a flight of capital occurs out of negative rate assets. All are not equal in this flight. Banks seek to shelter their regular domestic clients from negative rates. They pass on the cost of the negative rate fee on their reserves only to wholesale and foreign depositors, also taking account of the squeezed rates of return obtainable on their other assets including loans and short-maturity government bonds.

In effect the negative rate regime operates partly like a system of exchange restrictions which imposes penalties on foreign inflows into the domestic money market.

German banks are more stressed in sheltering their depositors from negative rates than their Swiss and Japanese counterparts given the harsh treatment of the ECB. In consequence the shelter they offer is less broad and deep and bank shareholders have to pay more heavily for its provision via diminished profits.

Why doesn’t Chief Draghi relent? Because that would mean less subsidy to Italian banks, stupid! The ECB takes advantage of the negative rate fee it charges on deposits (and German banks are the main net creditor of the euro-system reflecting the huge German savings surplus) to make subsidized loans most of all to Italian banks.

If ECB Chief Draghi were just pursuing currency manipulation, yes, he could please the German bank lobby (and the Bundesbank which pleads on their behalf). But he has this second purpose in mind. Hence the prevarication.

Ultimately these transfer consequences of negative rates within Europe (mainly from Germany to Italy) are not a matter for anyone else, including the Trump Administration. German voters should have their say. The aspect of concern for the US is currency manipulation.

—Brendan Brown, “The Menace of Sub-Zero Interest-Rate Policy,” in Anatomy of the Crash: The Financial Crisis of 2020, ed. Tho Bishop (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2020), 41-42.