A plan to turn the Euro from zero to hero

(this post is available in full as a guest post on Frances Coppola's excellent blog Coppola Comment)

It is difficult to read the history of inter-war Europe and the US without feeling a deep sense of foreboding about the future of the Eurozone. What is the Eurozone if not a new gold standard, lacking even the flexibility to readjust the peg? For the war reparations demanded at Versailles, or the war debts owed by France and the UK to the US, we see the huge debts owed by the South of Europe to the North, particularly Germany.

The growth model of the Eurozone now appears to be based largely on running a current account surplus. Competitive devaluation is required to make exports relatively cheap. While this may have been a very successful policy for Germany during a period of high economic growth in the rest of the world, it cannot work in the beggar-thy-neighbour demand-starved world economy of today.

As I've explained elsewhere, reasonably large government deficits are very important for sustainable economic growth. However, in the Eurozone this is prohibited both by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and by the fear of losing market confidence in the national debt. At the same time credit growth for productive investment is constrained by weak banks and Basel regulation. And the Eurozone as a whole is already running a large current account surplus; the rest of the world will not allow much more export-led growth. Helicopter money would be a solution, but politically this is a long way away. Summing up, if economic growth cannot be funded by government deficits, private sector debt, export growth or helicopter money it is very difficult to see where nominal GDP growth can come from.

In a way, this can be seen as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Every country knows (or should know) that if all states provided fiscal stimulus, the Eurozone would benefit from more economic growth. However, for any individual state, a unilateral fiscal boost would increase their own government debt whilst giving a fair amount of the GDP growth to other states (because some of the stimulus would go to increasing imports from the other nations). And if all others provide stimulus, then it is in an individual state’s interest to take the benefit of the other states’ stimulus, and become more competitive versus the rest.

The huge imbalances created by the fixed exchange rate system, described in this great piece by Michael Pettis, are still there. The enormous current account surplus built up by Germany makes it extremely difficult for the less competitive countries to run a current account surplus. The only way for this to happen, without German inflation, is by internal devaluation; a long and painful process to lower wages, which may succeed in achieving a current account surplus, but only at the expense of shrinking the economy. The debt owed to the creditor nations therefore gets larger in real terms. In the end, the debts owed by the South to  the North are unpayable without the Northern countries running a current account deficit and using the savings built up during the amassing of the surplus to buy goods from the South. But the Northern surpluses are only getting bigger.

On top of this, all countries in the Eurozone are committing the "original sin" of borrowing in a foreign currency. This can only be a time bomb, waiting to devastate Europe.

Read the rest of this post on Coppola Comment

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