The European Central Bank is failing abjectly in its core mission to protect the common currency through shared prosperity as well as price stability. It no longer deserves its name and logo.
So here are my proposals for a new name and logo.
The new logo:
And new name:
The Iron Bank of Frankfurt
There is a fine episode in The Game of Thrones where Stannis and Davos travel to the Iron Bank of Braavos and are forced to sit on low benches at the end of a huge and intimidating hall apparently designed by Albert Speer. They beg for a loan, in vain. The ambience would be familiar to Tsipras and Varoufakis.
Embedding disabled, but here’s the Youtube link.
Footnote
The Antiqua typeface I use for the name is surprisingly the official one chosen by the Nazi leadership in 1941, when you would think they had other priorities. Black-letter Gothic typefaces like this:
The Iron Bank of Frankfurt
had been the standard before then, but Hitler despised them as a poor fit:
in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and defiant will …
So Gothic type suddenly became Jewish, Schwabacher Judenlettern. The claimed Jewish origin is ahistorical, according to Wikipedia: ghetto Jews in Germany were no more likely to flock to the high-risk and new technology business of printing in the 1530s than Lubavitchers have been dominating Silicon Valley. Perhaps it was aimed by Bormann and Goebbels at the traditionalist Julius Streicher, publisher of the vile anti-Semitic rag
At all events, we have to credit the Nazis with getting it right on the merits of the typefaces: a very rare stopped-clock case, along with their objections to smoking and cruelty to animals.
Oh, they were right on bankers too, for the wrong reason. They despised them as Jews, a complete misapprehension. But the bias helped immunize them against deference to the economic CW that bankers promulgate, and peacetime fascist economic policy in Germany and Italy, and Mosley’s platform in Britain, was quite Keynesian.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]
