{"id":20307,"date":"2016-04-27T19:52:43","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T00:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20307"},"modified":"2016-04-27T19:52:43","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T00:52:43","slug":"the-road-to-canossa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20307","title":{"rendered":"The Road to Canossa"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"wrapper entry-header page-header\">\n<div class=\"title-with-sep single-title\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cobdencentre.org\/2016\/04\/the-road-to-canossa\/\">THE ROAD TO CANOSSA<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-media\">That the artificial interest rates in evidence in our hugely distorted capital and money markets can be made negative in nominal as well as in real terms is, alas, the curse of the modern age. Though entirely at odds with natural order \u2013 as we have repeatedly tried to make plain \u2013 they are also a curse that we are unlikely to have lifted any time soon, especially not in a Europe where there is no effective restraint to be had upon the exercise of his awful powers by the likes of a fanatic like Draghi.<\/div>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<div class=\"grids\">\n<div class=\"grid-8 column-1\">\n<div class=\"single-box clearfix entry-content\">\n<p>Like some latter-day Pope Gregory, Draghi pretends to a power superior to that of the secular realm\u2019s rulers. Forgetting that it was an act of political will which first set up the ECB, he now demands that the Lords Temporal of the Eurozone shuffle barefoot through the snows, like the Emperor Henry IV before them, to genuflect before him at his seat at that modern Canossa which stands on\u00a0<i>Sonnemannstrasse<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Though the \u2018mandate\u2019 which he unfailingly invokes in place of a claim of descent from St Peter was indeed intended to keep the Bank insulated from the worst, inflationary impulses of the short-horizon politician, it cannot be argued from that one act of self-denying foresight that the ECB is now only subject to a higher court. Laws are, after all, made in parliaments and when it becomes evident that among those laws there are those that have either been made obsolete by events or have become subject to exploitation by the unscrupulous, it is the duty of the people in parliament to highlight such abuses and to set in train the process by which the offending laws will be revised or repealed.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>THE ROAD TO CANOSSA That the artificial interest rates in evidence in our hugely distorted capital and money markets can be made negative in nominal as well as in real terms is, alas, the curse of the modern age. Though entirely at odds with natural order \u2013 as we have repeatedly tried to make plain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[52,13658,122,7380,233,282,1044],"class_list":["post-20307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bank","tag-canossa","tag-central-bank","tag-cobden-centre","tag-ecb","tag-european-central-bank","tag-mario-draghi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20308,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20307\/revisions\/20308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}