Hugo Dixon

The art of politics is about squaring circles. In the euro crisis, this means pushing ahead with painful but necessary reforms while hanging onto power.

In Spain, where I spent part of last week, these circles are getting harder to square. Mariano Rajoy isn’t at any immediate risk of losing power. His 10-month old government has also taken important steps to reform the economy – cleaning up banks, liberalising the labour market and reining in government spending.

But the recession is deepening, the prime minister is a poor communicator and his political capital has plummeted. Madrid will also find it harder than thought to access help from its euro zone partners.

GDP will shrink by 1.5 percent this year and another 1.8 percent next year, according to Funcas, the Spanish savings bank association. That is a result of both a severe fiscal squeeze and private-sector deleveraging. An austerity spiral is in operation. As the International Monetary Fund argued last week, so-called fiscal multipliers across the world are bigger than forecasters had previously estimated.

The severity of the downturn means the government seems destined to miss its deficit reduction targets again. This year, Madrid economists think it will end up with a deficit of around 7 percent of gross domestic product, against a revised target of 6.3 percent. Next year, the deficit could be in the 5-6 percent range rather than the new, 4.5 percent target.

The credit crisis burst into the open five years ago. The euro crisis has been rumbling for over two years. The term “crisis” isn’t just on everybody’s lips in finance. Wherever one turns – politics, business, medicine, ecology, psychology, in fact virtually every field of human activity – people talk about crises. But what are they, how do they develop and what can people do to change their course?

The first thing to say is that a crisis is not just a bad situation. When the word is used that way, it is devalued. The etymology is from the ancient Greek: krisis, or judgment. The Greek Orthodox Church uses the term when it talks about the Final Judgment – when sinners go to hell but the virtuous end up in heaven. The Chinese have a similar concept: the characters for crisis represent danger and opportunity.

A crisis is a point when people have to make rapid choices under extreme pressure, normally after something unhealthy has been exposed in a system. To use two other Greek words, one path can lead to chaos; another to catharsis or purification.

Solving the euro crisis is a race against time. Can peripheral economies reform before the people buckle under the pressure of austerity and pull the rug from their politicians? After two months of optimism triggered by the European Central Bank’s plans to buy government bonds, investors got a touch of jitters last week.

The best current fear gauge is the Spanish 10-year government bond yield. After peaking at 7.64 percent in late July, it fell to 5.65 percent in early September. It then poked its head above 6 percent in the middle of last week because there were large demonstrations against austerity; because Mariano Rajoy’s government was dragging its heels over asking for help from the ECB; and because the prime minister of Catalonia, one of Spain’s largest and richest regions, said he would call a referendum on independence.

But by the end of the week, the yield was just below 6 percent again. That’s mainly because Rajoy came up with a new budget which contains further doses of austerity. The move prepares the way for Madrid to ask for the ECB to buy its bonds and so drive down its borrowing costs.

Shortly after last year’s bonus round I was having lunch with the boss of an investment firm. He told me how he heard a handful of staff had been grumbling about what, by most people’s standards, were still extraordinary pay packages. He called them into his office and told them that, since they were unhappy, they should “Just Go”.

Most of them packed their things and left the firm. But the next day one came back and said he had been misunderstood. My interlocutor said he hadn’t misunderstood him at all. The employee clearly felt he was worth more than he was paid. He should take his luck and go elsewhere as he clearly didn’t have his heart in his current job. He should “Just Go”. And he duly did.

These words “Just Go” stuck in my mind because financial services bosses use them far too rarely. My lunch companion was perhaps an exception because his family is a big shareholder in his firm. Most other bosses are stewards for shareholders – and normally not terribly good stewards at that.

European integration tends to advance first with squabbling then with fudge. Every country has its national interest to defend. Some politicians appreciate the need to create a strong bloc that can compete effectively with the United States, China and other powers. But that imperative typically plays second fiddle to more parochial concerns with the result that time is lost and suboptimal solutions are chosen.

Amidst the europhoria unleashed by the European Central Bank’s bond-buying plan, it is easy to miss the immense challenges posed by two complex dossiers that have just landed on leaders’ desks: the proposed EADS/BAE merger; and a planned single banking supervisor.

Look first at the plan to create a defence and aerospace giant to rival America’s Boeing. This has been under discussion since at least 1997 when the UK’s Tony Blair, France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Helmut Kohl called on the industry to unify in the face of U.S. competition. London, Paris and Berlin are the key players in this game because they have the major assets.

The European Central Bank’s bond-buying scheme has bought Spain and Italy time to stabilise their finances. But if they drag their heels, the market will sniff them out. It will then be almost impossible to come up with another scheme to rescue the euro zone’s two large problem children and, with them, the single currency.

Mario Draghi’s promise in late July to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro has already had a dramatic impact on Madrid’s and Rome’s borrowing costs. Ten-year bond yields, which peaked at 7.6 percent and 6.6 percent respectively a few days before the ECB president made his first comments, had collapsed to 5.7 percent and 5.1 percent on Sept. 7.

Most of the decline came before Draghi spelt out last Thursday the details of how the plan will work. What makes the scheme powerful is that the ECB has not set any cap to the amount of sovereign bonds it will buy in the market. The central bank’s financial firepower is theoretically unlimited, whereas the euro zone governments’ own bailout funds do not have enough money to rescue both Spain and Italy.

Five years after the credit crunch erupted in August 2007, banking still looks like an industry running amok. Scandals keep tumbling out of the closet: an alleged ring of banks including Barclays that attempted to rig interest rates; money laundering by HSBC; insider tips passed by Nomura to its clients; and terrible risk management by JPMorgan, where traders have so far lost $5.8 billion.

True, some of these scandals date from the rip-roaring days of the bubble. And the industry is now being reformed. But the public is growing impatient with the slow pace of change, especially as recession bites in large parts of the industrialised world. Some observers therefore want to clear out the entire old guard. The idea is that only new teams can clean the cesspit. There are also increasing calls to break up banks into supposedly low-risk retail banks and casino-style investment banks. Even Sandy Weill, the man who created Citigroup, now advocates splitting up financial conglomerates.

Something must be done. The financial industry has made a mockery of capitalism. Despite endless bailouts, bankers are still paid far too much. Profits are privatised, while losses get socialised.

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.”

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.