Hugo Dixon

Can Super Mario save the euro? Mario Draghi said last Thursday that the European Central Bank’s job is to stop sovereign bond yields rising if these increases are caused by fears of a euro break-up. While this represents a sea-change in the ECB president’s thinking, it risks sowing dissension within his ranks. He will struggle to come up with the right tools to achieve his goals.

Draghi seemingly stared into the abyss and had a fright. Spanish 10-year bond yields shot up to 7.6 percent on July 24 while Italian ones rose to 6.6 percent. The high borrowing costs are not simply a reflection of the two countries’ high debts and struggling economies. Investors also fear “convertibility risk” – or the possibility that the euro will break up and they will get repaid in devalued pesetas and liras.

The central banker’s statement that dealing with convertibility risk is part of the ECB’s mandate is therefore highly significant. He rammed home his message, saying: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

Markets responded swiftly. Spain’s borrowing costs fell to 6.8 percent, while Italy’s dropped just below six percent. But these yields have to drop below five percent – and stay there – before confidence in the euro project will return. What’s more, it’s unclear what Draghi will actually do.

One possibility, immediately latched onto by investors, is that the ECB will relaunch its programme of buying government bonds in the market. But such an operation would be tough to calibrate. If the ECB was prepared to do whatever it took to drive yields below a certain level, the pressure would certainly be off Spain and Italy. But politicians might then stop reforming their economies. When the ECB bought Italian bonds last summer, that’s precisely what happened.

The euro crisis is to a great extent a confidence crisis. Sure, there are big underlying problems such as excessive debt and lack of competitiveness in the peripheral economies. But these can be addressed and, to some extent, this is happening already. Meanwhile, a quick fix for the confidence crisis is needed.

The harsh medicine of reform is required but is undermining confidence on multiple levels. Businesses, bankers, ordinary citizens and politicians are losing faith in both the immediate economic future and the whole single-currency project. That is creating interconnected vicious spirals.

The twin epicentres of the crisis are Spain and Italy. The boost they received from last month’s euro zone summit has been more than wiped out. Spanish 10-year bond yields equalled their euro-era record of 7.3 percent on July 20; Italy’s had also rebounded to a slightly less terrifying but still worrying 6.2 percent.

A year ago Rupert Murdoch was probably the most powerful unelected person operating in Britain. The media baron could seemingly choose prime ministers. Then came the phone hacking and police bribery scandal, after which politicians sought to distance themselves from him.

The title of most powerful unelected Briton now probably belongs to Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. Witness the way he dispatched Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond two weeks ago in connection with the Libor rate-rigging scandal. Whoever succeeds King next year will have even greater powers. After all, responsibility for financial stability and banking supervision is about to be added to the central bank’s main task of running monetary policy. It’s vital for democracy that this authority is exercised effectively, transparently and fairly.

Who will be King’s successor when he steps down? And how will the new governor be made accountable? These questions have been brought into sharp relief by the Libor scandal. The front runner for King’s job has seen his chances knocked, while doubts have been raised about the central bank’s effectiveness and transparency.

Was Bob Diamond really irreplaceable? Barclays’ board operated for 15 years on the assumption that he was. As a result, the UK bank’s chief executive became more powerful – and ever harder to replace. Now that he has been kicked out in the wake of the Libor rate-rigging scandal, Barclays is struggling to find new leadership.

This is an object lesson for all companies, not just banks. Think of two other UK-listed groups which have recently provoked shareholder anger over their bosses’ high pay packages: WPP, the advertising giant; and miner Xstrata. In both cases, the boards paid their chief executives so much because they thought they were indispensable.

Barclays is now in a mess. Not only has Diamond quit, his chairman, Marcus Agius, has also said he will resign. Both men ultimately had to go: Diamond had come to epitomise the worst of the City of London’s greed, while Agius seemed unable to hold his chief executive in check. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. “Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.”

This extremely short story by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso sums up the state of play on the euro crisis. Last week’s summit took important steps to stop the immediate panic. But the big economies of Italy and Spain are shrinking and there is no agreed long-term vision for the zone. In other words, the crisis is still there.

The summit’s decisions are not to be sniffed at. The agreement that the euro zone’s bailout fund should, in time, be able to recapitalise banks directly rather than via national governments will help break the so-called doom loop binding troubled lenders and troubled governments. That is a shot in the arm for both Spain and Ireland. Meanwhile, unleashing the bailout fund to stabilise sovereign bond markets could stop Rome’s and Madrid’s bond yields rising to unsustainable levels.