May 08, 2010
The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) pulled out the stops in pushing its deficit reduction agenda today. Its news section includes a lengthy story on the euro crisis that makes things up in order advance the Post line about evil budget deficits.
It starts by misrepresenting the central problem: “and the currency that was designed to rival the U.S. dollar for power and influence is foundering because of a lack of fiscal discipline among its weakest members.” While Greece’s problems can be attributed in large part to a lack of fiscal discipline, this is clearly not the case with Spain and Ireland, both of whom had budget surpluses and low debt to GDP ratios prior to the downturn. Portugal is a more ambiguous case. The euro would not be facing a crisis if only Greece and Portugal, two relatively small economies, were facing difficulties.
The euro’s problem stem from the fact that many economies across Europe were driven by a housing bubble. The European Central Bank (ECB), like the Fed, thought that bubbles were fun and opted to ignore the growth of dangerous housing bubbles in many countries.
For this reason, the sentence: “The euro, created 11 years ago, has always stood upon two unequal legs: a disciplined European Central Bank that has set interest rates for the entire monetary union and a wide variety of national budgets and economic policies ranging from prudent to profligate,” could perhaps be more accurately written: “The euro, created 11 years ago, has always stood upon two unequal legs: an incompetent European Central Bank that has set interest rates for the entire monetary union and a wide variety of national budgets and economic policies ranging from prudent to profligate.” Had the ECB done the proper job of a central bank it would have taken steps to pierce the bubble (which could have involved many measures other than raising interest rates) before it grew to such dangerous proportions.
It is worth noting that the Post consistently ignored the economists who warned of the dangers of the housing bubble in the build up to the crisis. It is continuing to ignore the bubble even after its collapse led to the worst economic crisis in 70 years.
The Post also gets the necessary remedies confused. It tells readers: “If Greece still had its own currency instead of being tethered to the euro zone, a sudden devaluation would have already slashed the value of the country’s wages and benefits.” Actually, the important point is not the absolute fall in Greece’s wages and benefits, but rather their decline in value relative to those of other countries in Europe.
This is the key point, the issue is less the budget problems, but rather that the fixed exchange rate precludes and effective process of economic adjustment to a period of lower budget deficits. Because Greece and the other troubled countries are stuck in the euro zone, they can neither lower interest rates nor decrease the value of their currency to offset the contractionary impact of deficit reduction. As a result, deficit reduction can lead to a downward spiral in which lower output leads to a higher budget deficit, requiring further cuts, and therefore causing a further drop in output.
Comments