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from The Great Debate UK:
Germany should be happy to let Greece go
When the Greek crisis began, there was much talk of contagion as the greatest short-term risk. In my view, this worry is almost irrelevant because bondholders are in any case facing a haircut of over 70%, so the question of default or bailout is now merely a technical detail.
From a longer term perspective, there is also little reason for the Germans to panic over a Greek default, even if it ultimately leads to the disintegration of the euro zone. The line peddled by a number of commentators and politicians that Germany has “done very well out of the euro zone” begs the question of how well it would have done without the euro zone, a question to which I do not know the answer – but nor does anyone else.
The implicit or explicit claim is that, with floating exchange rates, German trade would have suffered as the DM appreciated against the currencies of its neighbours. This is nonsense, a case of how, in the world of popular economics – what one colleague famously called D-I-Y economics – exchange rates occupy a position of exaggerated importance (If those who study the subject were given the same importance, I’d have had a peerage by now).
If exchange rate appreciation were so damaging and depreciation so beneficial to a country’s trade, the Swiss would by now be the poorest country in Europe and the Italians the richest. The reality is that, while there may be short term dislocations, the effect of changes in the value of a currency are ephemeral. Devaluations are self-defeating because they push up costs until the country’s terms of trade are back where they started, and the opposite for appreciations: a rise in the value of a country’s currency makes its imports cheaper, reducing its inflation rate and restoring its competitiveness as time passes. The process of adjustment seems to take some six or seven years, which might seem a window of opportunity worth seizing for opportunistic devaluation. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the more rapidly a currency depreciates, the more agents in the economy wise up and start anticipating the next depreciation, speeding up the adjustment and thereby narrowing the window of opportunity for exporters.
In other words, exchange rate flexibility smoothes the road, but does nothing whatever to change the destination. Moreover, the effect of exchange rate changes is smallest for countries with the most efficient labour markets, which includes Germany ever since its reforms of ten years ago, so there is every reason to suppose that it would adjust quickly anyway, just as it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s when the DM rose in value almost continually without seriously damaging the country’s competitiveness.
As far as Greece is concerned, making it competitive inside the euro zone will require a so-called internal devaluation – mainly a reduction in wages – whereas outside the euro zone a relaunched drachma could be allowed to float downward. The only difference is that in the former case, Greek workers will have to get by on fewer Euros than they have been used to, whereas outside the euro zone they would be paid in devalued drachmas, which would mean a cut in their living standards of the same order of size (is there such a thing as a Hobson’s Choice between Scylla and Charybdis?).
For Germany (and for the rest of Europe, including Britain), the real danger is that euro zone disintegration might be followed by the collapse of the single market, the only truly valuable component of the EU edifice. As a nation very reliant on its external trade, Germany needs market access – no reasonable person wants to go back to a world of protectionism, quotas and non-tariff barriers to trade, but it is an ever-present threat as populist politics take hold in Europe. But even then, the German carmakers have demonstrated in the last couple of years how capable they are of compensating for sales lost in Europe by higher volume in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America, and there is every reason to suppose that the formidable German capital goods sector will prove just as adaptable.
from The Great Debate UK:
Greece deal is a compromise and, once again, the banks have won
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Whenever I see photos of Chancellor Merkel these days, I’m reminded of the lugubrious features of the creature in the Restaurant at the End of the World, as it recommended to guests which part of its own anatomy they should eat. The details of the “Deal to Save the Euro” are still mysterious and have been given a misleading spin in the official releases, but one or two points seem clear.
First, the package is a compromise – a little bit of default (as required by a reality check) plus assistance to Greece which looks very generous but is still not enough to give it a realistic chance of paying its remaining debts. So the can has been kicked further down the same road yet again.
The second point is one I am as fed up of writing as you probably are of reading: once more, the Banks Have Won. On the one hand, the French President wanted some kind of blanket balance-sheet tax, supposedly to contribute to the cost of the bailout. This was a daft idea for all sorts of reasons, not least the fact that it would have penalised the banks which behaved responsibly along with the irresponsible, the sort of outcome we have seen only too often in the last three years.
Germany, or at least Angela Merkel, wanted a solution which involved some contribution from the private sector creditors (mostly the banks, of course), which she has in the end got. Now the first thing to be said is that the words “private sector” ought to be in inverted commas, because we have seen time and again since 2007 how, one way or another, bank losses end up being borne by the taxpayers, so that any serious hit on the banks would have been deflected on to the public sector anyway.
And then, of course, the British banking sector is half state-owned in any case – all of which begs the question: why all the fuss? Why were negotiations held up for weeks over the issue of how much the private sector should contribute?
In the end, how much are the so-called private sector lenders going to contribute to the rescue?
from The Great Debate UK:
Japanese fiscal management dragged into the spotlight
-Jane Foley is research director at Forex.com. The opinions expressed are her own.-
Perhaps the oddest side-effect of the Greece debt crisis has been its ability to drag Japan’s budget into the spotlight.
There are so many differences between Greece and Japan that the question asked by at least one media report "is Greece the next Japan" sounds like a clumsy analogy.
For one thing Japan is not involved in a monetary union and has a flexible (and very liquid) currency. That said, given that all governments will have to compete harder this year to place larger amounts of debt and since there are estimates that Japan’s gross public debt/GDP ratio could expand to beyond 200 percent this year and given S&P decision to lower the outlook on Japan’s sovereign credit rating to ‘negative’, it is easy to see why Japan’s budget is drawing attention.
Japan needs to commit itself to budget reform particularly given its ageing population. A country’s demographics tend to shift at a slow pace meaning that politicians have been aware for decades that budget pressures will increase with the retirement of the baby-boomers.
This is a common theme in almost all industrialised countries though the problem is particularly acute in Japan. Aware of the issues, there have been attempts by Japanese governments to tackle structural reform.
However, a prolonged period of slow growth in the 1990s (Japan’s lost decade) and again as a consequence of the most recent recession have thwarted progress. Instead of cutting spending various Japanese governments have been forced to use stimulus spending in an attempt to shore up domestic demand and stave off deflation.
