#ecb

[lordadmiralfarsight]

A quiet, but important signal

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lutnick-heckled-davos-dinner-hosted-by-blackrocks-fink-ft-reports-2026-01-21/

So, this is something I haven't seen discussed on Tumblr.com, and as the self-appointed Economy Side of Tumblr, I cannot let this stand. Or sit. Let's not even talk about letting it lie there in a slutty, slutty pose.

I'm usually in favour of slutty, slutty poses, as is proper of a Frenchman, but not in this case.

So, for those that do not feel the need to click on links to articles, let me summarize :

The World Economic Forum was held recently at Davos. It's kind of a big thing for the world economy. Like, a really big thing. It's also a mostly understated event for geopolitics, it's not out there and confrontational. Most of the time we hear about it because remarkably ineffectual anticapitalist groups with outlandish demands organise demonstration and their demands are so outlandish they're the only ones the press talks about. In this particular instance however, we heard about it a LOT, at least in Europe, because it was directly related to the on-going-but-only-kind-of-but-also-still-a-thing crisis about Greenland.

During this WEF, the CEO of Blackrock, who is also the co-chair of the WEF, organized a dinner for people with a big weight in the world economy. This kind of event tends to be fairly understated, quiet, but important, the kind of backroom events where softly-spoken but tremendously important deals are made.

During this diner one Mister Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce of the USA, decided to make a speech where he bashed the EU and Europe in general. I will take this occasion to remind you that Davos is in Switzerland. In Europe. Not in the EU, but still very much interlinked economically with it. Mayhaps not the best choice of venue for this kind of talk.

As if to exemplify how poor Mister Lutnick's grasp of "there is a time and place" is, he got his ass heckled. Now, this may not seem important but, I assure you : IT FUCKING IS. These events are formal, dignified, there's a decorum, an etiquette. soft-spoken is the rule. And despite this socio-cultural context, Lutnick got his ass BOO'D. I cannot emphasize enough how out of the ordinary this is.

Christine Lagarde, president of the fucking EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK, the single most important financial institution in the entire continent of Europe (why the fuck did he think it was a good idea to spew his bile against Europe in a room with HER?) decided to GET UP and WALK OFF. Let me repeat : the woman at the helm of the organization that controls the monetary policy of the entire fucking Euro-zone, who issues loans to EU states, whose organisation if the Single Biggest Deal for European economies ... got up and left. And she was followed by a bunch of people. This is beyond unprecedented. If point 4 was out of the ordinary, this is straight up iconoclastic, it's the equivalent, for that social circle, of flipping the table and calling Lutnick's mother a whore.

Blackrock called off the dinner before they got to the dessert.

Now, why is this important ? Several reasons.

First off, it means that the ECB is not willing to be diplomatic with Trump's bullshit anymore. Considering how important it is for the EU economies, that opens a rather worrying question for the US : next time they issue treasury bonds ... will Europe buy any ? That's a bit of an issue considering how much they rely on us buying their bonds, and it's made worse by the fact private European funds are apparently starting to divest. If I worked in the Fed or any related US administration, I would be getting nervous.

Second, Blackrock calling off the event means they didn't think it was salvageable. Which means that either they needed Lagarde and co present for important negociations over fine wine and cake, or they were humiliated by this to such a degree they'd rather cut their losses and avoid any risk of further humiliation, or both. I must insist on a point : the catering for those events is EXPENSIVE, like, obscenely so, it's a decadent rich people event, so Blackrock giving up on it midway through is, in economy term, a giant fucking deal.

Furthermore, like I pointed out, this was organized by the CEO of Blackrock and co-chair of the entire World Economic Forum. This is, to put it mildly, a sizeable setback for Blackrock. Effectively, Lutnick spewed so much shit they ruined THE flagship event Blackrock organized for this WEF. It's a slap in the face followed by a kick to the balls for Blackrock. And Blackrock isn't a small company, it has power and influence. And they got humiliated because Lutnick spewed so much shit that the most important lady for the European economy said "fuck this shit, I'm out" and walked out in front of several hundred of the most important people for the world economy. I suspect Blackrock is at least rather miffed.

Third, this is symptomatic of a greater loss of patience in Europe, even among the economic sector. It means that the economic sector of Europe is increasingly convinced that any profit they could make buying from and selling to the US is not worth the diplomatic hastle. This ... is a big fucking deal. It's one more sector with a growing Trump-branded rift between the US and Europe. And the economic sector was the one that clung to the US the most, since those transatlantic relations allowed for a load of business. So if the European business world is turning away from the US, and becoming willing to eat the economic pain this would cause ... well, that's rather bad for the US' economic prospect in the medium and long term.

Now, I must underline that the macro-economic situation is not something that changes at blazing speed usually, there's always a degree of inertia, or rejection of change in favour of tried and true methods, alliances and relations ... but holy fuck did a lot change in a single year ! Because yes, it's only been one (1), singular, unique year since Trump took office. When I make predictions, I tend to remain vague, because making long term economic predictions that are anything but vague is incredibly difficult, but with the speed at which Trump pushes things, I'm not even going to try to make predictions. Will NATO be a thing in a year ? Will economic relations between the US and the EU still exist ? Will they improve ? Worsen ? Shatter ? Stabilize ? Who fucking knows !

At this point, we even have people very seriously ask what we do if/when Trump invades Greenland. It's not taken as mere diplomatic theatre, it is being studied in our military HQs. And for those already reaching for the notes to say stuff like "took you long enough" or something to that effect : shut. We're talking about international diplomacy, where there is ALWAYS inertia to some degree. The fact in a single fucking year Trump took the invasion of Greenland from lalaland fantasy conspiracy troll bullshit from Russia to real and credible threat is the diplomatic equivalent of going 120kph in a zone limited at 20. Adjusting your trajectory is goddamn difficult when the lunatic coming at you is doing so at 6 times the speed limit.

Notice how I didn't even talk about Trump's renewed tarriff threats and how they destabilize things even more.

So, yeah, shit's fucked, I'm not sure where we'll be next year, everything's getting unpredictable and Trump is a nutjob.

Fun.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/#de-dollarization

There's a reason every decentralized system eventually finds its way onto a platform: platforms solve real-world problems that platform users struggle to solve for themselves.

I've written before about the indie/outsider author Crad Kilodney, who wrote, edited, typeset and published chapbooks of his weird and wonderful fiction, and then sold his books from Toronto street-corners with a sign around his neck reading VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR BUY MY BOOKS (or, if he was feeling spicy, simply: MARGARET ATWOOD):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

Crad was a hell of a writer and a bit of a force of nature, but there are plenty of writers I want to hear from who are never going to publish their own books, much less stand on a street-corner selling them with a MARGARET ATWOOD sign around their necks. Publishers, editors, distributors and booksellers all do important work, allowing writers to get on with their writing, taking all the other parts of the publishing process off their shoulders.

That's the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Everyone needs platforms: writers, social media users, people looking for a romantic partner. What's more, the world needs platforms. Say you want to connect all 200+ countries on Earth with high-speed fiber lines; you can run a cable from each country to every other country (about 21,000 cables, many of them expensively draped across the ocean floor), or you can pick one country (preferably one with both Atlantic and Pacific coasts) and run all your cables there, and then interconnect them.

That's America, the world's global fiber hub. The problem is, America isn't just a platform for fiber interconnections – it's a Great Power that uses its position at the center of the world's fiber networks to surveil and disrupt the world's communications networks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

That's a classic enshittification move on a geopolitical scale. It's not the only one America's made, either.

Consider the US dollar. The dollar is to global commerce what America's fiber head-ends are to the world's data network: a site of essential, (nominally) neutral interchange that is actually a weapon that the US uses to gain advantage over its allies and to punish its enemies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

The world's also got about 200 currencies. For parties in one country to trade with those in another country, the buyer needs to possess a currency the seller can readily spend. The problem is that setting up 21,000 pairwise exchange markets from every currency to every other currency is expensive and cumbersome – traders would have to amass reserves of hundreds of rarely used currencies, or they would have to construct long, brittle, expensive, high-risk chains that convert, say, Thai baht into Icelandic kroner to Brazilian reals and finally into Costa Rican colones.

Thanks to a bunch of complicated maneuvers following World War II, the world settled on the US dollar as its currency platform. Most important international transactions use "dollar clearing" (where goods are priced in USD irrespective of their country of origin) and buyers need only find someone who will convert their currency to dollars in order to buy food, oil, and other essentials.

There are two problems with this system. The first is that America has never treated the dollar as a neutral platform; rather, American leaders have found subtle, deniable ways to use "dollar dominance" to further America's geopolitical agenda, at the expense of other dollar users (you know, "enshittification"). The other problem is that America has become steadily less deniable and subtle in these machinations, finding all kinds of "exceptional circumstances" to use the dollar against dollar users:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

America's unabashed dollar weaponization has been getting worse for years, but under Trump, the weaponized dollar has come to constitute an existential risk to the rest of the world, sending them scrambling for alternatives. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game that was rigged in his favor, but he still flipped over the table because he resents having to pretend to play at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe "urgently" needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard:

https://davekeating.substack.com/p/can-europe-free-itself-from-visamastercard

Now, there's plenty of reasons to want to avoid Visa/Mastercard, starting with cost: the companies have raised their prices by more than 40% since the pandemic started (needless to say, updating database entries has not gotten 40% more expensive since 2020). This allows two American companies to impose a tax on the entire global economy, collecting swipe fees and other commissions on $24t worth of the world's transactions every year:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

But there's another reason to get shut of Visa/Mastercard: Trump controls them. He can order them to cut off payment processing for any individual or institution that displeases him. He's already done this to punish the International Criminal Court for issuing a genocide arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and against a Brazilian judge for finding against the criminal dictator Jair Bolsonaro (Trump also threatened to have the judge in Bolsonaro's case assassinated). What's more, Visa/Mastercard have a record of billions (trillions?) of retail transactions taking place between non-Americans, which Trump's officials can access for surveillance purposes, or just to conduct commercial espionage to benefit American firms as a loyalty bonus for the companies that buy the most $TRUMP coins.

Two days after Lagarde's radio announcement, 13 European countries announced the formation of "EuroPA," an alliance that will facilitate regionwide transactions that bypass American payment processors (as well as Chinese processors like Alipay):

https://news.europawire.eu/european-payment-leaders-sign-mou-to-create-a-sovereign-pan-european-interoperable-payments-network/eu-press-release/2026/02/02/15/34/11/168858/

As European Business Magazine points out, EuroPA is the latest in a succession of attempts to build a European payments network:

https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/europes-24-trillion-breakup-with-visa-and-mastercard-has-begun/

There's Wero, a 2024 launch from the 16-country European Payments Initiative, which currently boasts 47m users and 1,100 banks in Belgium, France and Germany, who've spent €7.5b through the network:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-banks-launching-product-break-101215642.html

Wero launched as a peer-to-peer payment system that used phone numbers as identifiers, but it expanded into retail at the end of last year, with several large retailers (such as Lidl) signing on to accept Wero payments.

Last week, Wero announced an alliance with EuroPA, making another 130m people eligible to use the service, which now covers 72% of the EU and Norway. They're rolling out international peer-to-peer payments in 2026, and retail/ecommerce payments in 2027.

These successes are all the more notable for the failures they follow, like Monnet (born 2008, died 2012). Even the EPI has been limping along since its founding, only finding a new vigor on the heels of Trump threatening EU member states with military force if he wasn't given Greenland.

As EBM writes, earlier efforts to build a regional payment processor foundered due to infighting among national payment processors within the EU, who jealously guarded their own turf and compulsively ratfucked one another. This left Visa/Mastercard as the best (and often sole) means of conducting cross-border commerce. This produced a "network effect" for Visa/Mastercard: since so many Europeans had an American credit card in their wallets, European merchants had to support them; and since so many EU merchants supported Visa/Mastercard, Europeans had to carry them in their wallets.

Network effects are pernicious, but not insurmountable. The EU is attacking this problem from multiple angles – not just through EuroPA, but also through the creation of the Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Essentially, this would give any European who signs up an account with the ECB, the federal bank of the Eurozone. Then, using an app or a website, any two Digital Euro customers could transfer funds to one another using the bank's own ledgers, instantaneously and at zero cost.

EBM points out that there's a critical difficulty in getting EuroPA off the ground: because it is designed to be cheap to use, it doesn't offer participating banks the windfall profits that Visa/Mastercard enjoy, which might hold back investment in EuroPA infrastructure.

But banks are used to making small amounts of money from a lot of people, and with the Digital Euro offering a "public option," the private sector EuroPA system will have a competitor that pushes it to continuously improve its systems.

It's true that European payment processing has been slow and halting until now, but that was when European businesses, governments and households could still pretend that the dollar – and the payment processing companies that come along with it – was a neutral platform, and not a geopolitical adversary.

If there's one thing the EU has demonstrated over the past three years, it's that geopolitical threats from massive, heavily armed mad empires can break longstanding deadlocks. Remember: Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the end of Russian gas moved the EU's climate goals in ways that beggar belief: the region went from 15 years behind on its solar rollout to ten years ahead of schedule in just a handful of months:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/05/contingency/#this-too-shall-pass

This despite an all-out blitz from the fossil fuel lobby, one of the most powerful bodies in the history of civilization.

Crises precipitate change, and Trump precipitates crises.

[onlypicturepoetry]

Big Structure

photography + © Christof Keßemeier

[hazlehoff]

well played harry brook what a hundred as a captain when your team needed you the most!!!! let's hope will jacks sees through the innings now with only 10 needed from 18 balls omg

[notwritinggames]

Kassandra King: Devil's Dice

Kassandra isn't a good person, and I like that.

I wanted to make a game about someone who starts bad and likely gets worse. Someone who is greedy and unpleasant and is always lying and is too clever for their own good.

Your moves to navigate people and places and cold cases are about violence, about doing cons, and fucking people and leaving them behind, about begging for help when things get bad, or just getting drunk about it.

I wanted to make a love letter to the awful people in stories I have loved. To John Constantine, to Rust Cohle, to Sherlock Holmes.

I wanted to make a game where you don't make a character, you inhabit one, and you play to see what happens to them. You will always play Kassandra King, you will always be solving mysteries for the External Containment Bureau, and at the end of the story you will always meet the Devil.

What move you make when you get there is up to you.

Kassandra King: Devil's Dice is out now on itch and DrivethruRPG.

It'll be on sale for the first week of release.

[newfoundhope]

THIS IS IMPORTANT PLS HELP

Does anyone know if there’s a petition against the Digital Euro that is binding for the European Union to talk about it/stop it?

A lot of experts are against it, as are the people but I cannot seem to find a petition. And amidst all this push for censorship and surveillance, I (and possibly more people) want to make a difference!

[gouravgb]

EUR/USD climbs above 1.1800 📈

▪️ Euro gains momentum ahead of German inflation data ▪️ Traders position for potential CPI-driven volatility ▪️ Focus on price pressures for ECB rate outlook

All eyes on Germany’s inflation print for the next move. #EURUSD

[foreck-info-blog]

Forex Today: EUR/USD Pauses, GBP Under Pressure, Yen Strengthens and Gold Push

Major currency pairs are consolidating ahead of a heavy macro calendar dominated by the delayed U.S. labor market report for November. EUR/USD is holding near 1.1730, while GBP/USD remains under pressure ahead of UK employment data and the Bank of England’s policy meeting.

The Japanese yen continues to strengthen as markets assess the likelihood of a BoJ rate hike later this month. In contrast, gold is extending its bullish momentum, testing the 4,340 level amid global monetary easing and strong central bank purchases.

With ECB, BoE, U.S. inflation, and jobs data all ahead, volatility across FX and precious metals is likely to increase.