Maybe I missed it but Ursula's dramatic speech about needing more money from banks last week really was something...odd.
She wants the serf's savings, because as usual the socialists have run out of other confiscated money.
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Ursula von der Leyen gave an astonishing speech to French business leaders five days ago that has just now broken into the news. As you will see in the video, the unelected Empress of Europe was tremendously animated for her normal appearances, but that was, perhaps, due to the subject - money.
She and her appointed satraps have run through all of it. The money sent to Brussels, the money they've extorted from 'member states' for their weapons build-ups and defense spending, all of it.
And what makes her angry enough to smack the podium is the savings of hard-working Europeans, sitting fat and untouched in European banks, out of her control.
She wants to control it. All of it.
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Von der Leyen Wants Your Bank Deposits: Here Is How to Keep Control of Them
Brussels wants Europe's 10 trillion euros in deposits funding its companies
The President of the European Commission stood in front of a room full of French business leaders last week and said the quiet part out loud. Europeans have roughly 10 trillion euros parked in bank accounts, that money is "sitting idle", and Europe now needs to put it to work for European companies.
She was not proposing to raid anyone's account. But the language matters, because it tells you exactly how your savings are viewed from Brussels: not as your money, but as a national resource that is currently being wasted. Here is what is actually happening, and what you can do about it that does not involve waiting for a policy to be designed for you.
How is she going to do that?
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...The vehicle for fixing this is the Savings and Investments Union, or SIU. The Commission says the package of measures on securitisation, bank and insurance investment rules, market integration and supervision could unlock up to 470 billion euros in additional investment.
...No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. There is no confiscation, no forced conversion, no deposit levy in the SIU.
What the SIU does is change the plumbing. It makes it easier and cheaper for banks, insurers and asset managers to move retail money into capital markets, it pushes simplified investment products and pension wrappers, and it leans hard on financial literacy campaigns to convince you that your deposit account is underperforming.
On the last point, they are not wrong. The Commission's own framing is that bank deposits are safe and easy to access but usually earn less than capital market investments. That is true. The awkward part is the second half of the pitch: the goal is not only better returns for you, it is cheaper capital for European companies. You are being asked to become the funding source for an industrial policy.
Europe is a lousy place to invest because they have astronomical energy and regulatory costs, so now they are moving to the part the communists always put off as long as possible, taking wealth from the subjects because they have big plans/needs at the top.
