Most or all politicians and most or all « euro-economists » are
currently misleading the public and distracting the opinion from the actual
issue. I call “euro-economists” those that have a vested interest in promoting the
euro, because they have already been promoting it in all their publications
during the last two or three decades, and keep denying the basic impossibility
of “saving it” by bureaucratic-technical-financial tricks, complex schemes to
reorganize and centralize (cartelize) the financial sector and the fiscal
institutions in Europe, against the fundamental current trend towards
decentralization.
That’s why a recent post on the INET
blog (August 8) by Heiner Flassbeck (a former deputy to the German
Finance Minister) is so important and his analysis outstanding. Commenting on a
recent INET Report, “Breaking the Deadlock: A Path Out of the Crisis”, that
purports to remedy the “fundamental structural flaws in the currency union”, he
doesn’t mince his words either.
Excerpts:
“A
currency union at its core is about harmonization of inflation rates as all
countries give up national monetary policies and explicitly agree on a common
inflation target (close to under two percent in the EMU). From here the
argument is absolutely straightforward.
First, we
have very strong evidence that inflation rates are highly correlated with unit
labour costs (ULC, for the overall economy, of course, not for industry).
Second, we know in general that the development of ULC is much more the result
of exogenous factors than the development of price changes, which leads to the
conclusion that ULC growth determines inflation to a very large extent. Third,
we know specifically (or should know) that the biggest country in Europe, Germany,
even before the official start of EMU, had decided to dramatically change the
course of its wage policy.
In a
tripartite agreement in 1999 government and negotiating partners on the labour
market agreed not to allow growth of nominal wages along the lines of
productivity growth and the inflation target of two percent (hitherto the
traditional German approach) for the future but to remain clearly below that
line. This has being applied and has been enforced by the “flexibilization of
the labour market” in the first years of the Red-Green government. This implied
that German ULC growth and its inflation rate would systematically remain below
the commonly agreed inflation target in EMU.
As no other country had a similar
arrangement it implied also that over time huge discrepancies in inflation
rates and huge real appreciations of other countries (against those like
Southern Europe that would slightly overshoot the inflation target but even
against those like France that would strictly stick to the target) and huge
unsustainable imbalances would be the result. One big country permanently
gaining international market shares and increasing its surpluses and the others
permanently losing and going deeper into deficit is a scenario for collapse if
corrective forces do not come into play sooner or later.”
(…)
“It is the
result of a political campaign trying to make Germany fit for an alleged
challenge of the “competition of nations” and it was sold exactly under that
banner to the German population. Even without any of the booms you mention in
the deficit countries, the euro was bound to fail.
I could stop
just here because for any reasonable person it is obvious that a monetary union
under these conditions will be in big trouble over time. That it was the
biggest of all financial crises that would trigger the outbreak of the crisis
is only of interest for historians. As has been the case in so many financial
crises in Asia and Latin America before, the crisis was unavoidable due to
unsustainable competitive positions.
What makes it much worse than
former crises is the simple fact that exchange-rate changes are not available
to close the gap in competitiveness. Europe has produced the biggest imbalances
in history exactly at the time when it has given up the main instrument to
correct such imbalances.”
While it is currently fashionable among “euro-economists” to attribute
the responsibility for the crisis to politicians, who allegedly did not follow
their excellent advice, Flassbeck thinks otherwise:
“You see,
reasonable people are one thing, economists are something else. (…)
Orthodox economists cannot even
take note of the undeniable correlation between ULC and inflation without being
in danger of losing their strongest belief.”
My comment:
As I wrote several times before, the key player is Germany. Different
national preferences regarding the inflation rate make the Euro unsustainable
because no amount of political pressure or “structural reform” is likely to
erase rapidly these differences, and especially the differences cumulated over
more than a decade , amounting in some cases to a price wedge of 30% to 50%
between North and South. It follows that the German preference for “competitive
disinflation” plays havoc with the other economies in the Eurozone. Of course a
true federal state could manage permanent transfers from the growing economies
towards the depressed ones (conditional also on a high geographical mobility of
labour, as is the case in the US) as far as it would rely on a politically
legitimate redistributive authority, contrary to the present situation where
such a transfer raises political conflicts between sovereign nation-states. But
no federal super-state can be build in Europe within a reasonably short time
framework, and moreover our age of information revolution is also characterized
by a revolution of organization leading to decentralization and fragmentation
of large hierarchical structures, the opposite of the construction of bigger,
more centralized ones that prevailed under the conditions of the late XIXth
century, when major empires were developed or built (cf Hobsbawm, The Age of
Empires).
So Germany is confronted to a dilemma: either sustain the euro as it is
(probably without Greece) but that implies a permanent transfer economy and
thus increased taxes that the German electorate rejects, or let the euro
disintegrate (and the best solution would be , in a first phase, for Germany to
exit the euro) with as a consequence a sharp appreciation of a new Deutsche
Mark and a marked depreciation of the residual euro that would jeopardize the
competitiveness of German exports, both within the ex-eurozone and in the world
at large. At the same time German creditors would suffer a large loss on their
euro assets, but would gain through a reduced volume of transfers from their
taxpayers to the southern economies.
The choice is a question of relative costs, but the costs of maintaining
the euro are rapidly rising as the southern economies sink and many German
opinion leaders now openly advocate an exit, even though often trying to argue
from a moral high ground and thus for the wrong reasons (the alleged
“unethical” behavior of southern members, when in fact the real culprit is
the “competitive disinflation” bias of
the German anti-inflation policy and mercantilist export model).
Let me be completely clear: a German exit would not mean that the
“residual” euro would be any more sustainable than the current one. Divergences
of political-economic equilibrium inflation preferences between southern
members themselves make a single currency most probably non viable. But as I
explained in “Euro Exit”, a depreciated euro would much reduce the burden of
foreign debt in euros, and also reduce the need for further depreciation of the
newly re-created national currencies, making exit much more appealing.
And a last word regarding the alleged devastating “mother of all crises”
argument that a disintegration of the euro would bring about: First, I have no idea of what a “mother
crisis” could mean, if anything, except as an expression meant to scare the uninformed
public and deter politicians to adopt such a strategy. Second, if we clearly
understand that the fundamental problem of the euro is a misalignment of
exchange rates, as Heiner Flassbeck rightly claims, then a return to national
currencies and to equilibrium exchange rates should positively and strongly
affect growth, beyond the current crisis. The crisis is a crisis of the euro,
and not a result of the future exit from the euro, as “euro-economists” would
have us believe.
These biased economists nevertheless are losing ground as the growing
debate in Germany shows, and as the key player, Germany will soon have to face
a “révision déchirante”.
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