Free Republic

Germany's financial regulator has said it won't take further action against the country's largest bank over alleged interest rate rigging and precious metals price fixing. The moves takes the spotlight off a former boss. The watchdog, known as Bafin, announced on Thursday it had ended several major special audits against Deutsche Bank. [...] Deutsche Bank paid $2.5 billion (2.26 billion euros) in fines in April last year after investigations on manipulating interest rates. The bank was also probed for its role in rigging prices of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. It also recorded a multibillion-euro loss for 2015. Bafin officials...

London: Twelve former senior military officers insisted Britain should stay in the European Union today, saying the country was "stronger" as a member of the 28-nation bloc in a "dangerous world". Writing ahead of a membership referendum on June 23, the retired military chiefs said the EU helped protect the country against threats from ISIS terrorists and Russia. The signatories of the letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper include four former professional heads of the overall armed forces as well as two former heads of the army and two of the navy. "Will Britain be safer inside the EU or...

A survey published on Wednesday shows 44 percent of Germans want the government to set an upper limit on how much companies can pay their employees. The number of respondents in favour of Germany setting a maximum salary clearly outweighed those who were against it, with only slightly over a quarter saying it was a bad idea. Twenty-nine percent, meanwhile, were undecided, the survey by Die Zeit showed. The idea was particularly popular in former communist east Germany, where a majority of 58 percent said they wanted salaries capped.

... If the European Union were a patient, its survival would be seen as threatened by multiple organ failure. That's the view of many experts as EU chiefs prepare for a Brussels summit that starts Thursday. Analysts believe the combined strain of these challenges may be unbearable for a political union and trading bloc that just 20 years ago seemed to be growing in stature as it proudly offered freedom and democracy - along with lucrative subsidies, military alliances and billions in foreign investment - to newly freed former Soviet satellites. Ian Kearns, director of the European Leadership Network research...

Two of Europe's most powerful central bankers have called on the eurozone to form its own treasury and push forward with a quantum leap in integration to secure the single currency's future. Germany's Jens Weidmann and France's newly-appointed Francois Villeroy de Galhau urged member states to move towards a "comprehensive sharing of sovereignty" which would include a common 19-member treasury and an "independent fiscal council" with a eurozone parliament. [...] Their comments are a rare sign of unity from the EU's most powerful founding member states, which have often diverged on their visions for the future of the eurozone. Germany...

When it was announced late last week that the German government planned to set a €5,000 limit on payments with cash, it barely raised an eyebrow in our newsroom. Limits on cash transactions are standard in other large European countries, including Italy, France and the UK, and this seemed to be a case of conservative Germany slowly falling in line with its neighbors. We should have known better. The outcry came from all quarters, with the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) just as vocal as the right-on left-wing Green Party and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). Economic weekly...

An internal government report seen by Die Welt am Sonntag predicts that Germany will have to take on uncontrollable debt if it doesn't start making huge budget cuts now. It's the same old problem: not only Germans are living longer than ever before, they're not producing enough offspring to replace them in the workforce. The result will be levels of debt reaching 220 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2060 - well above the 60 percent limit for EU member states set out by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 - experts from inside Wolfgang Schaeuble's finance ministry have calculated....

The six founding nations of the European Union on Tuesday stressed their commitment to seek an "ever closer union" ahead of next week's summit where Britain is expected to seek a new agreement to help convince a skeptical public to remain part of the EU. The foreign ministers of host Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg said in a joint statement Tuesday they reconfirm their "strong commitment to Europe and the European project and invite all other member states to join." ...

The euro zone needs to press ahead with structural reforms and closer integration, including an euro zone finance ministry, to deliver sustainable growth, the heads of the French and German central banks wrote in a German newspaper on Monday. In a guest article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung entitled "Europe at a crossroads", they said the European Central Bank (ECB) was not in a position to create sustainable long-term growth for the 19-country single currency bloc. The ECB has undershot its 2-percent inflation target for three straight years and is unlikely to return to it to for years to come given...

Greece aims to play the role of an economic force to strengthen ties between the European Union and Iran, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Sunday after he arrived in Tehran for an official visit. "Greece will become an energy, economic and trade bridge between Iran and European Union," Tsipras said, according to a translation by the Mega television channel. He further called Iran "a key player for stability and peace in the Middle East, and a significant economic partner." Tsipras's comments come after Iran's nuclear deal with world powers came into force, allowing the United States and the European...

Iran wants to recover tens of billions of dollars it is owed by India and other buyers of its oil in euros and is billing new crude sales in euros, too, looking to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar following last month's sanctions relief. A source at state-owned National Iranian Oil Co (NIOC) told Reuters that Iran will charge in euros for its recently signed oil contracts with firms including French oil and gas major Total, Spanish refiner Cepsa and Litasco, the trading arm of Russia's Lukoil. "In our invoices we mention a clause that buyers of our oil...

David Cameron has vowed to resist plans by the European Union to bar Britain from waiving VAT on food, medicine and children's clothing, a senior EU official said. Pierre Moscovici, the Economics Commissioner, said that Britain's "zero rate" for VAT on a number of items is "not the best idea" and suggested it will be looked at as part of a review by the European Commission. It will fuel controversy as David Cameron holds a series of meetings as he prepares to call a referendum on Britain's continued membership of the of the European Union. ...

France said Thursday that a British exit from the European Union would be a tragedy, but warned that Britain's demands for reform could not be met at any price. French President Francois Hollande said Thursday he would be "particularly vigilant" during talks with Britain while the PM Manuel Valls said the UK was unlikely to win over EU leaders in the next few weeks. [...] "France wants Great Britain to stay in the European Union - that's in the interests of Europe and the United Kingdom," he said. "But I will be particularly vigilant so that the eurozone can continue...

Leaflets outlining the benefits of remaining in the EU will appear in millions of letter boxes in England this week as a possible agreement on the reforms demanded by Britain begins to take shape. Some 10 million brochures will be sent around England -- the part of Britain where opposition to the European Union is at its highest -- by Britain Stronger in Europe, the campaign group leading the movement to stay in. Among the mostly economic arguments made in the leaflets are the jobs created by EU membership, greater consumer choice, lower prices as well as the investment coming...

Poland has accused the Dutch EU commissioner, Frans Timmermans, of "left-wing" bias and "astonishing" ignorance in trying to "exert pressure" on constitutional reform. If Timmermans had expected a conciliatory reply, on technical issues, after he asked the Polish justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, in December to explain the reforms, then he would have been surprised on Monday evening (11 January). [...] Ziobro's letter arrived shortly before the commission holds a debate on Poland on Wednesday. [...] Some commissioners, such as Germany's Guenther Oettinger, have said Poland should be placed under a supervisory mechanism, which could lead to EU sanctions. ...

It hasn't been legal tender for 14 years, but in January a German supermarket chain will start accepting Deutschmarks again. Kaufland supermarkets will be accepting the former German currency at their cashiers. To support the campaign, many of the company's products will also be given a 1960s design to enhance the nostalgic theme. [...] (T)his is a limited campaign, lasting from January 4th until January 30th, and the aim is to get Germans to use the old currency they still have lying around. The estimated value of that currency is over €6 billion. ...

The European Union on Thursday predicted the region's economy will grow at "a modest pace" next year thanks to cheap energy and central bank stimulus, but remains hampered by low investment and high debt. In an official forecast, European Commissioner Pierre Moscovici warned of uneven improvements across the 28 member states but said that for 2016, the EU economies will "see growth rising and unemployment and fiscal deficits falling." ...

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said on Tuesday that he wanted to do everything possible to keep Britain from leaving the European Union, adding that it would be a disaster for both the British and Europeans. “I hope that we can convince (the) UK… (to) stay in the EU, because a Brexit would be a disaster for the UK and for Europeans,” Schäuble said during a discussion with students at Sciences Po university in Paris. Schäuble also said that he hoped Britain would join the euro in the coming years. …

The European Union has no border patrol. It’s one of the many ways in which the bloc lacks power, with its member countries jealously guarding their sovereign prerogative to enact their own laws about defense, police and coast guard. This vacuum of authority, and the failure of EU policy-makers to anticipate how events in faraway Libya or Syria might trigger the flood of refugees now swamping Europe, are some of the reasons the group of 28 European nations originally founded as a common market has failed to deal more firmly and effectively with what has mushroomed into a major humanitarian...

The euro’s founding father has warned that Europe’s latest plan for an EMU-wide finance ministry is a dangerous attempt to smuggle through political union, and breaches the basic tenets of modern democracy. Professor Otmar Issing, the chief architect of monetary union through its early years, said it would be “dangerous” to transfer control over tax and spending to the EU federal level before full political union has been established first on democratic foundations. Such a quantum leap in the constitutional structure of Europe—effectively the creation of an EU superstate, with a parliament comparable in power to the US Congress—is unthinkable...