In the case of governments, the link between green issuance and any additional green spending is tenuous at best. Germany, for example, identified €12.7 billion of eligible spending from last year’s budget – hardly an indication that the green Bund programme will be financing anything that was not already happening anyway.

Biden’s bet on small-scale nuclear. As part of his decarbonisation drive, the president-elect wants to spur development of small modular reactors (SMRs), so that they can help balance the grid alongside surging renewable output. Small-scale nuclear’s biggest rival natural gas can already be ordered off the shelf and constructed quickly and cheaply.

Since 2016 the European Central Bank has adhered to the “market neutrality” principle, which aims to avoid distorting relative pricing of securities by only purchasing them in proportion to the overall eligible market. Mr Weidmann defended the principle and said: “It is not the task of the Eurosystem to penalise or promote certain industries.”

In March financial markets were subjected to their biggest stress test in more than a decade. Funds struggled to meet customer redemptions as buyers for credit products proved hard to find. Finland’s Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance has classified corporate credit as illiquid. This is why regulators need to revisit rules covering daily redemptions.

110 billion euros will need to be invested in Germany’s electricity network by 2050 in order to meet the demands of the energy transition, according to a new study. Without these investments, “follow-up costs” of 4.2 billion euros a year could be incurred because of overloaded networks that are not able to absorb renewable-generated electricity.

The rapid growth of the green bond industry is fanning suspicions that some debt is environmentally friendly in name only, encouraging investors to ignore the (green) label and focus on the credentials of the issuer instead. “We don’t buy a bond because it’s green, but because the company is,” said Tom Chinery of Aviva Investors.

Banks are putting pressure on giant oil-and-gas companies to accelerate their renewable strategies. Credit Suisse has partnered with the Climate Bonds Initiative to accelerate the energy transition. The duo has established a pathway for companies to issue “transition bonds” as a bridge between their current business and greener offerings in the future.

The EU has offered its first social bond. The offering was oversubscribed 14 times over. Orders blew past 233 billion euros. It gives new issuers significant incentive to offer their own sustainable debt, companies and sovereign entities. A 14-times-oversubscribed sustainable debt offering also indicates a market that’s structurally underserved.

In the first nine months, new money going into climate-aware funds totalled €37bn out of sustainable fund inflows of €134bn. However, climate change funds can be confusing. There is not yet a standard classification. Iberdrola or Enel are often held in climate change funds though still derive significant revenue from emission-generating activities.

Manually initiated load shedding is a call for people to stop using electricity, at a certain period of time to stop the electricity system collapsing. These kinds of events are becoming more frequent, due to a combination of hotter summers and increased instability due to renewables forming a higher percentage of the electricity mix.

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that Brussels would use its new borrowing powers to issue €225bn of its €750bn recovery debt in the form of sustainable bonds. Right now, Brussels is working with loosely-defined metrics that state certain percentages of an investment as being green. Critics have said it is hardly robust.

Swiss bank UBS asked them to pay for Swiss franc cash deposits. Investors may feel they have no alternative for their cash than to invest in higher-risk assets in order to make some form of return. Gardiner at Rothschild is sceptical of gold and silver, though, because even after recent price increases neither has regained its 1980s price level in real terms.