December 10, 2011
Fox on 15th yet again did some heavy editorializing in a front page story on the euro zone crisis. It referred to the plan to constrain debt as an effort to create an institutional structure that will “slap automatic penalties on governments that recklessly spend and borrow.”
How did the word “recklessly” get into this article and why did it make it past the Post’s editors? The point is that if the penalties are automatic, then they will not distinguish between countries that borrow “recklessly” and countries that might end up borrowing for reasons that are not reckless.
For example, a country like Ireland may end up borrowing because it had private banks that engaged in reckless lending and faced collapse. The country then had the choice of seeing its banking system go under or borrowing to rescue its banks. (It is possible that Ireland could have kept its banks operating at lower cost by giving creditors haircuts, but that is a debatable point.)
Alternatively, a country like Spain may end up borrowing because incompetent central bankers allow an enormous housing bubble to grow unchecked. When the bubble bursts it creates a severe recession leading to a huge loss of tax revenue and a massive increase in spending on unemployment benefits and other transfers.
An automatic enforcement mechanism does not distinguish between this sort of borrowing and borrowing that is done for reasons that may be viewed as reckless. That is precisely the point with an automatic mechanism, it is automatic. The Washington Post should be able to hire people who understand this.
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