Must-Read: Simon Wren-Lewis: Brexit and Democracy

Must-Read: Some nice backup from the wise Simon Wren-Lewis. The frame of eurocrats vs. democrats is much, much, much too simple to be more than misleading. We want democracy where democracy belongs, with technocracy where it is needed–always acknowledging that circumstances alter cases, mechanism design is complex, and that democracy’s key benefits are as a legitimacy machine and an anti rent-seeking machine, not as a wise leader or wise policy selection machine:

Simon Wren-Lewis: Brexit and Democracy: “Germany… believed a union-wide demonstration of austerity was required…

…I strongly disagree…have thought a lot about why it happened, but a lack of democracy is not high on my list of culprits…. Democracy was overridden in Greece so cruelly… not [as] the result of actions of unelected bureaucrats, but of elected finance ministers… because of pressure from their own electorates. This exercise in raw political power worked because the Greek people wanted to stay in the Euro. The ‘bad equilibrium’ Evans-Pritchard talks about happens in part because of democracy…. Union governments should not lend money directly to other union governments, precisely because governments are democratic and so find it hard to accept write-offs…

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: Brexit and the Globalization Trilemma

Must-Read: Time to fly my Neoliberal Freak Flag again!

I see this very differently than the extremely-sharp leader of the Seventh Social-Democratic International Dani Rodrik does. The Greek and the Spanish electorates vote loudly that they want to stay in the EU and even in the Eurozone at all costs, rather than threaten to exercise their exit option. The German electorate votes loudly that they want fiscal austerity at all costs. The policies are a result of those–democratic–decisions. The problem is not that Europe has too little democracy. The problem is that it has the wrong kind. Issues of fiscal stance are technocratic issues of economic governance in order to balance aggregate demand with potential output–to make the demand for safe, liquid, stores of value at full employment equal to the supply of such assets provided by governments with the exorbitant privilege of issuing reserve currencies and whatever other actors (if any) maintain credibility as safe borrowers. They are not properly what Angela Merkel and company have turned them into: things for the Germany electorate to vote on as it participates in what Dani Rodrik rightly calls a morality play about prudence and fecklessness. The monetary issue of whether to stay in the Eurozone or to pursue adjustment-through-depreciation is also a technocratic issue of economic governance in order to maximize speed and minimize the pain of structural adjustment. It is not properly what it has become: a thing for the Greek and Spanish electorates to vote on in a different morality play, one of whether the Mediterranean is or is not a full part of “Europe”.

Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes were good democrats. Neither would say that Europe’s economic problems now are the result of a deficiency of democracy. They would say that it is the fault of their IMF–that their IMF should have blown the whistle, declared a fundamental disequilibrium, and required one of:

  1. the shrinkage of the eurozone and the depreciation of the peso and the drachma back in 2010
  2. a wipeout of Greek and Spanish external debts, and a fiscal transfer program from the German government to Greece and Spain and to German banks if German authorities wished to avoid such a shrinking of the eurozone.

We did not have such an IMF back in 2010. But that we did not have such an IMF is not the result of a deficiency of democracy in Europe.

Or so I think: I could be wrong here.

Dani:

Dani Rodrik: Brexit and the Globalization Trilemma: “My personal hope is that Britain will choose to remain in the EU…

…without Britain the EU will likely become less democratic and more wrong-headed…. Exit poses significant economic risk to Britain…. But there are also serious questions posed about the nature of democracy and self-government in the EU as presently constituted. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (AEP) has now written a remarkable piece that… has little in common with the jingoistic and nativist tone of the Brexit campaign….

Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error…. We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal….

The trouble is that the EU is more of a technocracy than a democracy (AEP calls it a nomenklatura). An obvious alternative to Brexit would be to construct a full-fledged European democracy…. But as AEP says,

I do not think this is remotely possible, or would be desirable if it were, but it is not on offer anyway. Six years into the eurozone crisis there is no a flicker of fiscal union: no eurobonds, no Hamiltonian redemption fund, no pooling of debt, and no budget transfers. The banking union belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their heels….

Democracy is compatible with deep economic integration only if democracy is appropriately transnationalized as well…. The tension that arises between democracy and globalization is not straightforwardly a consequence of the fact that the latter constrains national sovereignty…. External constraints… can enhance rather than limit democracy. But there are also many circumstances under which external rules do not satisfy the conditions of democratic delegation…. It is clear that the EU rules needed to underpin a single European market have extended significantly beyond what can be supported by democratic legitimacy. Whether Britain’s opt out remains effective or not, the political trilemma is at work….

When I was asked to contribute to a special millennial issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives… I viewed the EU as the only part of the world economy that could successfully combine hyperglobalization (‘the single market’) with democracy through the creation of a European demos and polity…. I now have to admit that I was wrong in this view (or hope, perhaps). The manner in which Germany and Angela Merkel, in particular, reacted to the crisis in Greece and other indebted countries buried any chance of a democratic Europe…. She treated it as a morality play, pitting responsible northerners against lazy, profligate southerners, and to be dealt with by European technocrats accountable to no one serving up disastrous economic remedies…. My generation of Turks looked at the European Union as an example to emulate and a beacon of democracy. It saddens me greatly that it has now come to stand for a style of rule-making and governance so antithetical to democracy that even informed and reasonable observers like AEP view departure from it as the only option for repairing democracy.

Must-read: Wolfgang Munchau: “The Errors Behind Europe’s Many Crises”

Must-Read: Wolfgang Munchau: The Errors Behind Europe’s Many Crises: “The EU was wrong to construct a single currency without a proper banking union…

…wrong to create a passport-free travel zone without a common border police force and immigration policy. [And] I would add EU enlargement… the haste with which it was pursued. The cardinal mistake of our time was the decision to muddle through the eurozone crisis. Europe’s political leadership failed to generate the public support for what was needed: creating a political and economic union. Instead, the European Council did the minimum necessary…. There are four channels through which that policy contributed to the broader instability….

First… the EU has the capacity only to deal with one big crisis at a time…. Second… the conflation, real or imaginary, of two more crises. The Greek economy continues to contract… refugees have been trapped in Greece… since Macedonia closed the border…. There are the fake connections. Poland has used last week’s Brussels bombings as a pretext for questioning a commitment to accept 7,000 refugees… an interaction between the terrorist attacks and the prospect of British exit…. Third… the output of several eurozone countries has yet to return to pre-crisis levels. Security… was among the areas most affected by austerity…. The widening income gap between rich and poor — and north and south….

Fourth… a generalised loss of trust and political capital…. Populist parties on the left and the right are exploiting the union’s failures…. The combination of these four channels frustrates perfectly good ideas for further projects aimed at European integration–those that would benefit everybody, such as central agencies to co-ordinate the fight against terrorism and to deal with the influx of refugees. If the EU had not messed up the previous crises, people would look at a European immigration policy or an antiterrorism task force with a more open mind. But would you trust with your own security somebody who cannot even contain a medium-sized financial crisis?…

Economic history has shown… that efforts to muddle through financial crises never work…. For the EU it was a catastrophic policy error… an economic depression… destroyed public confidence in the EU and in the very idea of European integration.

Must-read: Draghi Day

Must-Read: FastFT: Draghi Day: “Rabobank describes the wild market moves that followed the European Central Bank rates decision and press conference as ‘carnage’…

…Whether that’s the ECB’s fault or the markets’ depends on who you speak to. Here’s a taste…. Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank sees signs of a strop in the market…. “Imagine you were expecting a trip during school holidays in a caravan around the country but instead you can take 2 weeks off school, fly first class to Disneyworld, have a go in the cockpit on the way, stay at a hotel made of chocolate, and then be able to go on every ride every day without queuing and have a private play session with the real Mickey Mouse as each day draws to a close. However if the market was the same kid its reaction yesterday was ‘do I not get unlimited spending money, and where are we going for our summer holidays then?’”…

Frederik Ducrozet at Pictet says ‘don’t fight the ECB’: “Such a policy package designed to boost bank lending and to improve QE implementation should lead to a significant easing of monetary and financial conditions. We are positive on the net impact….” Peter Schaffrik at RBC: “We do not share the negativity and could well imagine that the initiative to engage in risky assets will find more coverage going forward.”… And the economics team at BNP Paribas….

Now for the critics…. Lutz Karpowitz from Commerzbank says the central bank is ‘firing blanks’. He has issues with TLTRO 2, where the banks can effectively fund their lending at negative rates from the ECB…. Grant Lewis from Daiwa…. “The cost of finance is only one consideration for banks when deciding whether to lend or not – of at least equal importance is how the underlying economy, and hence the loan itself, is expected to perform. And on that measure it’s far from certain that today’s announcements will prove transformative to the economic outlook. Indeed, the ECB’s own forecast for 2017 sees growth of just 1.7% and inflation well below target at just 1.3%.” Rabobank’s Piotr Matys says ECB can forget about talking the euro down: “The damage to bearish bets against the euro, however, has been done. Those market participants, including yours truly, who went into the ECB meeting with a bearish view on the euro ended Thursday’s session calculating their losses instead of celebrating profits… after such a massive blow as on Thursday Draghi and other ECB officials may find it even more difficult, if they choose to do so, to talk the euro down.”

Citi‘s rates team says Draghi’s bazooka has ‘backfired’: “The bazooka backfired because the ECB is taking rate cuts off the table. We expect easing to be priced out. The measures do little to convince us that realised inflation will move higher any time soon.” That said, the same bank’s emerging-markets team says ‘the ECB delivered’: “There is now an incentive to move away from a policy fully centered on negative rates, to a toolset centered on further relief of financing in the banking sector. The markets should be cheering that, rather than reacting in a negative way.”

Must-read: Thomas Piketty: “A New Deal for Europe”

Must-Read: Thomas Piketty: A New Deal for Europe: “Only a genuine social and democratic refounding of the eurozone…

…designed to encourage growth and employment, arrayed around a small core of countries willing to lead by example and develop their own new political institutions, will be sufficient to counter the hateful nationalistic impulses that now threaten all Europe. Last summer, in the aftermath of the Greek fiasco, French President François Hollande had begun to revive on his own initiative the idea of a new parliament for the eurozone. Now France must present a specific proposal for such a parliament to its leading partners and reach a compromise. Otherwise the agenda is going to be monopolized by the countries that have opted for national isolationism—the United Kingdom and Poland among them…

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/a-new-deal-for-europe/

Must-read: Thorstein Beck et al.: “The Global Crisis Special Issue of Economic Policy”

Must-Read: Thorstein Beck et al.: The Global Crisis Special Issue of Economic Policy: “The Global Crisis was a watershed… for economies around the world… [and] for economics as a discipline…

…[This] special issue of Economic Policy… chart[s] the evolution of economists’ thinking on the causes of and cures for the Global and EZ Crises…. A large literature has explored commonalities across crisis countries, relating to macroeconomic imbalances, financial sector fragilities and policy variables. Applying this to the the euro periphery countries shows that their pre-crisis domestic vulnerabilities resemble those of earlier crises…. The extensive knowledge accumulated through these past banking crises… could have helped to both provide early warning signals and design recovery policies…. Evidence from the Great Depression shows that the decision by many countries to use fiscal stimulus policies was the right one….

International capital flows were an important part of the pre-crisis boom as much as their retrenchment was an important dimension of the crises…. Current account imbalances were financed mostly by intra-Eurozone capital inflows, which permitted external imbalances to grow over many years until the EZ Crisis hit…. Iceland has often been pointed to as having taken a very different approach to resolving the crisis, with the government cutting banks loose early on (with the result that the Icelandic government never lost its investment grade credit rating)…. The Greek sovereign debt crisis was at the core of the EZ Crisis…. One of the countries suffering from ‘contagion’ of the Greek debt restructuring was Cyprus….

Early on, observers noted the difference between the rapid and coordinated reaction of monetary policymakers to the crises – providing ample liquidity to unfreeze markets on the one hand – and the uncoordinated and rather inefficient reaction to bank failures on the other…. In the absence of bank resolution frameworks that allowed an effective and swift intervention into failing banks, most European countries (with the notable exception of Iceland) decided in 2008/9 for bailouts in the form of public recapitalisation…. Only large recapitalisations and infusions of common equity are associated with higher total regulatory capital ratios and sustained loan growth. These findings send the important message that if you bail out, you better do it well!…

The deadly embrace of sovereign and banks has been at the core of the EZ Crisis. This vicious cycle started in January 2009 when the nationalisation of Anglo-Irish by the Irish government showed the limitations of fiscal support for national banks…. The banking union is partly a response to this deadly embrace, although many observers would argue that it has not completely solved the problems….

The papers included in this special issue are just a sample… have… been an important source for the crisis consensus narrative…. Stay tuned for more…

Must-read: Barry Eichengreen and Charles Wyplosz: “How the Euro Crisis Was Successfully Resolved”

Must-Read: When people ask me if Barry Eichengreen is in, I sometimes say: No, he is in the 1920s. But he will be coming back via time machine and in his office this afternoon.

Now I learn that I was wrong: that he has been visiting Charles Wyplosz, whose home base is a parallel universe in which the Euro crisis was successfully resolved in 2010:

Barry Eichengreen and Charles Wyplosz: How the Euro Crisis Was Successfully Resolved: “When the newly elected Greek government of George Papandreou…

…revealed that its predecessor had doctored the books, financial markets reacted violently. This column discusses the steps implemented by policymakers following this episode, which were essential in resolving the Crisis. What is remarkable, in hindsight, is the combination of pragmatism and reasoning based on sound economic principles displayed by European leaders. Instead of finger pointing, they acknowledged that they were collectively responsible for the Crisis….

A miracle [was] made possible by a combination of steely resolve and economic common sense. In their historic 11 February 2010 statement, European heads of state and government acknowledged that the Greek government’s debt was unsustainable. Rather than ‘extend and pretend’, they faced reality…. Greece, European leaders insisted, had to restructure its debt as a condition of external assistance…. Trichet, rather than opposing debt restructuring, opposed the Emergency Liquidity Assistance, noting that the ECB’s mandate limited it to lending against good collateral. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, not happy that their banks had recklessly taken positions in Greek bonds, agreed that those banks should now bear the consequences. If banks failed, then the German and French governments would resolve them, bailing in stakeholders while preserving small depositors. Chancellor Merkel was adamant: asking Greek taxpayers to effectively bail out foreign banks was not only unjust but would aggravate moral hazard….

[The] IMF staff’s debt-sustainability analysis showed that Greece’s debt was already too high for [any] large loan to be paid back…. The managing director quickly concluded that the expedient path was to ally with European leaders and embrace the priority they attached to debt restructuring. At the landmark meeting of the IMF Executive Board on Sunday 10 May, European directors overrode the objections of the US Executive Director. The Board agreed on a programme assuming a 50% haircut on Greek public debt…. Fiscal consolidation was still required but for the moment would be limited to 5% of GDP, which was just possible for Greece’s new national union government to swallow. 

In return for this help, Greece was asked to prepare a programme of structural reforms, starting with product market reform… [which] lowered prices and increased households’ spending power, thereby not worsening the recession…. Programme documents gave the Greek authorities considerable leeway in the design of these measures and acknowledged the reality that they would take time to implement. The Greek government having been reassured of IMF support commenced negotiations with its creditors. A market-based debt exchange, in which investors were offered a menu of bonds with a present value of 50 cents on the euro, was completed by the end of the year…

Must-read: Athanasios Orphanages: “The Euro Area Crisis Five Years After the Original Sin”

Must-Read: Athanasios Orphanides: The Euro Area Crisis Five Years After the Original Sin: “Why did Europe fail to manage the euro area crisis?…

…Studying the EU/IMF program… imposed on Greece in May 2010–the original sin of the crisis–highlights both the nature of the problem and the difficulty in resolving it. The mismanagement can be traced to the flawed political structure of the euro area…. Undue influence of key euro area governments compromised the IMF’s role to the detriment of other member states and the euro area as a whole. Rather than help Greece, the May 2010 program was designed to protect specific political and financial interests in other member states. The ease with which the euro was exploited to shift losses from one member state to another and the absence of a corrective mechanism render the current framework unsustainable. In its current form, the euro poses a threat to the European project.

Must-Read: Frances Coppola: Eurodespair

Must-Read: Frances Coppola: Eurodespair: “I warned about ‘siren voices’ calling for tighter monetary policy…

…while the Eurozone economy is stuck in a toxic equilibrium of low growth, zero inflation and intractably high unemployment…

…the so-called “German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE)”…. There appears to be no justification for monetary tightening [even] in Germany. So why are a group of German “economic experts” calling not only for the ending of QE, but for its reversal? The clue is….

Low interest rates pose risks for financial stability and erode the business models of banks and insurers over the medium term. Relying only on macroprudential regulation cannot solve these problems.

Yes, as usual it is all about banks…. It is true that persistently low interest rates do reduce banks’ net interest margins. So do the flat yield curves created by QE. But against that should be set the benefit for businesses who can obtain credit both from banks and from markets at much lower interest rates…. The German establishment seems hellbent on steering the Eurozone ship on to the rocks. I despair, I really do.