From Norbert Häring
Shortly after it has become known that hackers are offering the identity data of most Indians from the world’s largest digital identity database for sale, the European Parliament and Council have agreed to introduce something similar for Europeans, while Washington praises the Ukrainian version as an export model and Bill Gates wants to impose a biometric digital marker on every newborn child in Kenya for life.
In early October, IT security firm Resecurity announced that hackers had stolen the biometric identity data of over 800 million Indians from the government’s Aadhaar database and were offering it for sale. Resecurity acquired 400,000 data records and verified their authenticity. Those affected had not been informed of the theft by the unknown organisation

From Norbert Häring
A presentation on the technical monitoring of human brain functions at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos has shined a spotlight on what ails our society: excessive faith in technology and too much efficiency without a worthwhile goal. As long as the machine runs like clockwork, it is considered irrelevant what it produces. From this diagnosis I derive recommendations on how we can change direction.
Moderator Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the U.S. publisher The Atlantic introduces Nita A. Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University. He cheerfully promises that the audience will be enlightened and excited by her talk.
The presentation “Ready for Brain Transparency?” begins on the screen with a colorful cartoon full of happy people.

From Norbert Häring
India’s central bank will withdraw the largest banknote from circulation. The then largest note is only worth about as much as the smallest in the euro area. The move is intended to force people to use electronic money instead of cash. With this, they can be better monitored and controlled and the financial and IT industries get their percentages and data with every purchase. India, as a favorite guinea pig of the global cash abolitionists, often provides the blueprint for what is in store for us.
The Reserve Bank of India announced on 20 May that it will withdraw the 2000 rupee note, worth the equivalent of almost 23 euros, from circulation by 30 September. The new largest banknote will then be the 500 rupee note worth about 5.7 euros.
Clearly, this makes the use

From Norbert Häring

The Central Bank of Kazakhstan published a report in July 2022 that developed the criteria for deciding on the design of the planned digital tenge. The tenge is the national currency of Kazakhstan. At the heart of the report is the conceptual groundwork of two guides from the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum, the lobby of the 1,000 largest international corporations. The World Economic Forum’s guide is the one which is quoted more extensively.
Reading this report from Kazakhstan – not exactly a mass medium – was the first time I read about this role of the World Economic Forum in the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). This is despite the fact that I follow quite closely what is going on at the World Economic Forum and

From Norbert Häring
The Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican turns two. After his famous verdict “This economy kills,” Pope Francis seems to now be offering big capitalists a spiritual platform for polishing their public image. Unless, the commitments that corporate CEOs post on this platform are seriously intended to make the world a better place? Let’s take a look.
It’s a contrast that could hardly be greater: In late 2013, Pope Francis condemned predatory capitalism and its leaders in his doctrinal letter “Evangelii Gaudium,” something like his government declaration: “Such an economy kills,” it read, and:
“The worship of the ancient golden calf has found a new and merciless form in the fetish of money and in the dictatorship of an economy without a face and without a

From Norbert Häring
Universal basic income has a lot of support among the left but also faces a lot of criticism or even hostility from the left. As on of the critics of I have used a book defending basic income against criticism from the left to check my beliefs against counter-arguments from the same side of the political spectrum and to clarify the reasons for not being convinced.
One of Karl Reitter’s arguments in his book “Kritik der linken Kritik am Grundeinkommen” has indeed convinced me of something that was not fully clear to me before. The neoliberal representatives of basic income, who want to abolish all or almost all social benefits in return for the basic income, are indeed a relatively small minority that has managed to dominate the discussion in the media. If one calls

From Norbert Häring
With its Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, the lobby of the world’s largest corporations, supposedly wants to save the world from climate collapse. With a contribution on protecting the climate through Bitcoin, the powerful organisation proves- once again – that distrust is called for when it comes to corporate commitments to social goals. Greenwashing is the order of the day.
Scandalously, the World Economic Forum is recognised as an international organisation, like the Red Cross, not least because of the UN’s dependence on corporate money. As such, it does not sit in the ranks as a lobby iwhen the supposed international bodies discuss how save the world, but sits at the table.
There already indications, that the greenwashing of the Forum will influence policy

From Norbert Häring
Thales, one of the largest international defense contractors, calls the digital vaccination passport a precursor to universal mobile-digital identity credentials. Thales thus confirms my analysis and my worst fears.
Under the headline “How digital ID can help citizens access government services from anywhere,” Kristel Teyras, in charge of the defense contractor Thales’ Digital Identity Services portfolio, writes:
“So-called digital ‘vaccination passports’ will play a key role in enabling citizens to access all manner of services and will act as a precursor to the rollout of mobile digital IDs.”
The pandemic, she writes, has acted as a catalyst for a major shift in consumer behavior, toward the widespread digitization of public and private services. On the role of

From Norbert Häring
The hypocrisy of a working group led by the European Central Bank (ECB) on the preservation of cash, which is dominated by banks who at the same time continue to wage their war on cash, has been exposed by cash industry group ESTA in a report. ESTA sent the report to this working group – after it had recently left it in protest.
As a part of its cash strategy, which the ECB Governing Council adopted last September and which it has been hiding in the depths of the ECB’s website since December, the ECB has tasked a working group of the European Retail Payment Board (ERPB) with producing a report on securing access to and acceptance of cash. The ERPB is an ECB-led advisory group. Members are representatives of banks and other associations involved in payment

From Norbert Häring
Merkel, Macron, von der Leyen and other international leaders have described the Corona crisis as an opportunity to reorder world politics on the basis of multilateralism. The timing, shortly after the World Economic Forum’s meeting, and the echoes of the Great Reset proclaimed by the forum, are probably no coincidence, as an analysis of key passages will show.
In a joint plea printed in a number of important international newspapers, António Guterres, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Charles Michel and Macky Sall call for “Multilateral cooperation for Global Recovery”
Guterres is secretary-general of the UN. As a member of the “World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Assistance,” he has co-written texts with such fine titles

From  Norbert Häring and current issue of RWER
On 2 October, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced in a press release that it intends to intensify its work on a digital euro. The ECB enumerated three scenarios under which it might want to issue a digital euro: (i) a sharp decline in the use of cash, (ii) “he launch of global private means of payment that might raise regulatory concerns and pose risks for financial stability and consumer protection” (read: Libra), and (iii) a broad take-up of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) issued by foreign central banks (read: digital yuan).
With a digital euro one could, if one wanted and was allowed to, actually do some good, namely:
create a supplement for cash that protects privacy better than other digital means of payment,
give

From Norbert Häring
ESTA, the association of European cash management companies, has published a position paper contradicting the assessment of the EU Advocate General of my case before the European Court of Justice regarding the right to pay my broadcasting fee with the legal tender, cash.
The opinion of the Advocate General is a recommendation to the highest EU court. The Advocate General has more or less adopted the anti-cash stance of the EU Commission. The Board of ESTA, in its opinion adopted on October 26, takes offence at the Attorney General’s assessment that private parties could, without meaningful restrictions, agree by explicit or implicit contractual agreement on a means of payment other than legal tender:
A limitation of legal tender based on contractual agreement, the

From Norbert Häring
The President of the EU-Commission plans to give all EU citizens a European digital identity which can “be used anywhere in Europe to do anything from paying taxes to renting a bike”. She wants to implement for Europe what ID2020, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and Homeland Security are pushing worldwide – to perfect the automated surveillance of the world’s ppopulation.
In Ursula von der Leyen’s speech on the State of the Union on September 16, an important announcement was lost due to the attention given to a tightened climate target. The President of the Commission said:
We want a set of rules that puts people at the centre. Algorithms must not be a black box and there must be clear rules if something goes wrong. The Commission will propose a law to

From  Norbert Häring
Developing countries are trying to contain the corona pandemic under the most adverse conditions. In the middle of this, the World Bank is proposing that the water supply of slum dwellers be cut off, if their landlords do not pay the water bill. It is an inhumane philosophy of development that is behind such monstrosities.
For about two decades, the World Bank’s philosophy has been “sustainable development”; “sustainable” in the sense of profitable in the long run. Wherever possible, development work should be carried out in partnership with private companies and their foundations, because only if some corporation can earn money sustainably from development policy will enough money flow in to make a lasting difference. The derivation from this is to privatize and

From Norbert Häring

According to its own description, the World Economic Forum is “THE international organisation for public-private cooperation” and has as its main objective “to improve the state of the world”. The foundation, founded in 1971 by German economist Klaus Schwab, lacks neither power nor self-confidence. For years now, almost all the world’s major heads of government have made the pilgrimage to the annual meeting in Davos to pay their respects to multinational corporations and billionaires.
The World Bank, a close collaborator of the Forum, has made it a strategy to only support development projects that the member companies of this club can earn money from. The United Nations (UN) have been made highly dependent on the money of the corporations and can do practically

From Norbert Häring
Ten years ago, the Rockefeller Foundation published the eerily prescient, autocratic Lock-Step-Scenario and, apparently, has been working to make it true. The most recent initiative in this regard is a cooperation of the Rockefeller-funded GAVI immunization alliance with Mastercard and a biometric ID company named TrustStamp.
Before getting to this cooperation, let me briefly remind you of a selection of the assumptions of the Lock Step scenario builders have made their choices 10 years ago:
A virus pandemic with high contagion and high mortality
Non-authoritarian response of US-government fails
Authoritarian Chinese approach works much better
Other nations emulate authoritarian, high surveillance Chinese approach
Endurance of more authoritarian rule after pandemic

From Norbert Norbert Häring
A turmoil has engulfed the faculties of economics at the University of Chicago and Harvard. A German economist was first suspended on accusations of racism in Chicago, then rehabilitated. An article in Harvard’s flagship Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) is accused of a colonial attitude. The authors justify themselves.
The article describes how a German economist, Harald Uhlig,caused a vritable shitstorm, fuelled not least by Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers, Even the former president of the US Federal Reserve and current chair of the American Economic Association, Janet Yellen, demanded publicly that Uhlig be relieved of his role as editor of the prestigious JPE, after Uhlig had made a number of callous remarks and provocative comparisons on his blog and

From Norbert Häring

From March 2021 people with an “I’ve got nothing to hide” attitude will be able to get around border and ticket controls at St Pancras International Station in London on their way to the Continent via the Eurostar, All they will have to do is upload a suitable portrait photo and a copy of their identity document to a government server. Then, instead of standing in a queue, they can walk down a camera-tagged “biometric corridor” without having to show a document. The passport and ticket will, however, be needed at the destination, at least until the brave new total surveillance world of the World Economic Forum has been implemented there, too.
The Known Traveller Program, which has been jointly developed by the World Economic Forum and US Homeland Security,

From Norbert Häring
Sudan has a transitional government that depends on the goodwill of the USA. This is an opportunity to use the country for the largest field trial to date, to put an entire population on the digital leash through cash abolition and a universal basic income.
For several years now, the World Bank, Better Than Cash Alliance and various UN organizations have been massively promoting and advertising the purely digital transmission of financial aid for the needy in poor countries. Declared goals are cost savings and prevention of corruption and theft, as well as “financial inclusion”. The latter is the real reason, but not in the harmless meaning of giving everyone the chance to get a bank account, but in the meaning of “bringing everyone into the system”, as the head of

From Norbert Häring

In Germany and beyond, public policy in response to the Corona crisis operates with
an unspoken basic assumption: the claims of capital are sacred.
This is unfair and economically unreasonable.
German economists largely agreed on how not to deal with the corona crisis. Sending a cheque to all taxpayers, as the US government did, is considered an unsuitable anti-crisis measure. After all, the 1200 dollars were too little for 30 million who lost their jobs within a few weeks, and unnecessary for the others who were supposed to stay at home anyway and not go shopping.
Instead, the German government, to roaring support of German economist, decided to lower the value added tax for half a year, starting in July. Few of the arguments against Trumps consumption checks

From Norbert Häring
Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality.
According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.
I became aware of this plan through a German

From Norbert Häring
Distributing additional money to stimulate demand is seen by economists as a recipe for boosting demand in a crisis. But you have to do it right, not like Donald Trump did it.
In response to the corona crisis, US President Donald Trump had consumption cheques with his signature worth 1200 dollars sent to all citizens. This bears a strong resemblance to an anti-crisis recipe of economists, which has been known as helicopter money since Milton Friedman coined this term. You just let money rain down, and demand will automatically pick up again.
According to the basic concept of helicopter money, it would be the central bank which puts the additional money into circulation. In the current case, however, the money does not come straight from the central bank Federal

From Norbert Häring
In January  2018, a pilot project for the surveillance of air travelers, commissioned by the World Economic Forum, was agreed upon in Davos. At the time, I presented the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project as a “totalitarian dystopa”. A follow-up report shows that the multinational corporations are successfully involving governments and the EU in their plans. Covid-19 is speeding up implementation tremdendously and Bill Gates inadvertently lets us know how.
Like the 2018 report called „”The Known Traveller: Unlocking the potential of digital identity for secure and seamless travel“ this more technical KTDI White Paper that goes by the title “Known Traveller Digital Identity Specifications Guidance” was published without any fanfare on the Internet  in

Fro Norbert Häring
If the trend of the last two decades continues, index funds could control 40 percent of the voting rights in the largest corporations by 2040.The share is already up to 25 percent in the US. There a two perspectives on this. Some scholars say it threatens shareholder value, others fear it will lead to too much of it. I side with the latter. …
Law-and-economics professors Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst from the Universities of Harvard and Boston make the extrapolation of the index funds share in votes in their paper “The Specter of the Giant Three”.
The concentration of shares in an ever smaller number of fund companies is a trend that has started roughly 70 years ago. In 1960 only about six percent of US shares were held by capital management companies. This share

From Norbert Häring
The Better Than Cash Alliance (Visa, Mastercard, Citibank, Bill Gates, USAID) coordinates the global war against cash from New York. Now, the city council of the headquarters of the Alliance has decided to oblige all brick and mortar stores and restaurants to accept cash. The justification of the regulation is a low blow for the alliance’s financial inclusion propaganda.
According to a USA-Today report, retail stores, restaurants, and bars will have to accept cash in the future. The new regulation gets in the way of a program of credit card company Visa, which is paying restaurants for going completely cashless.
Visa is one of the founding members of the Better Than Cash Alliance, which aims to eliminate cash worldwide. The alliance is based in New York. With

From Norbert Häring
The OECD and the EU want to change international tax principles to curb tax evasion. The United States is opposed to the plans as they would affect its internet companies and other US multinationals.
The US has stepped up its fight against taxes on digital corporations. Shortly after President Donald Trump’s threat of special tariffs on French goods, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked all countries in early December to abandon similar plans for taxes that would hit US internet corporations in particular. In a letter to the industrialized country organization OECD, Mnuchin stated that an agreement should instead be reached at the OECD level. At the same time, however, he warned of changes to the taxation right, which this same OECD has been planning to

From Norbert Häring
Germany’s economic output contracted in the second quarter and most indications point to a worsening in the third quarter, which is just halfway through. The culprit is only superficially Donald Trump with his trade wars. The German economy has been on an unsustainable path in several respects. Now the government is called upon to act courageously and intelligently to ensure that a deep restructuring crisis is avoided.
The German success model was not sustainable because it ignored the limits of the rest of the world’s ability to borrow money to pay for German exports and because it omits the fact that we are already very close to the limits of the ecological resilience of our planet.
As far as economic limits are concerned: In the long run it is not feasible that,

From Norbert Häring
On 27 March, the highest administrative court in Germany, the Bundesverwaltungsgericht, has referred my case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. I have insisted to pay my legally required contributions to public radio and TV with the legal tender, euro cash. This is not possible according to their regulations. The Bundesverwaltungsgericht has ruled that there is indeed a requirement for all public institutions to accept cash based on §14 of the Bundesbank Act, which makes euro-banknotes legal tender. However, they will ask the ECJ to clarify, if this law is in agreement with higher ranking European law.
§14 Paragraph 1 Sentence 2 of the Bundesbank Act says:
“Banknotes denominated in euro shall be the sole unrestricted legal tender.”
Article 128

From Norbert Häring
European Economic & Monetary Union (EMU) is in permanent crisis. The economic strengths of the participating nations are drifting apart instead of converging. This creates great frustration among the governments of countries being left behind and fierce disputes between them and Brussels and governments of core countries.
The currency union was based on the premise that the economic structures and levels of prosperity among the members of the union would converge. The poorer countries would catch up. That didn’t happen. On the contrary. Philipp Heimberger from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW) warned in his analysis of October 2018:
“The most significant long-term risk of disintegration for the euro area is the existing polarisation in

From Norbert Häring
A year ago, I described how the controversial and well-financed ride-hauling platform Uber pays economists with data and money to do Uber-related research. This research invariably leads to favourable results, which can be used to fend off criticism and regulation. One such study has now been ripped apart in the Industrial & Labor Relations Review (ILR), a top journal in labor-economics.
Two fearless economists, Janine Berg, senior-economist at the International Labor Organisation (ILO), and doctoral candidate Hannah Johnston submitted an extremely critical comment on a paper by Uber’s chief economist Jonathan Hall and Princeton economist Alan Krueger, which portrayed Uber as a good company to work for and its “driver-partners” as very satisfied and earning good