Hugo Dixon

Investors are feeling more optimistic about the euro crisis. So are policymakers. That much was evident last week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. There was much satisfaction over the early performance of the Super Mario Brothers – Mario Draghi, president of the European Central bank, and Mario Monti, Italy’s prime minister. What’s more, a deal may be in the works to build a bigger firewall against contagion, constructed out of commitments from euro zone members and the International Monetary Fund. And it looks like there will be another short-term fix for Greece.

But three bad fairies were lurking at the Davos feast. Spain and France are relatively new problems and Greece is an old one. All three are powerful menaces.

Madrid is staring at a particularly vicious version of the austerity spiral afflicting most of the euro zone. The last government missed its fiscal targets, leaving the country with a budget deficit of 8 percent of GDP in 2011. The programme agreed with the European Union commits Spain to cutting this to 4.4 percent in 2012. Doing so would be hard in good times. Trying to reach this target when GDP is set to shrink by at least 1.5 percent and the unemployment rate is already 23 percent would be nearly suicidal.

Mariano Rajoy’s new conservative government is making a lot of the right noises. It is steeling itself for a long overdue overhaul of the labour market. It is also preparing to clean up its banks’ toxic balance sheets. But requiring it simultaneously to throttle the economy with such a severe squeeze would set it up to fail.

There’s an obvious trade-off: in return for going full steam ahead with the structural reforms, Madrid could be allowed a little longer to get its deficit under control. Such a deal could be applied to other countries too. But it would require Germany’s blessing – and that doesn’t yet appear to be forthcoming.

The euro zone shouldn’t rely on a bailout from the rest of the world. The International Monetary Fund is asking for an additional $600 billion to help deal with the euro crisis. But the euro zone, which is vastly richer than most of the rest of the world, should find the money to solve its own problems. It will be bystanders in the developing world that may need help if the euro blows up.

One can see why the IMF wants more money. An additional $600 billion on top of its existing firepower of $390 billion would take it up to a nice round number of $1 trillion. Not only would that give its bosses more swagger as they crisscross the world fighting fires but it would allow the IMF to play a big role in any bailout of a large euro zone country such as Italy.

But why should the rest of the world bail out the euro? The rich normally help the poor. But GDP per capita in the euro zone was $33,819 in 2011, more than five times that in the developing world, according to the IMF. As things stand, 57 percent of the IMF’s existing loans are to the euro zone, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. It’s not surprising that other countries are hardly rushing to funnel yet more money its way.

Watch Athens more than Standard & Poor’s. The biggest source of immediate trouble for the euro zone could be the one country the ratings agency didn’t examine in a review that led to the downgrade of France and eight other states. Even if the short-term shoals can be navigated, the rest of the zone won’t find it easy to get by Greece.

The points S&P made when stripping France and Austria of their triple-A ratings and knocking two notches off the ratings of the likes of Italy and Spain were valid. It is true, for example, that policymakers can’t agree what to do to solve the euro crisis and that “fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating.” But these points, as well as the prospect of S&P downgrades, were already in the market.

Meanwhile, what Mario Draghi said last week about “tentative signs of stabilization” is true. The European Central Bank (ECB), over which Draghi presides, is itself partly responsible for that stabilization by virtue of providing 489 billion euros of three-year money to banks just before Christmas. Mario Monti’s promising beginning as Italy’s prime minister is the other main factor. The Super Mario Brothers have got off to a good start.

Semantics could help save the euro zone. There is a crying need to distinguish between fiscal austerity and structural reform.  The endless austerity programs adopted by the GIIPS — Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain — threaten to crush their economies so much that they are socially unbearable. By contrast, reforming pensions, labor markets and the like would be good for long-term growth. A policy mix that emphasizes the latter and draws some sort of line under the former is needed to stop the euro crisis spinning out of control.

Europeans have become grimly familiar with austerity spirals over the past two years. A government that needs to cut its fiscal deficit embarks on a program of tax hikes and spending cuts. The snag is that this fiscal squeeze, in turn, squeezes the economy — partly via the direct impact of cash being sucked out of the private sector and partly because the private sector loses confidence. The depressed economy means the government’s tax take doesn’t rise nearly as much as envisaged. So the deficit doesn’t decline much and, as a percentage of shrunken GDP, it falls even less. The governments’ creditors, led by Germany, then demand another round of austerity to get the program back on track. With each round, the howls of pain from the population increase, belief that there is light at the end of the tunnel declines and the government’s political capital shrinks.

The Greeks, Irish and Portuguese have been trying to run up this down escalator the longest. Italy and Spain are now embarking on the same regime. Yet more doses will be required over the coming year if the policy mix is unchanged. After all, last year’s budget deficits are expected to be about 10 percent for Greece and Ireland, 7-8 percent for Spain and Portugal (if a one-off pension transfer is ignored) and 4 percent for Italy.