Former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was quoted as saying during the 1979 Austrian election campaign that: “I am less worried about the budget deficits than by the need for the state to create jobs where private industry fails”. That is the statement of a social democrat. That is a progressive Left view. In June 1982, with French unemployment at 7.2 per cent (having risen from 2.4 per cent in 1974 after a near decade of austerity under the right-wing Prime Minister Raymond Barre), the French Minister of Economy and Finance cut 30 billion francs from government spending so that the fiscal deficit would remain below 3 per cent. In March 1983, the same Minister pressured his colleagues including President François Mitterrand, into imposing a further bout of austerity, cutting another 24 billion francs and increasing taxes by 40 billion francs. These were very deep cuts. The austerity under the so-called ‘Barre Plan’ had failed to reduce inflation. When the turn to austerity was repeated under Mitterand’s so-called Socialist government, France was already in a deep recession. Under the Socialist austerity period unemployment rose sharply to further to 9.3 per cent by 1987. By then the architect of that austerity, one Jacques Delors, was European Commission President and starting work on his next exercise in neoliberal carnage – the Eurozone. None of his behaviour during that period remotely signals a position we could call progressive or Left. Like his austerity turn (“tournant de la rigeur”), Delors had turned into just another neoliberal obsessed with fiscal surpluses, free markets (he oversaw the 1987 Single European Act), and privatisation (which he claimed was necessary to attract foreign direct investment) (Source). This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the abdication of the Left, which some still choose to deny....Bill goes heavy on fact today. He has a firm grip on the history of the period. If you are looking for the blow by blow, here it is.
I decided to write an extended blog post today (Wednesday) because events in Italy are so interesting. My usual short post on a Wednesday will resume next week. George Soros is now saying that “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” in Europe and a financial collapse is in the wind (Source). I doubt the latter but agree with the former assessment. All the flaws in the original neoliberal design of the Eurozone have been revealed and all the reasons why those flaws were created in the first place remain in place. Nothing has changed since 1977 when the MacDougall Report concluded that the cultural and national differences between the (then) Member States of the European Communities were too great to allow an effective monetary union to be created. That assessment and the earlier work of Pierre Werner in his 1970 Report were ignored as the neoliberals in France and Germany rushed headlong to Maastricht. France thought it would have a chance to dominate and Germany was distracted by unification but still firmly in charge of what would be allowed in the new monetary system and what would not. Now, one of the biggest nations – Italy – is is turmoil as the damage of being part of the Eurozone slowly but surely erodes its capacity to deliver anything remotely like prosperity and its social and political system starts to collapse. Italy must leave the Eurozone – the sooner the better. And, that will bring a reality check for the whole disaster and encourage other nations to push for an orderly dissolution.Stein's Law — "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." — Herbert Stein
This blog continues the discussion from yesterday’s blog – The EMU reform ruse – Part 1 – where I consider the reform proposals put forward by German academic Fritz Sharpf, which have been held out by Europhile Leftists as the progressive way out of the disaster that the Eurozone has become. Yesterday, I considered his first proposal – to continue with the enforced structural convergence to the Northern model – the current orthodoxy in Brussels. Like Sharpf I agree that the agenda outlined in the 2015 The Five President’s Report: Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union would just continue the disaster and would intensify the political and social instability that will eventually force a breakup of the monetary union. Sharpf’s second proposal is that the EMU dichotomise into a Northern hard currency bloc while the Southern states (and others less inclined to follow the German export-led, domestic-demand suppression growth model) reestablish their own currencies and peg them to the euro with ECB support. While it is an interesting proposal and certainly more adventurous than the plethora of proposals that just tinker at the edges (for example, European unemployment insurance schemes, Blue Bond proposals and the like), it remains deeply flawed. While it is assumed that the Northern bloc would comprise core European nations such as Germany and France, it is not clear that either would prosper under the new arrangement. France and Germany were never been able to maintain stable currencies prior to the EMU. Further, the ‘exit’ proposal ties the poorer nations into a vexed fixed exchange rate arrangement, which would always compromise their domestic policy freedom, just as it did under the earlier versions of the Snake or the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Far better to just break the whole show up and let the nations go free with floating exchange rates....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
On October 31, 2017, my blog – Europhile Left deluded if it thinks reform process will produce functional outcomes – countered some of the nonsense coming out of Europe (from the so-called progressive side) that the Eurozone hadn’t failed when judged by it bias towards mass unemployment and increasing precariousness of its citizens. I particularly noted the terrible record in terms of youth unemployment and NEETs. Yesterday’s blog – Massive Eurozone infrastructure deficit requires urgent redress – documented how much damage the austerity bias of the Eurozone has caused to essential productive infrastructure – human and physical and the ridiculous underinvestment by governments locked into mindless Stability and Growth Pact (and its recent derivatives) rules. Unphased, the Europhiles keep telling me that reform processes are underway and that we need to be patient. That the glorious vision outlined in the October 1990 European Commission Report – One Market, One Money Report, which, apparently outlined a vision of domestic-demand driven convergence bliss for the Economic and Monetary Union. I analysed that Report in detail in my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale – and have to say that anyone who holds it out as a plan for the future must have been reading a different report or affected by heavy drugs. Today, I am considering recent reform proposals put forward by German academic Fritz Sharpf, who considers the neoliberal Eurozone experiment has failed but can be resurrected without abandoning the essential mechanics of the monetary union. Tomorrow, I will conclude. It will not surprise regular readers to know that I disagree with Sharpf’s reform agenda....I appears to me that the problem in the EZ is not so much neoliberalism, which is chiefly Anglo-American, as it is German ordoliberalism.
The election of Donald Trump has stirred up the IMF and Germany, in particular.|Trump’s trade advisor has claimed that Germany is manipulating the currency to maintain its competitiveness. A more general view is that the massive German external surplus is a reflection of a dysfunctional Eurozone, particularly the failed monetary policy stance of the ECB and the lack of a European-level (federal) fiscal policy capacity and willingness to expand domestic demand in the Member States. In fact, both views have credibility as I will explain. Last week (April 19, 2017), Eurostat released the latest trade data for the Eurozone – Euro area international trade in goods surplus €17.8 bn. It showed that Germany’s trade surplus continues to grow (it was 35.4 billion euros in January-February 2017, up 1.4 billion over the 12 months) in total. In 2016, Germany’s current account surplus was 8.6 per cent of GDP, which is obviously an outlier. What is required to redress this on-going dysfunction within the Eurozone would appear to be beyond the political mentality of the establishment polity in the Eurozone. And with Macron’s elevation to an almost certain Presidential victory in France, it is hard to see any dynamic for now emerging that will create change for the better. So as usual, the Eurozone muddles on – with a dysfunctional design architecture and an even more dysfunctional attitude to policy flexibility held by the powers to be. Germany is seriously responsible for a lot of this dysfunction.
One of the various smokescreens that were erected by the European Commission and the bevy of economists that it either paid or were ideologically aligned to justify the design of the monetary union around the time of the Maastricht process was the concept of subsidiarity.
In 1993, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (a European-based research confederation) published its Annual Report – Making Sense of Subsidiarity: How Much Centralization for Europe? – which attempted to justify (ex post) the decisions imported from the 1989 Delors Report into the Maastricht Treaty that eschewed the creation of a federal fiscal capacity. It was one of many reports at the time by pro-Maastricht economists that influenced the political process and pushed the European nations on their inevitable journey to the edge of the ‘plank’ – teetering on the edge of destruction and being saved only because the European Central Bank has violated the spirit of the restrictions that a misapplication of the subsidiarity principle had created. It is interesting to reflect on these earlier reports. We find that the important issues they ignored remain the central issues today and predicate against the monetary union ever being a success....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Earlier today, I was listening to an interview with IMF head Christine Lagarde dance around the issue of the unsustainability of Greece’s debt load. And she said something very telling. She said that debt haircuts were not on the table but that maturity extensions and interest rate reductions were, but only AFTER Greece implemented reforms demanded by the Troika."Liberalized free markets and fiscal discipline" is neoliberalism in a nutshell.
What’s important to realize when Lagarde says this is that although she’s talking about Greece, the negotiations with Greece are not really about Greece itself per se. They are about the maintaining or imposing an economic paradigm for every country in the EU that Greece was not meeting – and this is a paradigm that the IMF supports as much as the ECB and the EU. Greece is just being used as an abject lessons for other larger EU economies.
Think of it this way: 25 years ago, the EU signed on to the idea of a single currency in Maastricht. The question marks at the time were Belgium and Italy – Italy because of its constant currency devaluations and Belgium because of high government debt loads. The EU figured out how to deal with Belgium and Italy by creating the stability and growth pact which said that all member states had to keep their deficits under 3% and get their debt under 60%, or at least moving in that direction. Underneath these simple rules lies a whole economic ideology though. And that orthodoxy says long-term growth and a stable currency are best maintained by liberalized free markets and fiscal discipline.…
There was an interesting interview published in the financial market journal Central Banking this week with Otmar Issing, who was the ECBs first chief economist and a former European Central Bank executive board member. He predicted that as a result of the political corruption of the monetary union ideal, “the house of cards will collapse.” He was referring to the claim that the ECB has become captured by politicians and technocrats in the IMF and the European Commission such that it is now violating essential central banking principles, in addition, to Treaty obligations that were designed to safeguard the financial stability of the system. I have some agreement with his overall view that a federal solution to the Eurozone ills is not viable. But I do not agree that the ills of the Eurozone stem from recent political decisions – to pressure the ECB to engage in QE or other interventions. The reality is that the flawed design of the Eurozone, which reflected the ideological hold of neo-liberalism on the integration discussions in the 1980s and beyond, meant that the only effective fiscal capacity in the currency union was held by the ECB. If the ECB had not started buying up government bonds in May 2010, the monetary union would have collapsed about then. The whole problem is that neo-liberalism brought these Member States together into a monetary architecture that was doomed from the start…Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The eurozone is unique among currency areas: Its central bank lacks a state to support its decisions, while its member states lack a central bank to support them in difficult times. Europe’s leaders have tried to fill this institutional lacuna with complex, non-credible rules that often fail to bind, and that, despite this failure, end up suffocating member states in need. One such rule is the Maastricht Treaty’s cap on member states’ public debt at 60% of GDP. Another is the treaty’s “no bailout” clause. Most member states, including Germany, have violated the first rule, surreptitiously or not, while for several the second rule has been overwhelmed by expensive financing packages.
The problem with debt restructuring in the eurozone is that it is essential and, at the same time, inconsistent with the implicit constitution underpinning the monetary union. When economics clashes with an institution’s rules, policymakers must either find creative ways to amend the rules or watch their creation collapse.…Yanis Varoufakis
France favours a "stronger organisation" behind the euro led by "a vanguard of countries", French President Francois Hollande said in an interview published Sunday.
In the past week "the European spirit prevailed" in addressing the Greek crisis, he told the weekly Journal du Dimanche.
"But we cannot stand still," Hollande said, in the interview published alongside a profile of Jacques Delors, the former head of the European Commission.
Delors, a former French economics and finance minister who turns 90 on Monday, is one of the architects of the euro.
"I have proposed taking up Jacques Delors' idea about euro government, with the addition of a specific budget and a parliament to ensure democratic control," Hollande said.…France 24
According to a recent Bloomberg article, nine people saw the Eurozone crisis coming years before anyone else. Wow, only nine people saw it coming? That is remarkable, these folks must be truly prescient if only they foresaw the crisis.
Except that this claim is terribly wrong. There were many economists who saw the problems of a European monetary union before it formed. One prominent economist not on the Bloomberg list is Martin Feldstein….
Feldstein was one among many American economists who doubted a currency union in Europe would work. In fact, an entire article in Econ Journal Watch provides a survey of the skeptical tendencies of most American economists over the Euro prior to its inception….Macro and Other Market Musings
The Maastricht approach has failed up to now. To understand why, let’s consider the four obstacles in its way: uniformity, complexity, implementability and limited solidarity.The author favors federalism but doubts it is possible at this point.
“In its current form, EMU is not viable in the long run”. That quote comes from a Report – Repair and Prepare – Strengthening Europe’s Economies after the Crisis – jointly published by the – Jacques Delors Institut (located in Berlin) – and the Bertelsmann Stiftung – (located in Gütersloh, Germany). The Report purports to lay out a blueprint to prepare Europe for the “next potential threat to its very existence”. It proposes a “path towards renovation” to create an “ever closer union”. They claim that they have taken up this task because there is “extensive ‘crisis fatigue’ and ‘euro area debate fatigue’ in “in governmental circles and the media”. I would call it adherence to ideological Groupthink rather than fatigue. There has been a major failure yet none of those who created the failure have put their hands up to take responsibility. Once they dismissed the problem as being caused by “profligate and fat Greeks (insert vilified nationality as to your preference)”, various policy makers and media commentators resorted to the even more amorphous “structural problems” to explain the on-going crisis. The media has been full of captive writers who just reiterate press releases from neo-liberal politicians and/or mainstream economists. So is this new Report different? Is their plan viable?
Before you get too excited, you might also like to know that the former organisation was founderd by the French politician after he finished his time as European President.
Delors will be remembered as the French neo-liberal (despite his socialist affiliation) who oversaw the disastrous Delors Report that informed the Treaty of Maastricht. It is clearly pro-Eurozone.
The German outfit is an off-shoot of the Paris-based – Notre Europe – Jacques Delors Institute. It is run by one Henrik Enderlein who is pro-Eurozone.
Meanwhile, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has a history of advocating neo-liberal changes to public education and labour market reform in Germany.
So you might expect my answers to the initial questions are No and No.…Regrouping for a counterattack after an electoral defeat in Greece.
Europe also needs to rethink its fiscal policy. That's beyond the remit of the ECB, though it wouldn't hurt for Draghi to demand changes. Again, he took a step in that direction in his recent speech, saying that fiscal policy should "play a greater role" in boosting demand. Then he took a step back by saying that Europe's Stability and Growth Pact allowed sufficient room to maneuver, and that it would be "self-defeating" to abandon it. No. It isn't a matter of finding room for maneuver. This pact, which tells governments to cut government borrowing regardless of impending deflation, needs to be scrapped.…
Monetary policy can and should do more. That's the responsibility of Draghi and his ECB colleagues. If they want to, Europe's governments can repair their fiscal policies, as well -- by scrapping the fiscal pact rather than fiddling with it. If Europe's long recession gets worse, it will be because its leaders saw what was happening yet chose not to act.Bloomberg View
The euro’s core founding principles, based on the Maastricht Treaty’s “irrevocable” fixing of currency rates, and of the free movement of capital, have been violated. The euro will never be the same again; its preservation now depends urgently upon economic recovery. Without the delivery of economic growth, unemployment will rise to yet higher post-war record levels, and the widespread and growing disillusionment felt by EU citizens towards their economic regime will threaten to spill over into more explicit questioning of the euro’s suitability.Zero Hedge
