Friday, April 29, 2011

Good summation...

...of th problem and suggested prescription for recovery. I disagree that the EU can be saved by policy, and furthermore assert that the current conditions will only fester cultural animosity.

The Full article is here.

As they begin to adopt Germany’s model, or something along those lines, the other eurozone states will find it nearly impossible to use fiscal stimulus in times of crisis. And with monetary policy already in the hands of the dogmatically anti-inflationary European Central Bank, their only means of adjusting to crises will be to stand by as wages fall and unemployment soars. Ireland—with its collapsed tax revenues, massive cuts in government spending, shrinking wages, and skyrocketing unemployment—is the unhappy exemplar of rigid austerity measures in the new Europe.

This approach cannot be sustained for long. The EU has never had much popular legitimacy: many voters have gone along with it so far only out of the belief that their politicians knew best. Today, they are more suspicious. And if they come to think that further European integration is causing more economic hardship, their suspicion could harden into bitterness and perhaps even xenophobia. Ireland’s new finance minister, Michael Noonan, has told voters that the EU is a game rigged in Germany’s favor; editorials in major Irish newspapers warn of Germany’s return to racist imperialism. As economic shocks hit other EU countries, politicians in those states will also look for someone to blame.

If the EU is to survive, it will have to craft a solution to the eurozone crisis that is politically as well as economically sustainable. It will need to create long-term institutions that both minimize the risk of future economic crises and refrain from adopting politically unsustainable forms of austerity when crises do hit. They must offer the EU countries that are the worst hit a viable path to economic stability while reassuring Germany, the state currently driving economic debates within the union, that it will not be asked to bail out weaker states indefinitely.

The short-term solution is clear—even if the European Central Bank, which is still fighting the war against the inflation of the 1980s and 1990s, refuses to recognize it. The solution is a one-off combination of market purchases of bonds and other financial assets, temporarily higher inflation, and fiscal support with the issuance of a common European bond. Quantitative easing and higher inflation would help ease the pain of adjustment, and a European bond would allow the weaker eurozone states to raise money on international markets. All of this would shore up the euro long enough to allow for further-reaching reforms down the road. The major euro bondholders would have to bear some of the costs—as they should, since they lent excessively during the first years of this century—through either explicit haircuts (in effect a discount of their bonds’ value) or inflation. Germany might not enjoy experiencing temporarily higher inflation, but if this were a one-time cost, it could probably live with the results—as long as it was also reassured that the long-term gain would be stability in the eurozone.

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