Candidate assesment: Peer Steinbrück would be an acceptable centre-left candidate for European elites by Peter Wahl http://imfboss.org/2011/05/23/candidate-assesment-peer-steinbruck-would-be-an-acceptable-centre-left-candidate-for-european-elites-by-peter-wahl/

Peer Steinbrück was minister of finance under Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 until 2009 in the coalition of the Christian Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He has studied economics and sociology and made a typical party career in the SPD working as an assistant of several social democratic ministers, for instance in the ministries for construction, for environment and for technology. In 2005 he was running as candidate for the presidency in the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia, which by population is the biggest state in the German federation. But he was beaten with the worst result for his party since the end of the war.

Steinbrück belongs to the right wing of the SPD and represents a kind of “New Labour” policies. In the first years as finance minister he strongly supported further deregulation and liberalization of financial markets with the argument, that German competitiveness on global financial markets would have to be strengthened. However, before the Heiligendamm G8, he tried to advocate more transparency for hedge funds, but did not succeed and gave up, accepting the arguments of the UK and the US.

Candidate assessment: Axel Weber lacks diplomatic skills and strategic thinking by Peter Wahl http://imfboss.org/2011/05/23/candidate-assessment-axel-weber-lacks-diplomatic-skills-and-strategic-thinking-by-peter-wahl/

Before his assignment he was part of the so called “Five wise men” an influential advisory board of five German top economic institutes to the federal government. Weber, a university professor of economics, represents the hard core monetarist school and the tradition of the Bundesbank from the times of the Deutschmark. This paradigm of the Bundesbank has been imposed to the euro-zone and the anchored in the statutes of the European Central Bank (ECB).

It was therefore no surprise, that Weber did not understand the system in which he was playing quite an important role. When the first German bank, the IKB, was collapsing in August 2007 as a result of the rising tide of the US-subprime crisis, he declared that “the exposure of German Banks in the American real estate market is limited. It is concentrated on investments with a high rating. Any comparison, made by some media reports, between the present economic situation and the banking crisis of 1931 are completely erroneous.”