Hugo Dixon

When euro zone governments agreed last year to give the European Central Bank the power to supervise its banks, that looked like another victory for its president Mario Draghi. It is more like a poisoned chalice.

The ECB will certainly get a chunk of extra power. But it will also be blamed when banks run into trouble, as they inevitably will. Draghi himself is experiencing this first hand following the scandal at Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), which has had to be rescued by the Italian state. He has been lambasted for failing to supervise the country’s third largest bank properly when he ran the Bank of Italy – although the criticism seems overdone and has often been fuelled by his political opponents back in Rome.

The potential reputational risks for the ECB from banking snarl-ups on its watch are probably even bigger than they are for national central banks. This is because it doesn’t yet have the full set of tools to do the job properly. Moreover, a huge amount is at stake since the ECB is the euro zone’s most credible institution. If its reputation gets tarnished because of perceived supervisory failures, that could rub off on its ability to conduct monetary policy or manage crises effectively.

The Bank of Italy rejects the notion that it was guilty of supervisory lapses with MPS. It pointed out in a seven-page document last week the host of regulatory actions it had taken since it first became worried about the bank in the second half of 2009.

The bottom line is that MPS did not blow up – something which could have triggered a new euro panic. The Bank of Italy deserves some credit for avoiding such a calamity. It did eventually force the Sienese bank to strengthen its weak liquidity and capital buffers as well as push for the management to quit.

The Monte dei Paschi di Siena saga is not just an Italian affair. Revelations that complex financial transactions used by the country’s third largest bank had the effect of hiding losses are causing a political storm in Italy.

With a general election only weeks away, Silvio Berlusconi looks like being the main winner from the political spat. The former prime minister’s camp has attacked Pierluigi Bersani’s Democratic Party, which is leading in the opinion polls, for being close to Monte dei Paschi (MPS). It has also criticised Mario Monti, the current prime minister, who agreed to increase MPS’s bailout to 3.9 billion euros.

The scandal won’t be enough to get Berlusconi back as prime minister. But it could prevent a Bersani-Monti coalition from running the country with a solid majority in both houses of parliament. If so, fears about Italian political risk could return to haunt the markets.

The UK faces half a decade of limbo-land. David Cameron’s promise of an in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union by the end-2017— provided he wins the next election – means an extremely long period of uncertainty for business. That will be bad for investment. It also heightens the risk of an eventual “Brexit” – a British exit from Europe – which would be even worse for the economy.

An in/out referendum is neither desirable nor necessary. Of course, if the UK was planning to hand further powers to Brussels, it would be a good idea to get the people’s consent. But no leading British politician of either left or right is contemplating such a transfer of sovereignty. Cameron has been driven to promise such a referendum because of the pressure from eurosceptics within his Conservative party as well as fears that UKIP, a fringe political entity which wants Britain to leave the EU, could take votes away from the Tories in the 2015 election.

If Cameron had been promising a quick referendum, the uncertainty for business would be manageable. But he has decided that he first wants to see if he can negotiate a “new settlement” based on a competitive, flexible and fair single market. That’s why the referendum could be nearly five years away.

When is it OK to avoid tax? And when should taxpayers refrain from actions that will cut their bills, even if their actions are perfectly legal? 

As the European economy remains sluggish, the public mood has turned against those who seem to be paying less than their fair share of tax. Last week, for example, saw Goldman Sachs abandon an idea to switch UK bonus dates to cut its employees’ tax bills and an escalation in the row about Greek tax cheating. 

The cases are, of course, very different. In Greece, tax evasion – which is against the law – is rife. The International Monetary Fund’s latest review on the country, published on Friday, says that the “losses to the state from tax evasion are enormous”. It estimates the black economy is 25 percent of GDP.

Mario Draghi didn’t quite coin a new phrase last week. But the European Central Bank president certainly popularised the expression “positive contagion”. After years in which the euro zone has been suffering from plain old contagion – which doesn’t even need the qualifier “negative” – Draghi now thinks a positive dynamic is in play. 

The term “contagion” has tended to be used in financial markets to refer to the way that problems in one country (such as Greece) can so unnerve investors that they cause difficulties in other countries (for example, Portugal, Spain and Italy). Draghi, though, seems to be using the word more broadly to cover the whole panoply of vicious cycles that had been sucking the euro zone into a whirlpool. 

The ECB president is right that the vicious cycle in financial markets has given way to a virtuous one. The best measure of this is how peripheral bond yields have dropped since he said last July that the ECB would do whatever it took to preserve the euro – “and believe me, it will be enough”. Spanish 10-year yields have fallen from 7.4 percent to 4.9 percent, while Italian ones are down from 6.4 percent to 4.1 percent. The Stoxx 50 equity index, meanwhile, is up 12 percent. 

David Cameron is planning a keynote speech on Britain’s relationship with the EU later this month. Here is what the UK prime minister should say.
 
 The euro crisis is forcing euro zone nations to rethink how they wish to run their currency union. It is also forcing European Union countries that don’t use the single currency, such as Britain, to rethink their relationship with Europe.

We have three main options: quit the EU; move to the edge as the euro zone pushes towards closer union; and seek to stay at the heart of Europe and influence its development in a way that promotes our interests.

There are members of my own Conservative party who would like Britain to quit. There are others who would like us to move to the periphery. But I am determined to make sure that we stay at the centre.

One doesn’t have to be a Mayan to believe that tomorrow represents a numerological end of an era. Apocalyptic visions stem from reading the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar. But even using the widely used Gregorian Calendar, there’s something special about today: 20.12.2012.

It’s one of those dates where digits create interesting patterns. It also comes at the end of 13 years which have been astonishingly fertile for such numerologically “magic” dates. The rest of the century is going to be a desert by comparison.

Dates can be aesthetically attractive because they repeat a number several times (eg last week’s 12.12.12) or contain a string of successive numbers (eg last month’s 10.11.12) or because they are palindromes (eg 01.1.10), where you get the same date if you run the numbers backwards.

Who is Europe’s most powerful man? If one phrased the question as who is Europe’s most powerful person, the answer might well be Angela Merkel. But the deliberate use of the masculine excludes Germany’s chancellor, leaving the field open to Mario Draghi.

This answer can, of course, be disputed. How can one compare power in economics with power in, say, religion? Is it possible to rank the technocratic European Central Bank boss on the same scale, for example, as the Pope?

The best place to start is with an attempt to understand what power is. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, said it was the production of intended effects. By contrast, Steven Lukes, one of the top contemporary power theorists, said in an interview last week that power is the capacity to make a difference in a manner that is significant.

Conventional wisdom has it that the euro zone needs a banking union to solve its crisis. This is wrong. Not only are there alternatives to an integrated regulatory structure for the zone’s 6,000 banks; centralisation will undermine national sovereignty.

“Create a banking union” became a rallying cry earlier in the year when it looked like the euro was going to explode. Advocates of a single banking authority said it would break the “doom loop” which tied troubled banks to troubled governments. European Union governments will this week continue their attempt to agree on a single supervisor, the first stage of a banking union.

There are two parts to the doom loop: when banks go bust, their governments bail them out, adding to their own debts; and when governments become over-indebted, the nation’s banks are usually big lenders, so the banks get sucked into the sovereign debt vortex.

The last Italian prime minister whose surname began with a “B” – Silvio Berlusconi – was a disaster. The country’s next leader’s name is also likely to start with a “B”.

Investors want Mario Monti, the technocrat who took over from Berlusconi last year, to stay as prime minister after the election, which will probably be in March. But they are more likely to get Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the left-wing Democratic Party (PD). While there are risks, such an outcome may not be as bad as it looks – not least because Bersani has promised to continue with Monti’s policies and was one of the few reformers when Romano Prodi was prime minister in the last decade.

Trade union-backed Bersani will be the standard-bearer for the left in the coming elections after winning a decisive primary at the weekend against Matteo Renzi, the modernising mayor of Florence. His first comments were promising: he said the PD would have to tell Italians the “truth, not fairy-tales” about the country’s grave economic situation.