Category Archives: Europe

Black Swans of August

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       Throughout history, big economic and political shocks have often occurred in August, when leaders had gone on vacation in the belief that world affairs were quiet.   Examples of geopolitical jolts that came in August include the outbreak of World War I, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Berlin Wall in 1961.  Subsequent examples of economic and other surprises in August have included the Nixon shock of 1971 (when the American president enacted wage-price controls, took the dollar off gold, and imposed trade controls), 1982 eruption in Mexico of the international debt crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the 1991 Soviet coup, 1992 crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007.   Many of these shocks constituted events that had previously not even appeared on most radar screens. They were considered unthinkable.  read more

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Procyclicalists Across the Atlantic Too

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     My preceding post bemoaned the tendency for many US politicians to exhibit a procyclicalist pattern:    supporting tax cuts and spending increases when the economy is booming, which should be the time to save money for a rainy day, and then re-discovering the evils of budget deficits only in times of recession, thus supporting fiscal contraction at precisely the wrong time.  Procyclicalists exacerbate the magnitude of the swings in the business cycle.

        This is not just an American problem.  A similar unfortunate cycle — large fiscal deficits when the economy is already expanding anyway, followed by fiscal contraction in response to a recession — has also been visible in the United Kingdom and euroland in recent years.   Greece and Portugal are the two most infamous examples. But the larger European countries, as well, failed to take advantage of the expansionary period 2003-07 to strengthen their public finances, and instead ran budget deficits in excess of the limits (3% of GDP) that they were supposed to obey under the Stability and Growth Pact. Then, over the last few years, politicians in both the UK and the continent have made their recessions worse by imposing aggressive fiscal austerity at precisely the wrong time. read more

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Could Eurobonds Help Solve the Euro Crisis?

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Any solution to the euro crisis must meet two objectives.  One is short run and the other is long run.  Unfortunately they tend to conflict.

The first necessary objective is to put Greece, Portugal, and other troubled countries back on a sustainable debt path, defined as a long-term trajectory where the ratio of debt to GDP is declining rather than rising.  Austerity won’t restore debt sustainability.  It has raised debt/GDP ratios, not lowered them.   A write-down would do it.  New bigger bail-outs might too, or might not.  But either write-downs or bailouts would then create moral hazard and thus make even it even harder to satisfy the second necessary objective. read more

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