Hugo Dixon

Tayyip Erdogan seems to like the concept of “choking” things. At the weekend, Turkey’s prime minister sent riot police into an Istanbul park with tear gas and water cannons to clear out the protestors. A week earlier, he had threatened to “choke” an alleged “high-interest-rate lobby” of speculators who wanted to push interest rates up and suffocate the economy.

Erdogan’s harsh actions against protestors and harsh words against investors could backfire economically. The country depends on foreign investors to fund its big current account deficit. If they turn tail in response to the mounting unrest, interest rates will indeed have to rise.

The protests which began two weeks ago over Tayyip Erdogan’s alleged authoritarianism, triggered by the prime minister’s insistence on bulldozing one of Istanbul’s few public parks, initially alarmed investors. The stock market plunged, the lira fell and government bond yields spiked. Then, after the central bank intervened in the foreign exchange market and Erdogan offered concessions last week, investors calmed down.

But the weekend’s use of riot police has stoked a conflict that seemed like it might be on the point of resolution.

The problem is not so much that speculators have an incentive to jack up interest rates. This would be perverse. Foreign investors own $140 billion of domestic bonds and equities, according to Standard Bank. They will lose money if interest rates rise.

One reason the euro zone is in such a mess is that it hasn’t had the courage to clean up its banks. The United States gave its lenders a proper scrubbing, followed by recapitalisation, in 2009. By contrast, the euro zone engaged in a series of half-hearted stress tests that missed many of the biggest banking problems such as those in Ireland, Spain and Cyprus.

In recent years, the zone has started to address these problems on a piecemeal basis. But it is still haunted by zombie banks, which are not strong enough to support an economic recovery.

The European Central Bank now has a golden opportunity to press the reset button in advance of taking on the job of supervisor in mid-2014. It mustn’t flunk the cleanup.

The UK, France and maybe America are edging towards a policy of arming Syria’s “moderate” rebels if planned peace talks with the Assad regime don’t produce a breakthrough. The idea would be to tilt the civil war in favour of moderates and against both Assad’s Iranian-backed regime and al Qaeda-style jihadists. But the scheme, while superficially attractive, is fraught with risk.

The West’s three nuclear powers clearly don’t have much appetite for intervention in Syria. Nobody is pushing for an Iraqi or Afghan-style invasion. There is also precious little desire to impose a Libyan-style no-fly zone – not least because it would be impossible to get United Nations’ authority for such a policy given Russia’s steadfast support for the Assad regime.

The West is anyway struggling to clarify why it should get involved in this increasingly grisly sectarian war. Syria doesn’t have much oil or gas, unlike Libya and Iraq. Nor is Assad threatening the West with al Qaeda-style attacks. It could even be argued, on the basis of realpolitik, that it could be in the West’s interests if Sunni jihadists and the Iran-Assad-Hezbollah Shi’ite axis exhausted each other in an orgy of mutual destruction.

When Mario Draghi was appointed President of the European Central Bank, the German tabloid Bild gave him a Prussian helmet because it admired his Teutonic anti-inflation credentials. The Sun, Bild’s British equivalent, should give him keys to the City of London because of his pro-market credentials.

Draghi likes London. The Italian still has a flat in the city, kept from his time as a Goldman Sachs banker. He is a man with a natural affinity for the markets.

Last week Draghi was in London, the scene of his July 2012 promise to “do whatever it takes to preserve the euro”. The ECB President’s message this time was that Europe needs a more European UK as much as the United Kingdom needs a more British Europe.

It is perhaps too much to expect Britain’s Conservative-led government to lead any initiatives on Europe, such is the orgy of self-destruction in the party over whether the UK should stay in the European Union. But, insofar as David Cameron manages to get some respite from the madness, he should launch a strategy to enhance the City of London as Europe’s financial centre.

Britain has in recent years been playing a defensive game in response to the barrage of misguided financial rules from Brussels. It now needs to get on the front foot and sell the City as part of the solution to Europe’s problems. The opportunity is huge both for Britain and the rest of Europe.

The chance of getting the EU to swing behind a pro-City strategy may, on the face of it, seem pie in the sky. Many people blame financiers for the financial crisis. So how could they be part of the solution? What’s more, Continental Europeans have long tended to be suspicious of financial markets.

Quitting the European Union would be bad for Britain. Membership of even an unreformed EU is better than “Brexit”. Quitting would mean either not having access to the single market – at a huge cost to the economy – or second-tier membership.

The debate over Brexit has moved into high gear in the past 10 days, after the UK Independence Party – which wants Britain to pull out of the EU – performed well in English local elections. The Conservative party, which rules in coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats, has been thrown into turmoil because UKIP has been winning votes largely from the Tories.

What’s more, many Conservatives would like Britain to quit the EU too. Last week Nigel Lawson, one of Margaret Thatcher’s finance ministers, argued the case for Brexit. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London who is the Conservatives’ most popular politician, also shuffled a little further in a eurosceptic direction – although he stopped short of calling for an exit.

By Hugo Dixon

(Hugo Dixon is Editor-at-Large, Reuters News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

The UK Independence Party will not come close to winning Britain’s next general election. The populist anti-Europe, anti-immigration party may not even win a single seat, despite last week’s surge in English local elections where it won nearly a quarter of the vote – running a close third to Labour and the Conservatives. That’s how the maths of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system works.

Nevertheless, the rise of UKIP could have profound consequences for British politics and business – in particular, for the UK’s relationship with the European Union. This is because UKIP is mainly taking votes away from David Cameron’s Conservatives. A calculation by Sky News suggested that, if the local election results were translated into a general election, Labour would win an overall majority. Even though UKIP might win no seats itself, its popularity would damage Cameron’s prospects for reelection in 2015.

The austerity debate misses half the point. It is true that governments, especially in the euro zone, shouldn’t chase an austerity spiral ever downwards. But they can’t just sit on their hands. They must drive even harder for structural reforms.

The last few weeks have witnessed a sea-change in the debate over fiscal austerity. A seminal academic paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which purported to show that economic growth was impaired if government debt levels exceeded 90 percent of GDP, has been discredited.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has softened its line on the merits of further deep budget cuts in peripheral economies. Spain, for example, looks like it will get until 2016 to bring its deficit down below the European Union’s magic number of 3 percent of GDP. Portugal, Greece, Italy and France are also being shown greater leniency by Brussels. One of the first things Enrico Letta, Italy’s new prime minister, said last week was that country needed to focus on growth not austerity.

Greece is not yet out of the woods. But there is a credible path that could lead the country back into the sunlight. That’s the main conclusion of a week I have just spent in the country.

Although the economy will have a terrible 2013, next year should be better. But the outlook is fragile: political crisis could yet rear its ugly head, tax evasion is rife and there’s the risk of external shocks.

Look first at the good news. Antonis Samaras’ coalition government has held together surprisingly well since it came to power last June following a period of political chaos, despite pushing through extremely unpopular measures. Samaras’ centre-right New Democracy party is neck and neck in the opinion polls with the radical left Syriza, the main opposition party. Samaras hasn’t suffered the plunging support of Spain’s Mariano Rajoy or France’s Francois Hollande.

Italy could do with some market pressure. Rome’s bond yields are now lower than they were before February’s inconclusive election. But as the politicians scheme, the economy burns. With markets calm, there is insufficient urgency to crack on with long-needed economic and political reform.

The fall in 10-year bond yields, which were 4.3 percent on Friday compared to 4.4 percent just before the election, is attributable to two factors. First, nobody wants to bet against the European Central Bank which has promised to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. Second, the Japanese central bank’s pledge to buy gigantic quantities of bonds at home has buoyed asset prices elsewhere, including in Italy.

The backdrop to the current political crisis is starkly different to that in November 2011, when a sharp increase in bond yields created a panic which led to Silvio Berlusconi being forced out of office. Now none of the three main political blocs – Berlusconi’s centre-right group, the centre-left Democrats and Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star Movement – can govern on its own. But seven weeks have been wasted without a coalition being formed.