Norbert Haring

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Norbert Häring (* 1963 ) is a German business journalist . He has been editor for economics and business at Handelsblatt since 2002 .

Life

After graduating from high school, Häring studied economics in Heidelberg and Saarbrücken and did his doctorate under Olaf Sievert with a thesis on the political economy of regional funding. He then worked for Commerzbank for three years and switched to business journalism in 1997. He worked for the Börsen-Zeitung and, from 2000, for the newly founded Financial Times Deutschland . He has been working full-time at Handelsblatt since 2002 and was mainly responsible for monetary policy until 2012 . In 2002 he set up the ECB Shadow Council, a group of then 18, now 15 prominent economists from financial institutions, universities and research institutes, which discuss monetary policy issues and adopt recommendations for the ECB's monetary policy. In 2011 he was one of the initiators and founders and since then one of the co-directors of the international economists' association World Economics Association .

Economic policy statements

Cash payment of the license fee

Häring demands the right to cash payments from the fee control center for public broadcasting. This is anchored in Section 14 of the Bundesbank Act. It poses problems for the fee collection center , since a cash payment entails a higher administrative burden than a fee collection. After all lower court instances had ruled that no payments could be made to public bodies with cash, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig decided on March 27, 2019 to suspend the Häring case against the license fee center and to refer it to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Criticism of the proposals to abolish cash

According to Häring, the demand for the abolition or limitation of cash is rooted in the desire of the financial sector for unlimited money creation instead of the official motives for fighting crime and tax justice. For him, the abolition of cash is also a step into the “ Orwell State ”, since it leads to the absolute transparency of all payment transactions and thus to the possible control of every act of the individual citizen connected with money transfers. Häring attributes the seemingly unmotivated rush to introduce and the coordination of proposals from politics and business to the banks' "nervous fear" of a new and worsened financial crisis, which, as in Greece, could lead to a run on the banks if citizens get their cash want to take off. In his opinion, the international initiative Better Than Cash Alliance is promoting the global implementation of cashless payments with the promise of wanting to eradicate poverty. Using the example of India, however, Haring tries to demonstrate what dire consequences the abolition of cash has had and can continue to have for "the poor majority of the population and the majority of the smaller producers and traders" in a country.

Criticism of the global agreement to promote labor migration

Together with the Mexican development economist Raul Delgado Wise, Häring states: "If you look at the data, migration is subsidizing the north by the south." The contribution of the well-educated emigrated from developing countries to increasing prosperity in industrialized countries is considerable. The costs of the brain drain for the countries of origin in terms of the loss of their potential are underexposed. Labor migration according to the parameters of the migration agreement harms both the workers in the destination countries and the migrants' countries of origin: "Left parties who support such a thing are doomed and have earned it."

Monographs

The Abolition of Cash and the Consequences (2016)

In this monograph, Häring puts his criticism of a possible abolition of cash in a wider context: He explains the functioning of the monetary and financial system in the context of the neoliberal economic order and the state and political order, which in his view corresponds to the neoliberal economy. Häring questions the official justification that aims to combat illegal work, tax evasion and terrorism. They have existed before and they are not dependent on cash, as the case of HSBC shows.

Häring sees the main economic motive behind the abolition of cash and thus the universal implementation of electronic book money transactions in the money creation profit . While the ECB reports 20 to 25 billion euros as annual profit from the interest on lending money, this is 300 billion euros for private banks across Europe for the interest on loans through deposit money creation . The abolition of cash will increase this volume even further. For the first time, the commercial banks were given complete control over the creation of money.

In the abolition of cash, Haring also sees parallels with the abolition of gold cover in favor of the American central bank's increase in the amount of money in the dollar that is independent of gold. Today, due to the indebtedness of the US, the dollar is demanding that the cash cover be removed as the last obstacle to limitless money creation.

Part of the presentation is the description of the difficulties that his Frankfurt house bank put in his way when he tried to withdraw cash. Häring works out which people and institutions are interested in cash abolition and how they work together as a network in the form of coordinated campaigns and coordinated actions.

In his opinion, the US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers , the US economist Kenneth Rogoff and the ECB President Mario Draghi are interested in the abolition of cash. Above all, rope teams unite members of Harvard University , MIT , the Group of Thirty , the Bilderberg Conference , Goldman Sachs , the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank .

Häring closes with an appeal to citizens to increase cash purchases in order to counteract the abolition of cash and the control of payment flows. Häring sees alternatives to the security of cash in crises in “everyone accounts” at the central bank or in a state-guaranteed deposit bank. The sovereign money theory with sovereign money is also presented as an alternative to the existing monetary system, supplemented by laws on data protection. The return to gold cover , the Bitcoin system and the model of free currency competition are also presented a little more distantly .

In his review, Guido Speckmann from Neues Deutschland praised the analysis of the motives behind the abolition of cash, but finds the theory of a conspiracy only partially justified and therefore too speculative overall. For Katja Scherer from NDR Info , too, Häring's portrayal of the networks sounds like an unlikely world conspiracy: “But precisely because this plan apparently does not exist, the current development is so dangerous: We live technological progress, we are happy about the convenience, quickly and to be able to pay easily - and do not notice how we are selling our identity piece by piece. Haring's book helps to become aware of this. "

Nice new money: PayPal, WeChat, Amazon Go - We are threatened by a totalitarian world currency (2018)

In this book, Häring specifies the actors and structures of the global campaign against cash claimed in "The Abolition of Cash and the Consequences". The focus is then on the Better Than Cash Alliance and the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI), as well as the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor ( CGAP ) and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI). He describes financial inclusion as a cover word for the targeted cash elimination.

As the main mastermind of the campaign, he makes the US government, secondly Bill Gates and his foundation, as well as Visa, Mastercard, Citi and the foundation of E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar . The main motives are firstly the US government's wish to strengthen its own global surveillance and sanctioning power in relation to the financial sector, secondly the commercial interests of the globally leading US corporations involved in the financial and IT sectors and thirdly the wish to prevent the central banks and the financial sector from withdrawing liquidity from the banking sector in the form of cash, which is difficult to control in the event of a crisis. A coalition with the other G20 countries had been forged through the GPFI, which also had an interest in better monitoring of the financial management of their respective citizens and companies.

Poor countries, on the other hand, with technical and financial help, as well as pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, would be persuaded to declare a government goal to suppress the use of cash and to implement appropriate measures.

Häring quotes from reports by the main actors, according to which important international standard-setters such as the Financial Action Task Force on Money-Laundering (FATF) have committed themselves to pursue the goal of financial inclusion, i.e. to make their financial standards hostile to cash.

In a review on Deutschlandfunk, Caspar Dohmen praised the author for having written a convincing book, with many surprising insights and a lot of new facts. Häring shows comprehensively which alliances and initiatives commercial enterprises, but also parts of politics, have formed in order to push back cash.

Prizes and awards

  • 2007: Business Book Prize for the bestseller Ökonomie 2.0 , which he wrote together with Olaf Storbeck.
  • 2015: Keynes Society Prize for Business Journalism. Häring expressed his thanks with the acceptance speech “Confessions of the court jester Norbert Häring”.

Publications

  • with Olaf Sievert and Hermann Naust: Need for reform for non-profit housing. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart [a. a.] 1990, ISBN 3-17-011240-6 (expert opinion on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Construction).
  • with Olaf Sivert u. a .: On the location quality of the Saarland. Werner Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1991, ISBN 3-924555-78-8 .
  • Regional policy and the financial constitution in a probabilistic model of political competition. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main [a. a.] 1995, ISBN 3-631-48815-7 , also: Dissertation, Saarbrücken University, 1995.
  • with Olaf Storbeck: Economy 2.0. 99 surprising findings. Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-7910-2635-0 .
  • Market and power. Everything you always wanted to know about business, but shouldn't have found out yet. Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-7910-2986-3 .
  • This is how the economy works. Haufe, Freiburg im Breisgau and Planegg / Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-648-02552-9 .
  • with Niall Douglas: Economists and the Powerful. Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards. Anthem Press, London [u. a.] 2012, ISBN 978-0-85728-459-4
  • Is it true, that…? Disrespectful questions about the economic order and the economic crisis. Schäffer-Poeschel, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-7910-3269-6 .
  • The abolition of cash and the consequences. Quadriga-Verlag, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-86995-088-4 .
  • Nice new money: PayPal, WeChat, Amazon Go - we are threatened by a totalitarian world currency , Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-593-50914-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ according to information on his website , accessed on April 28, 2019
  2. ↑ Norbert Häring. In: Planet Knowledge. WDR, December 4, 2018, accessed on August 11, 2019 .
  3. ^ World Economics Association: World Economics Association. In: www.worldeconomicsassociation.org. Retrieved September 25, 2016 .
  4. ↑ : Norbert Häring [1377222]. In: www.handelsblatt.com. Retrieved September 25, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Tim Schulze: Journalist wants to deal with radio broadcasts with a cash trick. WAZ , June 9, 2015, accessed November 17, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Press release No. 23/2019: ECJ should clarify questions about the acceptance obligation for euro banknotes. In: Federal Administrative Court. March 28, 2019, accessed March 30, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Norbert Häring: The abolition of cash and the consequences. 1st edition 2016 ISBN 978-3-86995-088-4  ; Interview on Deutschlandfunk , March 12, 2016
  8. ↑ https://www.betterthancash.org/about
  9. ↑ Norbert Häring: A well-kept, open secret: Washington is behind India's brutal cash experiment . norberthaering.de, January 1, 2017
  10. ↑ The migration agreement as the last nail in the coffin for the left parties , Über das Geld, October 24, 2018, accessed October 25, 2018
  11. ↑ Review: The Abolition of Cash and the Consequences. Retrieved September 25, 2016 .
  12. ↑ Guido Speckmann: Resists cash! (New Germany). Retrieved September 25, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Katja Scherer: Hard to imagine: A world without cash. Presentation of the book "The Abolition of Cash and the Consequences" by Norbert Häring. www.ndr.de, May 25, 2016, archived from the original on December 3, 2016 ; accessed on November 28, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Caspar Dohmen: "Beautiful new money. PayPal, WeChat, Amazon Go. Deutschlandfunk" Andruck ", August 20, 2018, accessed on August 11, 2019 .
  15. ^ Norbert Häring: Confessions of the court jester Norbert Häring - norberthaering.de. In: norberthaering.de. Retrieved September 25, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Haring, Norbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German business journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1963