Kari Partanen

Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB. Even her exit is planned: leave before the 2027 French election so her successor gets picked before voters have a say. Let's use the moment to ask the real question: what is this job even for? One person, in a tower in Frankfurt, sets the price of money for 350 million Europeans. The single most important price in the economy, the one every other price depends on, decided by a committee. We call it "monetary policy." If we did the same thing with the price of bread, we'd call it Gosplan. That's Europe's real problem. It's a central planning project, and like every communist project, it rests on one belief: that the economy is a machine you can steer with levers, rates, regulations and directives, as long as you have enough technocrats and enough models. Macroeconomics as practiced in Brussels and Frankfurt is that illusion dressed up as science. Look at the results. Stagnant growth, industry leaving, purchasing power melting, savers wiped out by inflation, overindebted states propped up by the printing press, social anger, insecurity. This isn't a string of accidents. It's what happens when you replace millions of free decisions with a handful of central ones. Milton Friedman said it 50 years ago: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It doesn't fall from the sky, it comes out of central banks. He distrusted central bankers so much that he proposed replacing them with a computer that would grow the money supply at a fixed rate, no discretion, no "steering." I'd go further. Creating money out of nothing distorts every price at once. Prices are the information that lets an economy function. Falsifying them is lying to everyone at the same time. It should be banned. And the good news is this system is about to become obsolete. What Elon is building, AI, robots, energy, payments, is an economy of abundance where productivity pushes prices down faster than any committee can manipulate them. When the cost of production collapses, the power of those who control money collapses with it. Lagarde is leaving. The next one should be the last.

Yesterday I was talking with an economist. A genuinely sharp guy. We ended up agreeing on a conclusion that isn't comfortable: Europe and the West are down to two scenarios. Scenario one: communism gets defeated within the next 5 years. We finally do what has to be done on immigration and on the economy. It will be hard, really hard. But better a horrible ending than horror without end. Scenario two: communism wins. And right behind it, most likely, Islamic tyranny. Not in 50 years. Soon after. There is no in-between. No "it'll sort itself out," no lukewarm third way where everyone keeps their little comfort zone. What fascinates me is that the vast majority of people don't see this at all. They're living through this period as if it were just another political cycle. But there's good news. The people who've been sounding the alarm for 20 years were right. They were called crazy, doomers, prophets of decline. And every month, reality proves them a little more right. The faster people realize this, the further ahead we get. Waking up is already half the battle.