Sand in the gears

Today's Wall Street Journal has a beautifully informative editorial, "Employment, Italian Style." Snippets:

Once you hire employee 11, you must submit an annual self-assessment to the national authorities outlining every possible health and safety hazard to which your employees might be subject. These include stress that is work-related or caused by age, gender and racial differences. You must also note all precautionary and individual measures to prevent risks, procedures to carry them out, the names of employees in charge of safety, as well as the physician whose presence is required for the assessment.

Bloomberg TV link

I did a Bloomberg TV interview this morning on Euro debt crisis. I can't seem to insert the video here, so you'll have to follow the link if you're curious.

Update: I figured out how to embed bloomberg vidoes!

A glimmer of hope?

Weekend Update.

On Monday the Greeks decide whether to vote for the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus to solve their fiscal problems. What is Europe planning to do next?

Sunday's New York Times had an unusually cogent article on European events over the weekend, reporting on events with thoughtful analysis:

Euro explosion

The European bank run is on, and with it the slow-motion train wreck  will move to high speed.

The Wall Street Journal reports €600 to 900 million  a day are flowing out of Greek banks, and  the outflow may rise above a billion euros per day. At the end of April there were only €166 Billion deposits to flow. Count the days.  And Greeks -- those who can't move money abroad or move themselves abroad -- are "hiding money in jars, under the bed, even burying it in the mountains."

In related news, I read last week say that payments are simply stopping in Greece. If there's a chance to pay in Drachma next month, why pay in euros now? Shipments are stopping -- if your invoice might get paid in drachma, no point in sending goods today. This is simple implosion.  Spain has already lost about € 100 billion of bank deposits and Italy is losing them quickly.

Economist's Haiku for Europe

A lovely letter to the Economist says it all.

Sir: 

Leaving the euro zone is no option for Greece (“Fiddling while Athens burns”, May 19th). The new drachma would be valueless, as there would be no demand for it. A country that finds it difficult to run its fiscal affairs cannot manage a national currency. The restored drachma would stay in circulation only if the Greeks were denied access to foreign exchange, preventing the informal use of the euro. That would require draconian exchange controls of the type put in place by Germany after the first world war, which ensured the circulation of the depreciating mark during a period of hyperinflation.

What can Europe do for Greece? It can provide it with a stable monetary unit: the euro. What can Europe not do for Greece? Well, it cannot give it a sound fiscal system. The Greeks have to achieve that themselves if they wish to remain a sovereign country.

Ernst Juerg Weber
Associate professor of economics
University of Western Australia
Perth  

Good news from Europe

This morning's Wall Street Journal article on renewed bank competition in Europe is one little bright spot. Apparently, large healthy international banks are competing for deposits in Greece, Spain and Italy.

Simon Johnson on the Euro

Simon Johnson has a good blog post on the end of the euro. Digging in, the run is on, the end is near, and the chaos will be worse than you thought.T he ECB has also monetized a lot more than you thought.

Still, I do not understand why even Simon cannot imagine the idea of sovereign default while staying in -- and firmly committing to stay in -- the currency union. The picture Simon paints of the euro breakup is a catastrophe. So why not even talk about sovereign default (restructuring) without euro breakup?

It strikes me as really the only way out, and the longer Europe waits, the harder it will be. 

Leaving the Euro again

Yesterday's coverage of the latest European summit seems designed to reinforce my view of basic confusion expressed yesterday pretty clearly.

For example, the Wall Street Journal's "Europe Girds for a Greek Exit" reports that the talk was all about eurobonds, stimulus, or bailout as a way to avoid Greek exit from the Eurozone, repeating the senseless mantra that sovereign default cannot occur in a currency union.

"We want Greece to remain in the euro zone," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters after nearly eight hours of talks. "But the precondition is that Greece upholds the commitments it has made."

I salute Ms. Merkel for not giving in to the camp that wants endless wasted spending disguised as stimulus, to be followed by inflation. But really, why would Greece not "upholding its commitments" mean it has to "leave the eurozone?" Why is it impossible to turn off the bailout spigot, and let Greece default and stop running deficits, while it stays in the euro?

Leaving the Euro

I find all the reporting of the Greek (and following Spanish, Italian, etc.) debt crisis unbelievably frustrating.

Why does everyone equate Greece defaulting on its debt with Greece leaving or being kicked out of the euro? The two steps are completely separate. If Illinois defaults on its bonds, it does not have to leave the dollar zone -- and it would be an obvious disaster for it to do so. 

It is precisely the doublespeak confusion of sovereign default with breaking up a currency union which is causing a lot of the run.

Austerity, Stimulus, or Growth Now?

(This is also a Bloomberg "Business class" column, with minor improvements.)

Austerity isn't working in Europe. Greece is collapsing, Italy and Spain’s output is declining, and even Germany and the U.K. are slowing down. In addition to its direct economic costs, these “austerity” programs aren't even swiftly closing budget gaps. As incomes decline, tax revenue drops, and it is harder to cut spending. A downward spiral looms.

These events have important lessons for the U.S. Our government cannot forever borrow and spend 10 percent of gross domestic product each year, with an impending entitlements fiasco to boot. Sooner or later, we will have to fix our finances, too.  Europe's experience is a warning that austerity -- a program of sharp budget cuts and (even) higher tax rates, but largely putting off “structural reforms” for a sunnier day -- is a dangerous path.

Why is austerity causing such economic difficulty? What else should we do?

To London

I'll be at the Booth campus in London next Monday March 12 as part of a panel discussion with Francesco Garzzarelli and Charles Goodhart on "Financial Stability and the Macroeconomy," sponsored by the Becker-Friedman Institute. More information on the event here. Presuming, of course, that the fact that Greece has finally defaulted doesn't mean the end of the world, as so many predicted. Ex-students, colleagues, and blog readers, if you come to the event, stop and say hi. 

Hope for Europe

A provocative Wall Street Journal OpEd by Donald Luskin and Lorcan Kelly gives me hope for Europe.

No, I'm not talking about Greece, and the latest bailout deal. That's more of the usual charade. But in the end Greece is small. Europe can bail Greece out if they feel like it; or let it default.Or let it rot, which seems where they are headed. 

Italy and Spain are where the real issue lies. Italy and Spain are too big to bail.

Sargent on debt and defaults

Tom Sargent's Wall Street Journal oped is well worth reading closely. It's a very short summary of his Nobel prize speech

As readers of this blog will probably know, I think Europe should stop bailing out bondholders of Greek and other debt. (See the Euro collection and Euro tags to the right.)

"What about Alexander Hamilton?" has always been a nagging doubt.

Should Greece Devalue?

Two weeks ago I wrote the following in a little Bloomberg column about the Euro 

Defenders [of devaluation] think that devaluing would fool workers into a bout of “competitiveness,” as if people wouldn’t realize they were being paid in Monopoly money. If devaluing the currency made countries competitive, Zimbabwe would be the richest country on Earth. No Chicago voter would want the governor of Illinois to be able to devalue his way out of his state’s budget and economic troubles. Why do economists think Greek politicians are so much wiser? 

This paragraph set off a little kerfuffle in the Cochrane-is-a-moron section of the blogosphere. I won't respond in detail, because I presume you're more interested in economics than what anyone thinks of anyone else's intelligence.

But the paragraph was mighty distilled, and the evident interest in the question suggests a little fuller examination of whether devaluation is a good idea or not for a country like Greece, and trying to understand why people come to such different views.

I think I can sum it up this way: Devaluation is like a cigarette. The Keynesian camp basically says, "Boy, a cigarette would perk me up right now."' Modern macroeconomists (I'm looking for a good name -- "Dynamic?" "Intertemporal?" "Equilibrium?" Really everybody else, including new-Keynesians) basically say "Maybe, but smoking is a really bad lifestyle decision." We think of policies as rules, not decisions.

The following discussion resembles that between a teenager and the parent who found a pack of cigarettes. It sounds like facts are at issue -- just how good does it really feel, just how long does it take to get addicted, how bad are the long-run effects -- but there is a deeper difference in perspective, which is why the arguments are a lot more heated than the simple facts suggest. 

All the world's troubles in 10 minutes

Last month, John Taylor asked me to give some  lunch-time remarks at a conference on "Restoring Economic Growth" at the Hoover institution. "Oh," said John, "Just talk about what's going on in Europe and how to fix the U.S. economy. Keep it to about 10 minutes." As any economist knows, it's easy to talk for an hour and nearly impossible to talk for 10 minutes. Then I looked at my fellow panelists, who turned out to be George Schultz and Alan Greenspan. Heady company, I feel like a kid again.

The euro crisis,some emerging thoughts on how to create a run-free financial system, a review of why everything on the current policy agenda does not have a prayer of working, and a note of cation to economists'  collective habit of jumping from bright idea to policy. (There is a permanent version on my webpage)

In case you’re not reading the papers, we’re in financial crisis 3.0, a run on European banks stemming from their sovereign debt losses.

This is not high finance. European banks have been failing on sovereign debt since Edward III stiffed the Perruzzi in 1353. This is not a “multiple equilibrium,” a run of self-confirming expectations. People are simply getting out of the way of sovereign default, since it’s pretty clear that governments are at the end of the bailout rope.

A continent of bad ideas

Why does noone see that Europe can have a nice currency union without fiscal union? I tried to put together this and some of the other bad ideas that I think are clouding the euro crisis debate in this post on the IGM/Bloomberg "business class" blog.

By artful application of bad ideas, Europe has taken a plain-vanilla sovereign restructuring and turned it into a banking crisis, a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, and now a political crisis..

Read more here