Financing vs. Spending Unions: How To Remedy The Euro Zone’s Original Sin

By Thomas Palley

In economic policy, timing isn't everything, it's the only thing. The euro zone crisis has been evolving for over seven years, making it difficult to time policy proposals. Now, the shock of Brexit has created a definitive political opportunity for reforming rather than patching the euro. With that in mind, I would like to revive an earlier mistimed proposal for a euro zone "financing union." The proposal contrasts with others that emphasize "spending unions." But first some preliminaries.

Read full text here.

CIGI Senior Fellow Miranda Xafa on State of The Eurozone

Centre for International Governance Innovation Senior Fellow Miranda Xafa comments on the "State of the Eurozone" discussions which took place on October 6th, 2014 at the the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C. Xafa notes that the recent ECB announcement on asset purchases and the likelihood of a relatively successful forthcoming banking union may help to reduce Euro fragmentation and possibly ease credit issues. She cautions, nevertheless, that such structural reforms alone will not be enough to get the Eurozone out of its current long-run low-growth equilibrium.

New Book: "The Euro, The Dollar and the Global Financial Crisis" By Miguel Otero-Iglesias

Editorial Reviews:

Many scholars have contributed to ongoing debates about the competition between the dollar and the euro for global monetary dominance. Few have added as much value as Miguel Otero-Iglesias with his systematic and original survey of the views of financial elites in major emerging market economies. Where conventional interpretations emphasize material "reality," Otero-Iglesias's ideational analysis clearly demonstrates how important it is to consider as well how "reality" is perceived and framed by key actors. The euro may be structurally weak, limiting its "hard" power. But at the cognitive level of "soft" power, Otero-Iglesias suggests, Europe's money poses a significant challenge to America's greenback. This is an argument to be taken seriously.

Benjamin J. Cohen, Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

This is a book I’ve been waiting for: a detailed analysis of what financial elites in the large reserve-holding countries are thinking about the future of the international monetary system. Drawing on extensive research, Miguel Otero-Iglesias argues persuasively that the views of authorities in China, Brazil, and the Gulf states matter enormously for the future of the global roles of dollar and the euro. An engaging and innovative book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the world’s money."

Eric Helleiner, Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy and Professor in the Department of Political Science of the University of Waterloo

In this original, well written and carefully researched book, Otero-Iglesias suspends motion in this fast moving story of currency rivalry to give the reader a view into the deeper logic of global monetary change. The author has synthesized skilfully across a wide spectrum of perspectives, from various systemically important emerging countries, and for which he has accessed key financial elites, and policy shapers, in China and Brazil, as well as the Gulf States. This book is truly a must read for scholars of the politics of the international monetary system, especially those with an eye to systemic change.

Gregory T. Chin, Associate Professor, York University, Canada and Co-Editor, Review of International Political Economy'

About the Author:
Miguel Otero-Iglesias is Senior Analyst on the European Economy and the Emerging Markets at the Elcano Royal Institute in Spain and Research Fellow in International Political Economy at the EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA School of Management in France.

For more info go here.

***My RIPE paper with Matias Vernengo, "Hegemonic Currencies During The Crisis, The Dollar Versus The Euro In a Cartalist Perspective" (see here), is cited.

Riccardo Bellofiore on why Italy’s stagnation could be future for Euro Zone

From The Guardian

This summer Italy fell into a triple-dip recession. After the 2008/09 collapse, the economy stagnated, heading back into recession during 2011 and never really recovering. The philosophy of Giulio Tremonti, who was the economic minister at the time, was to wait and see, until speculation killed Berlusconi’s government. Prime ministers Mario Monti and Enrico Letta followed Brussels’ self-defeating diktat for fiscal rigour, but even with moderate deficits the public debt/GDP ratio soared. The situation remained under control only thanks to the zero rate of interest and rhetoric by the European central bank president, Mario Draghi. Then came along Matteo Renzi, and Italian economic policy was all talk, talk, talk. While turning the screw of authoritarian parliamentary and electoral reforms, future lower taxes and liberalisations are promised to compensate for public cuts and to attract foreign investments. The €80 monthly tax break to lower-paid workers did not raise household consumption, and was instead spent on tariffs and local taxes. Yet in the past few weeks the outlook has changed, with 2014 second-quarter data showing France flat and Germany experiencing negative growth. Greece, Spain and Portugal registered rosier figures only because they were recovering from severe austerity. The eurozone cannot but be driven by the three biggest economies alone. This is a continental crisis within an anaemic global economy. However, an old Gramscian truth about Italy must be remembered: the “backwardness” of its capitalism is paradigmatic. Europe’s exit from the crisis needs the same policies that Italy needs, and without them Italy’s stagnation is the future for the entire continent.

Read rest here.

Bill Lucarelli on The Euro: A currency in search of a state

 

New paper concerning Euro by Bill Lucarelli

From the abstract:

To understand the structural dynamics of the current eurozone crisis, it is necessary to examine the longstanding internal contradictions that the system has inherited from its inception under the Maastricht Treaty and the neoliberal strategy which has governed its evolution from the first experiments in economic and monetary union in the 1970s. A brief narrative of the evolution of the European Monetary Union yields some insights into its peculiar institutional design. More specifically, the article examines the dangerously self-reinforcing logic between speculative bond markets and cascading, deflationary policies of austerity imposed on those countries encountering severe debt crises. This examination reveals the fragile foundations upon which the eurozone was constructed [...] The stark contrast between US monetary and exchange rate policies and the straightjacket imposed in the eurozone by the ECB during the financial crisis that began in 2008 could not be more revealing. As David Fields and Matias Vernengo (2012) [see here] contend,

By buying great quantities of Treasuries, the Fed not only keeps stable bond prices and low interest rates, but also provides assurances that Treasury bonds remain a secure asset. That allows the US Treasury to maintain high fiscal deficits on a sustainable basis. That is the exact opposite of what the ECB has done for the countries in the periphery of Europe. Countries in the currency union lose control of monetary policy and cannot depreciate the exchange rate. But a common currency setting also brings to an end the possibility for a single nation to run fiscal deficits since the sources of funding are either removed or subjected to supra-national control.

Read rest here (subscription required).

Neoliberal Authoritarian Greece: A Nation for Sale & Death of Democracy

According to Henry A. Giroux (2005/6), 'neoliberal authoritarianism' is the process by which upper capitalist class interests reinvent the past, present, & future in the image of a crude exercise of power that unleashes unimaginable human suffering, in order to maximize wealth and influence in social, political & economic affairs at whatever social costs. From Truthout:

When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece's rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a euro-zone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were mult-ifold. First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece's gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks.

Read rest here.

Giroux, Henry A. 2005. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32(1):1-19.

Giroux, Henry A., and Susan Searls Giroux. 2006. “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 6(1):21–32.

Weisbrot on why the European authorities are still punishing Greece

Mark Weisbrot

Alexis Tsipras has a tough job. He is leader of the Syriza Party of Greece, a left party that has risen meteorically in the past three years: from 4.6 percent of the vote in 2009 to 27 percent last June. It is now the most popular party in the country and Tsipras could be the next Prime Minister. Unlike most of the eurozone's leaders, he knows what is wrong with Greece and the eurozone, and so does his party: austerity. "We have become the guinea pig for barbaric, violent neoliberal policies," he said at a forum at Columbia University Law School last week, in which I participated. Tsipras notes that Greece's fiscal problems could be resolved if the rich paid their taxes. The IMF's latest numbers [PDF] concur on this: according to the Fund, "annual uncollected net tax revenue [is] at 86 percent of collections in Greece, against an OECD average of 12 percent."

Read rest here.

Mark Weisbrot on Economic and Social Policy and the Problems of the Eurozone and European Integration

By Mark Weisbrot

It was not because of the power of financial markets or because the Germans didn't want to "help" the Greeks that Europe suffered through about three years of recurring crises, in which the continued existence of the euro was thrown into question, until August 2012. It was because the European authorities were using these acute crises and did not want to resolve them until they had extracted certain "reforms" from the weaker European economies (and possibly even some of the stronger ones, if we consider the European Fiscal Compact and what the French government has been doing recently). We know this because as soon as the European Central Bank (ECB) wanted to do so, it put an end to these crises in a matter of weeks, in July-August 2012, by effectively establishing a ceiling on the interest rates of Italian and Spanish bonds - something it could have done at any time in the prior three years.

Read the rest here.

Mark Weisbrot: Why the European Economy Has Done So Much Worse Than That of the United States

 

By Mark Weisbrot,

If we compare the economic recovery of the United States since the Great Recession with that of Europe – or more specifically the eurozone countries – the differences are striking, and instructive. The U.S. recession technically lasted about a year and a half – from December 2007 to June 2009. (Of course, for America’s 20.3 million unemployed and underemployed, and millions of others, the recession never ended – but more on that below.) The eurozone had a similar-length recession from about January 2008 to April 2009; but then it fell into a longer recession in the third quarter of 2011 that lasted for about another two years; it may be exiting that recession currently.

Read the rest here.

European Amnesia: Lithuania Considers Euro Adoption

 

Well, it is quite apparent that the euro crisis had done little to transform the sociology of knowledge concerning inherent problems related to common currencies; Lithuania is on track towards adopting the Euro. Read here. A related post on the issue can be seen here.

PS: Euroization is similar (wrt consequences for countries in the periphery) to the process of dollarization - see here.

Lessons Unlearned: Latvia Adopts Euro

Latvia officially adopted the euro to start off the new year. The prime minister has noted that although this is not necessarily a guarantee towards economic prosperity, it's an opportunity...I deem it a death sentence - For more on the sinking ship that is the euro, see here.