By Simon Johnson, co-author 13 Bankers
Most days we can coast along, confident that tomorrow will be much like yesterday. On a very few days we need to look hard at the news headlines, click through to read the whole story, and then completely change a large chunk of how we thought the world worked. Today is such a day.
Everything you knew or thought you believed about the European economy – and the eurozone, which lies at its heart – was just ripped up by financial markets and thrown out of the proverbial window.
While you slept, there was a fundamental repricing of risk in financial markets around Europe – we’ll see shortly about the rest of the world. You may see this called a “panic” and the term conveys the emotions involved, but do not be misled – this is not a flash in a pan; financial markets have taken a long hard view at the fiscal and banking realities in Europe. They have also looked long and hard into the eyes – and, they think, the souls – of politicians and policymakers, including in Washington this weekend.
The conclusion: large parts of Europe are no longer “investment grade” – they are more like “emerging markets”, meaning higher yield, more risky, and in the descriptive if overly evocative term: “junk”. Continue reading
Dominos
By James Kwak
So, as everyone knows, the ECB came out yesterday with its latest plan to stem the creeping European sovereign debt crisis. This one involves potentially unlimited ECB purchases of sovereign debt, so long as its maturity is less than three years (presumably so that the ECB can pull the plug within three years on non-complying governments) and the country in question agrees to comply with fiscal policy reforms (i.e., austerity).
I don’t have any particular ability to forecast whether this will succeed or fail. My inclination is that it will succeed for a while and then turn out to be insufficient, for the reasons that others have identified. Central bank bond-buying will enable governments to borrow money at manageable yields, so their national debt will not spiral out of control solely because of climbing interest rates. But to bring debt levels down will require actual economic growth, and more austerity—even if it isn’t quite as austere as that imposed on Greece in the past—will not generate growth. In addition, the ECB’s promise to “sterilize” its bond purchases—I believe by selling other assets to raise the cash for bond purchases, so the net effect will not be to create money—means that this is not a particularly expansionary form of monetary policy.
This is as good an occasion as any, however, to ask a question I’ve been wondering about for, oh, years now. Every discussion of the European crisis includes the following domino theory (although no one calls it that anymore, for reasons I’ll get back to): If Greece leaves the Eurozone, that proves that it is possible to leave the Eurozone—or, put another way, that the powers that be cannot keep the Eurozone intact. If people realize that it is possible, then bond markets will bet even more heavily against Spain and Italy, which will force them to leave the Eurozone, which would be terrible. Hence Greece cannot leave the Eurozone.
Continue reading →
→ 12 Comments
Posted in Commentary
Tagged euro, European crisis, eurozone