The Great Debate UK

from MacroScope:

The Law of Diminishing Greeks

The Law of Diminishing Returns  states that a continuing push towards a given goal tends to  decline in effectiveness after a certain amount of effort has been expended. If this weren't the case, Usain Bolt would be able to run the mile in  less than 2-1/2 minutes.

From an economic standpoint, this law now seems to be fully in force in Greece. The latest jobs figures from the twice-bailed out euro zone country paint a bleak numerical picture of the impact of unrelenting austerity in ordinary Greeks, regardless of whether it was self-inflicted or not. To wit:

More than one in five Greeks is unemployed.

There are more young people without a job than with one.

The record 1.08 million people  without work in January was a  47 percent tumble  in a year.

Putting aside for the moment the question of what such a condition means for political dissent, there is now the issue of whether any of this austerity-fueled pain is actually helping the Greek economy.

Austerity mixed with the inability of euro-tied Greece to devalue its currency  means  Greece is now in its fifth year of recession. As for job-creating small and medium -sized businesses, the latest projections are that more than a net 130,000 of them will have shut down over two years by the time 2012 is over.

The biggest example of the Law of Diminishing returns, however, is the impact all this is having on what ails Greece in the first place -- its budget.

Unemployed people offer no revenue to the government in terms of income tax and far less in sales tax than they would if they were working.

Spain, Italy and Greece are miracles waiting to happen

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

Last November, at the time of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Autumn Statement, the two men in charge of our fiscal and monetary policy together delivered the gloomiest peacetime message in our history. Those of us who have been pessimistic all along were totally outflanked.

The governor of the Bank of England was absolutely right to decry the sudden vogue for technocracy. As he says, the problems in Europe are not fundamentally about a shortage of liquidity, as many commentators suggest and as politicians are only too happy to agree. They are at root about solvency, about the ability and the willingness of countries like Greece to pay their debts, and as such they are political problems which require political solutions. It is simply wishful thinking to imagine that an economics PhD somehow provides access to the secret of how to balance the books of a society which has long been living beyond its means, as have the majority of euro zone members. If it is hard for a Government with a sound electoral mandate to deliver painful medicine, it is likely to be even harder for one with no mandate at all.

Far from being evidence of maturity, the way the political class in Greece and Italy has given way to technocrats is a total abdication of responsibility. What needs to be done to transform the prospects of Greece and Italy, Spain and Portugal involves no rocket science. No advanced macroeconomic theory is needed to get the basics right: to cut Government spending, introduce honest tax collection (especially in Greece and Italy), privatise and deregulate transport systems and utilities, and most importantly to allow labour markets to function properly so as to reduce unemployment to a minimum, rather than to maximise it, as they do at the moment.

If this prescription sounds familiar, so it should. Britain’s situation in 1979 was not unlike that of the ClubMed countries today, with the sole, critical difference that we had been able to print our own money – which we did aplenty in the 1970’s, generating inflation as high as 25 percent by the middle of that awful decade. In the end, the situation was salvaged not by an economist, but by Mrs Thatcher, armed with nothing better than the Micawberish economics of her father’s Grantham grocery.

By contrast, Italy had a professor of economics, Romano Prodi, as Prime Minister from 1996 to 1998 and again from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008, but he achieved very little in the way of reform.

Look at the first two columns in the table below, which give indicators of the scale of economic distortion: the Transparency Index, which focuses mainly on the extent of corruption, and the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, which attempts to measure the freedom of the corporate sector to fulfil its function of creating wealth and jobs. No West European country should ever be outside the top 30 on either index, and the rankings for Greece and Italy – behind many Third World countries (and not only in SE Asia) – ought to have shamed them and the E.U. into action a long time ago.

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.

A funny sort of Union

The pictures from Athens at the weekend showed a city in turmoil: protests turned violent, buildings were alight and an anti-German feeling was clear for all to see. German flags have been burnt as Greek politicians have agreed to yet more austerity, which means reduced pensions, a 20% cut to the minimum wage and mass layoffs in the public sector.

Added to that the EU has demanded that Greek politicians from both sides of the political aisle sign a pledge to implement cuts regardless of the outcome of the general election scheduled for April. Thus, even if the Greek people vote for an alternative to cuts the troika will insist on them.

But while the Greeks protested at this loss of sovereignty the financial markets have been surprisingly calm. While Greek politicians have been in the throes of austerity, negotiations the bond markets in Italy, Spain and Portugal have continued to recover and apart from a slight blip at the end of last week, euro-based risk assets have continued to rally. Added to this, those calling for the end of the euro have been frustrated by the resilience of the single currency.

So does this mean that the markets will have a delayed reaction to what is going on in Athens, or does Greece not matter anymore? I tend to lean towards the latter. That doesn’t mean that no one cares about Greece or her citizens – the pictures at the weekend were truly disturbing – it’s just that in terms of the euro zone crisis, what happens in Athens is not such an important part of the equation anymore.

A trader I know put it this way: rather than spook the markets, the current events in Greece may spur Italy, Portugal and Spain to act to meet fiscal targets and implement structural reform. After all, it shows just how harsh the Troika can be if you repeatedly fail to live up to expectations when it comes to fiscal consolidation.

An Italian tax crackdown has already yielded positive results. A recent article in the New York Times reported that Rome’s tax police swooped on a small workshop near the Vatican that sold religious souvenirs but failed to pay the Italian Revenue its share. Other arrests have been made in ski resorts and high profile nightclubs around the country. The warning is clear: if you live in Italy, drive a Ferrari and report earnings that could hardly pay for a Fiat Punto then the tax police are coming to get you.

Fraud in Italy is said to be worth 255-275 billion euros a year by some estimates. Thus, stories of raids on the rich and famous not only catch the public’s imagination, but are also a way for Italy to score brownie points from Germany.

Hungary: The Greece of Eastern Europe

By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.

It used to be Greece that was the canary in the coal mine, these days it’s Hungary. The new year got off to a bad start for the Eastern European nation after it experienced a failed bond auction, causing its bond yields to surge.

This caused major jitters across global financial markets and once again a small, relatively unknown economy is dominating the headlines and causing a massive headache for the European authorities.

But while there are many similarities, the reasons for the panic in Hungary’s debt markets are different from Greece’s problems. Athens borrowed too much and public spending spiralled out of control. However, Hungary’s problems were not based on the size of its budget deficit, which was a fairly manageable 4.2 percent of GDP at the end of 2010, but the amount of debt in its public and private sector that was denominated in foreign-currency.

While the post-Communist era in Hungary helped to modernise the state, its capital markets did not keep up to date. Borrowing costs were lower in the euro zone and other parts of Europe where banks were willing to lend relatively cheaply across the Eastern European bloc, especially to Hungary. While the Hungarian forint was strong it was fine to have liabilities in euro and Swiss franc, however, since the start of 2011 the forint has deteriorated at a rapid pace. Since August alone the forint has lost more than 17 percent of its value against the euro.

Here is the problem: when your liabilities are in euro but you earn forint, all of a sudden servicing your debts becomes much more expensive and bad debts start to rise.

That’s where the similarities with Greece start. If bad debts start to rise then Austria and Italy could be on the hook. Austrian banks hold a whopping $40 billion of Hungarian liabilities, while Italian banks have a slightly more manageable $20 billion.

from The Great Debate:

The abyss and our last chance

By Carlo De Benedetti The opinions expressed are his own.

In a magnificent book published a few years ago Cormac McCarthy imagines a man and a child, father and son, pushing a shopping cart containing what little they have left, along a back road somewhere in America. Ten years earlier the world was destroyed by a nameless catastrophe that turned it into a dark, cold place without life.

There is no history and there is no future. But there is an objective: to head south toward the sea. Mythical places, only vaguely perceived, where there might be salvation. The father is getting older and is ever more weary. But he has the child with him. And he has his objective. He wants to take him southward to the sea. Toward a future that may still be possible.

Today, is the western economy, in particular the Italian economy, that world destroyed by an Apocalypse? Are we pushing that cart, containing the few things we have left, toward a mythical sea of which we know nothing, or even what it is like or where it is?

Re-reading the book I was tempted to think this. To think that those pages, written in 2006, were in some way a prophesy of what we are living through today. Never before has an entire productive system, our own, been so fundamentally questioned.

I have been convinced for some time now that the huge financial crisis of the last few years is the litmus test of a deeper crisis to do with the universal economic order that has lasted through the centuries, with a shift of the balance of world wealth toward new countries.

The euro is on life support, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

The short term solution to the problem of how to manage the euro zone crisis may now be right there in front of us. The central issue, as far as Germany is concerned at least, is how to reconcile bailing out the other member countries with keeping up the pressure on them to put their fiscal house in order. Quietly, without any official recognition of the fact, the ECB has taken charge of the situation and is now effectively running fiscal policy for most of the euro zone by simply buying enough Greek, Italian, Spanish and maybe French bonds to keep yields from going too high, but not buying so many as to reduce yields to anything like comfortable levels.

Moreover, treasury officials in every country will be only too well aware that what the ECB giveth, the ECB can take away. Any relaxation in austerity regimes can always be countered by an end to ECB purchases or even by ECB sales in the secondary market, driving yields back up in the space of a few minutes to 7%, 8% and beyond. In short, most of the euro zone members are now  on a life support machine, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt.

As a temporary situation, this suits everyone. Politically, it is far more acceptable both for Germany and its clients to conceal the fact that power in Europe is now shared only between Berlin and Frankfurt. Moreover, it conceals from the German electorate that the dreaded Transfer Union is already up and running, because they are in fact subsidising their neighbours via the ECB. With transparent subsidies ruled out – the European Financial Stability Fund has failed to get off the ground and Frau Merkel is unwilling to contemplate a Eurobond – the transfers are being made in the most opaque way possible.

Notice also that the current state of affairs is entirely consistent with developments in Greece and Italy, insofar as it means that technocrats are now running the euro zone too. For Europe, it is the culmination of the trend to unaccountable government that stretches all the way back to the Treaty of Rome in 1958.

Convenient as the current ad hoc arrangement may be, however, I suspect it will not hold up for long, though it will probably get us through to the New Year and beyond. Holding a gun to someone’s head only works if you are really willing to pull the trigger. If, or more likely when, one of the ECB’s clients calls its bluff by refusing or simply being unable to implement additional austerity measures for fear of bloodshed in the streets, a decision will have to be taken in Frankfurt and Berlin. Either stop buying bonds and run the risk of being seen to precipitate a collapse in both the economy and possibly in law and order too, or alternatively surrender to moral hazard, abandon any hope of controlling the money stock and accept inflation as the inevitable long run consequence.

Germans who believe, with their Chancellor, that fiscal integration is the ultimate answer might like to ponder the question: how would it differ from the current scenario? Would it involve some kind of rules to set limits on each country’s fiscal policy? If so, they should explain how those rules could be made any more effective than those in the Maastricht Treaty, which even Germany itself flouted. Some in Germany are said to favour fines for overspending countries, which demonstrates that there is in fact such a thing as a Teutonic sense of humour. (Imagine imposing a fine on Greece today. How do you levy a fine on any country, let alone one which is already bankrupt and which you yourself have to bail out? Presumably, Germany would have to pay Greece’s fines too?)

Belgium: A role model for the rest of Europe?

By Mark Hillary. The opinions expressed are his own.

In addition to the economic meltdown, there is another political story in Europe at present – Belgium.

I’m not referring to the recent release of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Adventures of Tintin’ movie – though it might be argued that Captain Haddock bears a passing resemblance to several much-missed British political figures, thanks to the trademark slur.

I mean the government. Or lack of one. As I write, it is now 530 days since Belgium actually had a functioning Cabinet making decisions and showing political leadership – or actually doing anything.

They didn’t need an Occupy movement to destroy the government in Belgium. They just needed a general election where the votes were spread so thinly across so many political parties that it became impossible to form a coalition that could then appoint Cabinet representatives.

At the election in June last year, 11 parties won a place in the Chamber of Representatives, and since then the horse-trading over who will take seats in Cabinet has continued. It was June this year when Belgium passed the previous holder of the dubious honour of being the slowest country to ever form a government – Cambodia.

Without digging too deep into the background of the Belgian problem – and speculation over partition – I am surprised that failure to form a government in a western European nation has sailed under the radar of most people commenting on the European economic and political maelstrom.

from Bethany McLean:

The euro zone’s self-inflicted killer

By Bethany McLean The opinions expressed are her own.

There were a lot of things that were supposed to save Europe from potential financial Armageddon. Chief among them is the EFSF, or European Financial Stability Facility.

In the spring of 2010, European finance ministers announced the facility’s formation with great fanfare. In its inaugural report, Standard & Poor's described the EFSF as the “cornerstone of the EU’s strategy to restore financial stability to the euro zone  sovereign debt market.”  The facility itself said in an October 2011 date presentation that its mission is to “safeguard financial stability in Europe.”

That of course hasn’t happened. And the evidence suggests that the EFSF may have only exacerbated the problems.

In theory, the facility is supposed to provide a way for a country that the market perceives as weak to still borrow money on good terms. The initial idea was that instead of the financially troubled country itself trying to sell its debt to live another day, the EFSF would be the one to raise the money and lend it to the country in question. The logic was simple: country X might be shaky, but the EFSF deserved a triple-A rating.

For all of its would-be financial firepower, the EFSF isn’t much to see—it’s just an office in Luxembourg with a German-born economist CEO named Klaus Regling, who oversees a staff of about 20. Its power—and that rating—is derived from the assumption that any debt it issues is guaranteed by the members of the euro zone. Initially, each member pledged unconditionally to repay up to 120% of its share of any debt the EFSF issued. (A country’s share is determined by the amount of capital it has in the European Central Bank.)

On paper, it all sounded great. The reality is that the EFSF wasn’t meant to be an active institution; it was supposed to be a fire extinguisher behind glass: never to be used. “The EFSF has been designed to bolster investor confidence and thus contain financing costs for euro zone member states,” wrote Standard & Poors in its initial report granting the triple A rating. “ If its establishment achieves this aim, we would not expect EFSF to issue a bond itself.”  Moody’s, for its part, wrote that the EFSF “reflects the political commitment of the euro zone member states to the preservation of the euro and the European Monetary Union.” That show of commitment alone was supposed to be enough to reassure the market.

Put the euro zone out of its misery

By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.

Let me make a wild guess – just a hunch, a vague feeling, the kind you get when you hear a football club chairman say “the manager has my full support”. My forecast is that the IMF monitors currently poring over the Italian government’s books will uncover a black hole somewhere, probably one big enough to swallow the euro zone, and the discovery will leave them as shocked as Captain Renault when he found there was gambling going on at Rick’s Bar in Casablanca.

My gut feeling is based on a deeply rooted suspicion of Italian statistics dating back to the early 1970’s, when I got my first job in academic life, as a research assistant in the University of Manchester. In that more tranquil era, it seemed possible to uncover a number of stable relationships between macroeconomic variables for all the other countries in the industrial world, but somehow never for Italy, which was always the outlier. Suspicion of the data is reinforced by the well-established claim that as much as 25 percent of Italy’s production is in the economia sommersa, the underground economy, exempt from taxation, unmonitored and unregulated (in fact, the Italian authorities have sometimes seemed to take a pride in its size, notably in 1987, when by a sleight of the statistician’s hand, Italy’s GDP was deemed to have overtaken that of Britain, thanks to an overnight reassessment of the scale of the country’s black market).

Even if Italy’s predicament is no worse than it appears from official statistics, the outlook is grim. It is hard to imagine a Berlusconi-led government successfully enforcing a serious austerity regime, but neither is it likely that an opposition dominated by ex-Communists could succeed where he failed. Moreover, as with Greece, those who are enthusiastic for a non-partisan administration made up of technocrats forget that mustering support in parliament is not enough. Restoring Italy to fiscal health will need a government able and willing to enforce spending cuts, raise taxes (or at least collect them more vigorously) and deregulate labour markets in the face of bitter and potentially violent opposition from trade unions, the professions and probably much of the public. It is not obvious to me that a government of supposedly neutral technocrats is better placed to achieve all this.

With a total debt of nearly two trillion euros, even a relatively modest haircut for Italy would be ruinously expensive to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and a Greek-style coiffure of 50 percent or more would use up all the additional funding promised (but not yet delivered). Moreover, there would be devastating consequences for the creditworthiness of the core countries — France in particular, but even Germany, and of course for all the major European banks.

For months now, commentators have been urging the EU authorities finally to get ahead of the curve, something they have repeatedly failed to do in the case of Greece. They began by refusing to admit the need for a bailout, then denied the inevitability of a partial default, then were forced to recognise the need for a 20 percent haircut, and have now been reduced to begging Greece to accept a 50 percent writedown, an offer which will still leave the country facing a crippling debt-to-GDP ratio for a decade or more and which may be rejected anyway — in which case we will end up with a disorderly default after all.

The same sort of slow-motion trainwreck with Italian debt will sink Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) banking system – yet the authorities in Brussels and Frankfurt seem set on that course. To those who ask whether we face another Lehman Brothers, the answer is yes – and probably worse than in 2008.