The EU today faces two dramatic challenges: the COVID-19 Pandemic and the climate transition. The EU’s recovery plan for the pandemic falls far short of the estimated €2 trillion needed for achieving a sustainable recovery in line with the EU’s environmental objectives.

This report from Positive Money Europe and the Sustainable Finance Lab explains how the European Central Bank can incentivize private banks to lend more money for green investments. By tweaking its Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTROs) programme, the ECB could make green lending much more affordable for small businesses and households.

 

With Eurozone governments spending huge amounts to fight the recession caused by Covid-19, the debt sustainability debate and how to manage it will only intensify in the coming months.

This report, written by Sebastian Diessner, assesses the merits and drawbacks of different monetary finance proposals with the potential to revive the euro area economy. It seeks to structure the debate on how the ECB should do this by ordering, categorising and assessing the monetary policy options it has at its disposal to tackle the upcoming recession.

The EU economy urgently requires innovative and bold reforms that reshape finance, so that it can help sustain our planet and enable us to thrive.

In this policy briefing, co-written with the New Economics Foundation and 350.org, we offer policymakers a list of recommendations that, if implemented by the ECB, would constitute a successful strategic review from a climate justice perspective.

This report outlines why and how “helicopter money” should be deployed as soon as possible in the Eurozone. It summarizes the benefits of using helicopter money in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. 

It aims to help policymakers carefully prepare for the practical implementation of helicopter money. It clarifies how it can be implemented swiftly, legally, and democratically in the Eurozone context.

 

In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, it is clear that the European Central Bank (ECB) has extended its competences and area of influence. In comparison however, the accountability framework of the ECB was not leveled up – it remains largely weak and informal. This report advocates for a stronger role of the European Parliament in holding the European Central Bank to account and outlines specific recommendations.

This analysis of the European Central Bank’s corporate bonds portfolio reveals a worrying gap between the ECB’s quantitative easing programme and the European Union’s climate objectives.

This report, co-written by Stanislas Jourdan (Positive Money Europe) and Wojtek Kalinowski (Veblen Institute), includes an exclusive analysis of the corporate-sector purchase programme (CSPP) by the European Central Bank (ECB). The report was originally published in French (here).

The main contribution of this policy briefing is to show why helicopter money can be justified on legal grounds as a monetary policy instrument for the ECB. This key point refutes recurring claims that such a scheme would amount to “fiscal policy”.