Opinion

Hugo Dixon

Can Super Mario save the euro?

Hugo Dixon
Jul 30, 2012 08:45 UTC

Can Super Mario save the euro? Mario Draghi said last Thursday that the European Central Bank’s job is to stop sovereign bond yields rising if these increases are caused by fears of a euro break-up. While this represents a sea-change in the ECB president’s thinking, it risks sowing dissension within his ranks. He will struggle to come up with the right tools to achieve his goals.

Draghi seemingly stared into the abyss and had a fright. Spanish 10-year bond yields shot up to 7.6 percent on July 24 while Italian ones rose to 6.6 percent. The high borrowing costs are not simply a reflection of the two countries’ high debts and struggling economies. Investors also fear “convertibility risk” – or the possibility that the euro will break up and they will get repaid in devalued pesetas and liras.

The central banker’s statement that dealing with convertibility risk is part of the ECB’s mandate is therefore highly significant. He rammed home his message, saying: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

Markets responded swiftly. Spain’s borrowing costs fell to 6.8 percent, while Italy’s dropped just below six percent. But these yields have to drop below five percent – and stay there – before confidence in the euro project will return. What’s more, it’s unclear what Draghi will actually do.

One possibility, immediately latched onto by investors, is that the ECB will relaunch its programme of buying government bonds in the market. But such an operation would be tough to calibrate. If the ECB was prepared to do whatever it took to drive yields below a certain level, the pressure would certainly be off Spain and Italy. But politicians might then stop reforming their economies. When the ECB bought Italian bonds last summer, that’s precisely what happened.

That’s why Germany’s Bundesbank, which has a powerful voice within the ECB but no veto over its actions, is opposed to bond-buying – potentially setting the stage for a stormy meeting when the ECB governing council meets to discuss what to do on Aug. 2. It’s not yet clear how big a spoke the German central bank will be able to put into Draghi’s plans.

On the other hand, if the ECB made its support conditional on good behaviour, investors might not be reassured. Their anxiety would be heightened if central bank bond-buying pushed private creditors down the pecking order. That’s what happened when Greece’s debt was restructured earlier this year: private bondholders suffered big losses while the ECB theoretically stands to make a profit. A half-hearted bond-buying programme might therefore simply encourage investors to dump their holdings on the ECB while having no lasting effect on Spain’s and Italy’s borrowing costs.

Draghi may think that the two countries’ current leaders – Spain’s Mariano Rajoy and Italy’s Mario Monti – are more serious about reform than their predecessors Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Silvio Berlusconi. But even the new leaders have shown signs of losing momentum. Rajoy’s latest spurt of action – further budget-tightening and a plan to recapitalise the country’s struggling banks – only occurred because his back was to the wall. In Italy, meanwhile, Monti says he will stop being prime minister next spring. It’s not clear whether his successor will be committed to reform.

For these reasons, Draghi seems reluctant for the ECB just to buy bonds on its own. Rather, he seems to want to do so in combination with the euro zone’s bailout funds, which have the ability to buy bonds directly from governments – something the ECB is banned from doing. One advantage is that Madrid and Rome would have to sign memorandums of understanding setting out their reform plans in order to access the bailout funds. It would then be easier to hold them to their commitments.

A further idea, reported by Reuters, could help deal with private creditors being pushed down the pecking order. Policymakers are working on a “last chance” option to cut Athens’ debt – involving the ECB taking a haircut on its Greek bond holdings. If that happened, investors would worry less about being unfairly treated if Spain or Italy ever needed to restructure their debts. They might then not view bond-buying as the perfect chance to offload their holdings onto the public sector.

The two-pronged approach is preferable to the ECB buying bonds solo. But it would still put the central bank in the front line of rescuing governments. A better approach would be to scale up the euro zone’s bailout funds and get them to do the entire job of lending to Spain and Italy, if they need help. This could be achieved by letting the soon-to-be-created European Stability Mechanism (ESM) borrow money from the ECB.

Draghi should prefer lending to the ESM than buying Spanish or Italian bonds because, if either country got into trouble, the bailout fund not the ECB would take the first losses. Unfortunately, the ECB said last year that extending loans to the ESM would contravene the Maastricht Treaty – a position Draghi himself repeated after he took over as president, even though there are plenty of lawyers who think the opposite.

Super Mario is now warming to the idea of lending to the ESM, according to Bloomberg, even though that’s not part of his immediate plan. If Draghi does this, he’ll have to find a way to eat his words without losing credibility. If not, he will have to rely on second-best options with all their drawbacks. Mind you, it’s the job of super heroes to get out of tight spots.

COMMENT

Mario Draghi is an unelected banker whose allegiance to the financial cartel, which includes the ECB, appears greater than it should for a national leader. To refer to him as Super Mario seems contemptible. I am assured though that Mr Draghi will ensure an extremely profitable environment for his shareholders.

Posted by yoyo0 | Report as abusive

ECB and euro governments play chicken

Hugo Dixon
Jun 4, 2012 08:20 UTC

The euro zone crisis is a multi-dimensional game of chicken. There isn’t just a standoff between the zone’s core and its periphery; there is also one between the European Central Bank and the euro zone governments over who should rescue the single currency. In such games somebody usually blinks. But if nobody does, the consequences will be terrible.

The brinkmanship between the governments is over how much help the northerners, led by Germany, should give the southerners. The core is effectively threatening the peripheral countries with bankruptcy if they don’t cut their deficits and reform their economies. The periphery is saying that, if they collapse, so will the entire single currency which has been so beneficial to Germany’s economy. The game is being played out transparently in Greece and covertly in Spain.

But even if the core eventually decides to help the periphery, there is a struggle of whether the aid should come from governments or from the ECB. Politicians would like the central bank to do the heavy lifting to avoid having to confront taxpayers with an explicit bill. But the ECB doesn’t think it is its job to help governments, arguing that such support violates the Maastricht Treaty.

This standoff is making it hard to devise a Plan B to cope with what is now a clear and present danger: an explosion in the euro zone.

Look at the most immediate problem: what to do if the “jog” out of Greek bank accounts accelerates into a run. The ECB’s exposure to Greek banks is about 125 billion euros – through a combination of its normal liquidity operations and emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) provided by Greece’s central bank.

The Bundesbank, Germany’s hard-line central bank, says the eurosystem, the collection of national central banks, shouldn’t increase its risk level in Greece. Instead, it wants governments to guarantee any further liquidity injections. But the politicians don’t want to face that issue, at least until Greek voters have given a clear answer over whether they want to stay in the euro.

The snag is that the June 17 election may not provide a clear answer and that might provoke a bank run. At the moment, there isn’t a plan of how to respond. Would the ECB blink and authorise extra ELA – in which case it would look remarkably silly if Greece then quit the euro and the central bank faced massive extra losses on its exposure? Or would it shut off the tap – in which case cash withdrawals from Greek ATMs would have to be rationed, quite possibly provoking panics elsewhere?

The difficulty coming up with contingency plans goes beyond Greece. What, for example, should be done if bank runs do spread to other countries such as Spain and Italy? Mario Draghi, the ECB’s president, last week gave what might seem like a reassuring comment to the European Parliament, saying: “We have all the means to cope with this as far as solvent banks are concerned”. What he didn’t spell out, though, is how the ECB would react if there were runs on insolvent lenders.

There would probably be brinkmanship. The ECB would argue that it was the governments’ job to recapitalise their banks. The politicians would try to avoid injecting taxpayers’ money into their lenders, not least because the governments don’t have the cash. The ECB would then probably say the governments should borrow money from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone bailout fund.

The politicians might come up with inventive schemes, such as giving their banks IOUs which could then be swapped with their own national central banks for ELA. That fudge was used two years ago to recapitalise Ireland’s banks – and Spain was originally toying with a variation on the theme to shore up Bankia. But the ECB doesn’t like it, not least because ELA is supposed to be only temporary.

On the other hand, if neither side blinked, some banks could collapse – triggering runs even among solid ones.

Yet another weakness in the euro’s defences is what to do if investors refuse to buy Spanish and Italian government debt. Madrid, for one, wants the ECB to step in with massive purchases of its bonds through what is known as the securities markets programme. The central bank, though, thinks it should do this only to a limited extent and that if a government needs cash, the relief should come from the ESM, that is from the other governments.

The snag is that the bailout fund doesn’t have enough money to rescue both Madrid and Rome. That’s why France and other countries have argued that it should be allowed to borrow money from the ECB – back to the central bank again. But Draghi has rejected that idea, saying that it would constitute “monetary financing” – or bailing out governments by printing cash – which is forbidden by the Maastricht Treaty. Others argue that the legal position isn’t so clear.

Either way, another potential standoff is being set up. If Italy lost access to the markets and the ECB didn’t blink, then Rome would have to turn to extreme measures: force its citizens to buy bonds, suspend debt repayments or something else. That would be a pretty hairy moment, which might spell the end of the single currency.

Of course, all hell might not break loose. And, if it does, some clever compromises might be found. But multi-dimensional chicken certainly heightens the risks.

COMMENT

where the Germans enjoy playing god but at the same are not ready to listen to the prayers of their worshipers.This issue is a two-way thing…its either everybody stays in the euro zone…..or the euro leaves everybody.

Posted by yisa570 | Report as abusive

Euro zone should beware the “F” word

Hugo Dixon
Apr 2, 2012 08:25 UTC

Beware the “F” word. The European Central Bank and, to a lesser extent, the zone’s political leaders have bought the time needed to resolve the euro crisis. But there are signs of fatigue. A renewed sense of danger may be needed to spur politicians to address underlying problems. It would be far better if they got ahead of the curve.

The big time-buying exercise was the ECB’s injection of 1 trillion euros of super-cheap three-year money into the region’s banks. A smaller breathing space was won last week when governments agreed to expand the ceiling on the region’s bailout funds from 500 to 700 billion euros.

These moves have taken the heat out of the crisis – both by easing fears that banks could go bust and by making it easier for troubled governments, especially Italy’s and Spain’s, to fund themselves. Data from the ECB last week shows how much of the easy money has been recycled from banks into government bonds. In February, Italian lenders increased their purchases of euro zone government bonds by a record 23 billion euros. Spanish banks, meanwhile, increased their purchases by 15.7 billion euros following a record 23 billion euro spending spree in January.

The risk is that, as the short-term funding pressure comes off, governments’ determination to push through unpopular reforms will flag. If that happens, the time that has been bought will be wasted – and, when crisis rears its ugly head again, the authorities won’t have the tools to fight it.

Early signs of such fatigue are emerging. One is the tendency of politicians – most recently, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti – to say that the worst of the crisis is over. They may wish to take credit for their crisis-fighting skills or relax. But it is too early to declare victory.

Italy is a case in point. Monti should have pushed through crucial reforms to the labour market earlier, while his popularity was high and the electorate was afraid that Italy would be engulfed by the crisis. He did not. And although he has now come up with a good package, his honeymoon period as the unassailable technocratic prime minister is nearing its end. His popularity fell to 44 percent from 62 percent in early March, according to a poll published last week by ISPO. Two-thirds of Italians oppose his labour reforms.

It’s a similar story in Spain. Mariano Rajoy, the incoming prime minister, should have cracked on earlier with a budget to bring the government’s finances into balance. To be fair, his administration did publish plans last Friday to curb its deficit – though it won’t be possible to judge how credible these are until Madrid explains how the health and education spending of Spain’s free-wheeling regional governments is to be reined in. Meanwhile, Rajoy’s honeymoon is also over. Last week, he failed to win the regional election in Andalucia and faced his first general strike.

Both Monti and Rajoy are still in strong positions. Although Italy’s political parties could theoretically kick Monti out, they are even less popular than him. Meanwhile, the Spanish prime minister has a sound majority in parliament. But as each month passes, it will get harder to push through reforms. Both men must hold their nerve and implement their full programmes while they can, without compromise.

Further afield, the appetite for austerity is also flagging – sometimes in unexpected places. The Dutch government, one of the high priests of fiscal rectitude, is finding it difficult to cut its own deficit. The ruling coalition may even collapse under the strain.

There is also increasing unhappiness about the fiscal discipline treaty Germany rammed through in December. Francois Hollande, the French socialist who is the front-runner to be France’s next president, wants to add a growth component to it. So do Germany’s social democrats, whose support is needed to ratify the treaty even though they are in opposition.

A fudge will probably be found that adds a protocol to the treaty which emphasises the importance of growth as well as discipline. Indeed, that would be no bad thing: too much austerity can be self-defeating as severe budget squeezes can crush an economy and make it even harder to raise taxes and cut deficits.

However, governments can’t ease up on short-term austerity and do nothing. What is needed is a vigorous programme of long-term structural reforms such as freeing up labour markets and introducing more competition into services industries. This could ultimately boost GDP by about 15 percent in large euro countries such as France, Italy and Spain, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even Germany, whose services markets are sclerotic, could benefit by about 13 percent of GDP.

Such a programme would make the euro zone’s economies fit enough to stand on their own feet when the anaesthetic of cheap money fades. But do governments have the will to make these changes given that the cheap money is lulling them and their people into believing the worst of the crisis is over?

A prod from the markets may be what is required. There are indications that this is beginning to happen. Spanish 10-year bond yields briefly reached 5.5 percent last week. The art, though, will be in the calibration. If markets move too little the politicians will be complacent. If there is too much, the euro zone will slip back into full-blown crisis.

COMMENT

Here in the US the middle class faces the same fate. The virtual elimination of our manufacturing base has decimated not only the solid paying jobs and benefits they bring. It’s also destroying something I believe to be of even greater importance to our once great Republic. Belief. Belief that the people we elect to represent us in the halls of Congress would never sell their countrymen out for 30 pieces of silver. Belief in the general decency of their brethren who own these companies they work for, small and large, that they would never become our Judas, choosing larger profit margins over their own country. A belief, that is at the heart and soul of anything good America has ever represented. The belief that even with all of our flaws and shameful missteps, that when it really matters most, our brothers in the positions of power would stand on the side of the righteous and never yield. That belief, is everything in America. Without it, all of the bloodshed by our Founding Fathers and countrymen to gain our rightful independence from tyranny, will have been for naught. Our Constitution, amongst the most divinely inspired and just words mankind has ever put to parchment, betrayed by those who swore a sacred oath to uphold and defend her. Sold out to global banksters and corporate elites in bed with our Executive, Legislative and Judicial representatives, here and abroad. Men devoid of conscience. Sociopath puppet masters who actually believe it is their destiny and right to rule us serfs under a New World Order. The deconstruction of freewill principles and the wealth of nations has been decades in the making. The acceleration of their move to one world government is so palpable, that even those who lack the detailed knowledge or education in such matters can sense that we are all but done for as a free people. Without those beliefs secured in their hearts and minds, America is all but guaranteed to become a part of the totalitarian state we’re being sold to. A job is just that, a job. The reason for America’s stunning success in gaining our Independence from England, was their/our belief. Having a truly just cause worthy of sacrificing your life for if necessary. The British were the greatest military force the world had ever known, defeated by a group of educated rebels and a rag tag army of outgunned, outnumbered, farmers and expats with little to no training or combat experience in comparison. The Brits served a tyrant, a King who owned them as if chattel. The American Patriot’s they faced had tasted the notion of true freedom, after having suffered under the boot heel of a tyrant King and his henchmen. This is why England was defeated. These Patriot’s believed in a just, noble cause and sacrificed dearly for it. What were the Brits fighting for? Promotion in rank? Titles? Land? Fear of angering their King? What they had was just a job, no belief that was just or noble. I see the change in my country destroying the faith in our beliefs, our own elected leaders speaking as if Patriot’s while governing as tyrants. Jobs and industry are important for all nations, but we’ve got much deeper problems the world over than a high unemployment rate……We’re losing our freedom.

Posted by Mastafing | Report as abusive

LTRO was a necessary evil

Hugo Dixon
Mar 5, 2012 09:48 UTC

Bailout may not be a four-letter word. But many of the rescue operations mounted to save banks and governments in the past few years have been four-letter acronyms. Think of the TARP and TALF programmes that were used to bail out the U.S. banking system after Lehman Brothers went bust. Or the European Central Bank’s LTRO, the longer-term refinancing operation. This has involved lending European banks 1 trillion euros for three years at an extraordinarily low interest rate of 1 percent.

The markets and the banks have jumped for joy in response to all this liquidity being sprayed around. So have Italy and Spain, whose borrowing costs have dropped because their banks have been able to take cheap cash from the ECB and recycle it into their governments’ bonds — making a profit on the round trip. But as has been the case with other four-letter bailouts, the LTRO has come in for criticism — most of it a variation on the theme that the way to treat debt junkies isn’t to give them another heroin injection.

One problem is that European governments could now feel less pressure to reform their labour laws and do the other painful things that are needed to get their economies fit. Another is that banks may delay actions that are required to let them stand on their own two feet: such as rebuilding their capital buffers and raising their own longer-term funds on the markets.

As if this were not bad enough, undeserving banks will be able to make bumper profits on the back of the ECB’s cheap money and, potentially, route them into fat compensation packages — although two British banks, Barclays and HSBC, have said they won’t allow bonuses to be inflated in this way. Meanwhile, the ECB could incur losses if the commercial banks that have borrowed all this money can’t pay it back and the collateral they have pledged turns out to be insufficiently valuable. Oh, and don’t forget that this is just a three-year operation. There could be another crisis when the banks need to find 1 trillion euros to repay the ECB in 2015.

The charge sheet is a long one. But the LTRO was a necessary evil. Just think back to early December when panic was stalking the euro zone. Without some form of bailout, there would have been a severe credit crunch that would have dragged the economy into a deep recession rather than the mild one it now seems likely to suffer. Large countries such as Italy and Spain could also have easily been shut out of the markets, potentially leading to a break-up of the single currency.

The ECB faced a too-big-to-fail problem. If it didn’t bail out the system, it would be faced with catastrophe; if it did, it would reward foolish behaviour. One can argue with the details. Did the money, for example, really need to be so cheap? But the central bank made a rational choice. The priority now is to limit the bad side-effects.

Mario Draghi, the ECB president, has made a start by telling European Union leaders at their summit last week that the three-year cash injection would not be repeated, according to Reuters. He said it had merely bought the euro zone time and it was essential that structural reforms were pushed through.

Hopefully, such lectures will be sufficient to do the job. But countries rarely reform unless their backs are to the wall. Take Italy. Mario Monti has made a remarkable start pushing through pension changes and liberalising services since taking over from Silvio Berlusconi. But there is much left to do: freeing up the labour market, privatising assets, revamping public spending and fighting tax evasion. How easy will he find it to push all that through now that Italy’s 10-year borrowing costs are below 5 percent?

Similar points can be made about Spain, where Mariano Rajoy’s reform programme has only just begun. Meanwhile, France, which has so far largely escaped the crisis, will not be under pressure to address its deep-seated labour market and pension problems. Francois Hollande, the socialist who will probably be the country’s next president, certainly has no ideological desire to do so.

But won’t the new European fiscal treaty deal with the issue? Sadly not. The demand for fiscal austerity was, indeed, the quid pro quo for the ECB’s bailout. But it was the wrong sort of conditionality. Balancing budgets is not the same as structural reform. The only thing pushing Europe’s governments down the latter route is exhortation and the warning that there won’t be any more bailouts.

With the banks, more tools are available to mitigate the damage from the LTRO. After all, governments, the ECB and regulators can tell lenders what to do. The most important changes – requiring them to build stronger capital bases and rely less on short-term funding — are already under way. The key thing will be to resist lobbying to delay and dilute these rules.

But there is also a case for revisiting the industry’s lax tax regime, especially if compensation remains high. Politicians have given most of their attention to taxing financial transactions, the so-called Tobin tax. But a better alternative could be to introduce what is known as a financial activities tax or FAT tax. Most countries do not apply VAT to banking. FAT, which would tax profits and compensation, would do a similar job. A three-letter tax could be part of the answer to a four-letter bailout.

COMMENT

It’s good for intermediate inflation and making the inevitable more catastrophic.

At what point did the West do away with capitalism and decide that price discovery was a bad thing?

Posted by agonzal0 | Report as abusive

Europe’s Sisyphean burden

Hugo Dixon
Jan 16, 2012 10:43 UTC

Watch Athens more than Standard & Poor’s. The biggest source of immediate trouble for the euro zone could be the one country the ratings agency didn’t examine in a review that led to the downgrade of France and eight other states. Even if the short-term shoals can be navigated, the rest of the zone won’t find it easy to get by Greece.

The points S&P made when stripping France and Austria of their triple-A ratings and knocking two notches off the ratings of the likes of Italy and Spain were valid. It is true, for example, that policymakers can’t agree what to do to solve the euro crisis and that “fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating.” But these points, as well as the prospect of S&P downgrades, were already in the market.

Meanwhile, what Mario Draghi said last week about “tentative signs of stabilization” is true. The European Central Bank (ECB), over which Draghi presides, is itself partly responsible for that stabilization by virtue of providing 489 billion euros of three-year money to banks just before Christmas. Mario Monti’s promising beginning as Italy’s prime minister is the other main factor. The Super Mario Brothers have got off to a good start.

In Greece, though, matters go from bad to worse. The economy, which shrank about 6 percent last year, is now forecast to shrink an additional 4 percent or so by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs –- even worse than the International Monetary Fund forecast in November. What this means is that the numbers behind the latest bailout plan-cum-debt restructuring are probably out of date.

The immediate problem is corralling private-sector bondholders to swap 206 billion euros of bonds for new paper nominally worth half that value. There are actually two problems: persuading the negotiators for the bondholders to accept a deal and then getting virtually all the bondholders themselves to agree.

Despite the brinkmanship, which led the negotiators to leave the talks on Friday, it is likely there will be a solution — albeit a messy one. If the negotiators eventually agree, recalcitrant bondholders can be roped in by retroactively inserting collective action clauses in their contracts. If the negotiators don’t agree, there can be a formal default with losses imposed on everybody by diktat.

The snag is that restructuring the private-sector debt wouldn’t remotely close the Greek dossier as far as the rest of the euro zone is concerned. The question would then be whether to provide Athens with a bumper 90 billion euro tranche of bailout cash in March. The previous tranches have been much smaller: December’s, for example, was only 8 billion euros. But the debt restructuring means the next tranche has to be supersized: Up to 40 billion euros is required to recapitalize the country’s banks, whose balance sheets will be shot to bits because they are up to their gills in their own government’s bonds; a further 30 billion euros is needed as a sweetener to persuade the private bondholders to agree to the restructuring.

Politicians elsewhere will not find it easy to write the Greeks such a mega-check. There was much wrangling even before the previous smaller tranches, given that Athens’ finances were always worse than expected and that the country was never delivering on its promises. This time not only is serious money at stake but there will soon be an election that could bring in Antonis Samaras, the mercurial leader of the country’s conservative New Democracy party, as prime minister. He has been reluctant to embrace the austerity-cum-reform program that the euro zone and IMF want the country to follow.

Lending Greece such a huge sum when it’s not on track and is about to have an election would be risky. But the alternative would be for the whole program to fall to pieces. And despite the recent signs of stabilization that Draghi spoke of, other euro zone countries aren’t yet ready for an uncontrolled Greek default. So the best bet is that they will hold their noses, fudge things and hand over the money.

But that wouldn’t be the end of the trouble either. The continual bailouts mean that the public sector will soon have about 300 billion euros at stake in Greece. This is made up of loans by euro zone countries, loans from the IMF, purchases of Greek bonds by the ECB, loans by the ECB to Greek banks and permission given by the ECB to the Greek central bank to lend yet more money to its own banks.

The rest of the euro zone hasn’t been willing to see Greece default on its debts or leave the single currency because it has been worried about contagion. In future, the risk of contagion may be reduced. After all, if the current debt restructuring is successfully concluded, there will be less private-sector exposure to Greece, and so any second debt restructuring might cause less of an earthquake.

But even if the risk of contagion is smaller, the euro zone wouldn’t be able to wave good-bye to Greece. After all, the flip side of less private-sector exposure will be that vast 300 billion-euro public-sector exposure. Politicians -– such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, who faces an election in autumn 2013 –- won’t want to explain massive losses to their electorates.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder to the top of the hill, only to see it roll all the way down again. It looks as if the euro zone will be carrying its Sisyphean burden for a long time.

COMMENT

The problem with Greece is that the economy and society are so incredibly corrupt (at least a year before elections tax collectors are taken from the streets, for example) that it will take more than Sisyphus to sort these people out. They had promised to privatise public assets, of which promise precisely zero has been fulfilled. Back taxes to the tune of billions remain uncollected: tax officials simply refuse to collect them. Nobody appears to care that hundreds of billions have been parked offshore by the Greeks. But they seem to realise that they have the EU by the nuts because contagion is a real risk. Wonderful people to let the cautious Ms. Merkel and her sticky politicians chase.

Posted by Beethoven | Report as abusive

Euro Disziplin may store up trouble

Hugo Dixon
Dec 5, 2011 04:11 UTC

The euro zone will probably get another short-term fix at its summit this week. Exactly how the fix will work isn’t clear. But both Germany and the European Central Bank have softened their positions so much that some sort of solution is in the works. The ECB will probably cut interest rates and spray more liquidity at the troubled banking system; it may also step up its purchases of government bonds; and some scheme for assembling enough money to bail out Italy and Spain — probably by getting national central banks to lend money to the International Monetary Fund, which could then pass it on to Rome and Madrid – may be unveiled.

All this would be cause for celebration. The problem is the price that Germany and seemingly the ECB are demanding for their help: fiscal discipline, embedded in a treaty. Merkel wants the European Commission in Brussels to have the power to overturn irresponsible national budgets and for the European Court of Justice to fine governments that step out of line.

This idea for a treaty is stirring up all sorts of problems. One is that Britain, which is not part of the euro zone but is a member of the European Union, wants a quid pro quo for signing a revised treaty – probably in the form of returning powers over social and judicial affairs to London or getting some veto over the regulation of financial services, the UK’s largest industry.

An even bigger problem is the objection of many people in the euro zone to Disziplin being imposed by Berlin. Even France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, who is backing Merkel’s plan, has had to swallow hard before embracing a policy which would involve a loss of sovereignty, and is still wrangling over the details. The opposition socialists, which look likely to defeat Sarkozy in May’s presidential elections, have been quick to dub the plan an “austerity treaty.”

Handing powers to Brussels at Germany’s insistence isn’t popular with France’s right-wing parties either. In fact, it is likely to be pretty unpopular right across the euro zone. Even the president of the European Parliament, a body which normally supports anything that increases the European Union’s power, has said treaty change could be “dangerous” because citizens were unlikely to warm to the idea.

This is not to say that Europe’s governments won’t sign up to the German plan. Fear over what would happen if the euro collapsed is now so high that they will probably fall into line if this is what is needed to unleash the ECB. But a marriage based on fear is not the most attractive or most sustainable one. It will breed resentment. This could be expressed in the growing popularity of right-wing nationalist parties. There is even a chance that the proposed treaty changes, which will require unanimity, would be voted down by at least one parliament or torpedoed in at least one national referendum.

Merkel says she wants “more Europe.” But she is offering a lot less than the fiscal union that many pundits outside Germany are clamoring for. They want the euro zone’s governments to guarantee each others’ debt, by issuing euro bonds. A fully functional fiscal union would also have a large central budget that would transfer resources from booming regions to struggling ones. Germany’s chancellor is against these ideas for the simple reason that her people are not remotely ready to bail out other parts of Europe on a permanent basis. Nor, for that matter, are the Dutch, the Finns and some other nations.

Merkel’s idea of discipline is not in itself a bad idea, mind you. Governments ought to run their finances responsibly. The problem is that she is trying to achieve this through rules.  An alternative would be to impose discipline through the market. If bond investors knew that profligate states might have to restructure their debts in future, they might rein governments in before their debts got out of hand in the first place.

It might be objected that the markets did a terrible job holding governments to account during the bubble years. This is true. But that’s partly because governments gave investors artificial incentives to buy their bonds. There’s now a golden opportunity to set a new baseline for market discipline by making clear that investors will have to share the pain if a euro zone country racks up excessive debts. To be fair, Germany has been pushing this idea, but France wants it abandoned. Even if Berlin gets its way on this, it won’t be giving ground on the need for rules.

The discipline of the bond markets may not be an appealing slogan. But it is less unpalatable than the discipline of remote bureaucrats dictated to by Berlin. Europe’s citizens can probably understand that, if you borrow too much money, you have to dance to your creditors’ tune. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the way the debate is going. The price for a short-term fix could be a long-term problem.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes a point during her speech at the German lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin December 2, 2011. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

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Fourth Reich

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