Crisis in the Eurozone. Costas Lapavitsas
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deleveraging. By late 2008 banks were already reducing their lending, including to the periphery. Banks also stopped buying long-term securities preferring to hold short-term instruments – backed by the ECB – with a view to improving liquidity. The result was credit shortage and accelerated recession across the eurozone, including the periphery.
These were the conditions under which states – both core and periphery of the eurozone but also the UK and other states – began to seek additional loanable funds in financial markets. A major cause of rising state borrowing was the decline of public revenue as recession lowered the tax intake. State expenditure also rose in several countries after 2007 as the rescuing of banks proved expensive, and to a lesser extent as states attempted to support aggregate demand. Accelerated public borrowing in 2009 was induced by the crisis, and hence by the earlier speculations of the financial system. In this respect, the Greek state was typical of several others, including the USA and the UK.
In the conditions of financial markets in 2009, with the banks reluctant to lend, the rising supply of state paper put upward pressure on yields. Speculators found this environment conducive to their activities. In the past, similar pressures in financial markets would have led to speculative attacks on currencies and collapsing exchange rates for the heavy borrowers. But this was obviously impossible within the eurozone, and hence speculative pressures appeared as falling prices of sovereign debt.
Speculators focused on Greek public debt on account of the country’s large and entrenched current account deficit as well as because of the small size of the market in Greek public bonds. Credibility was also lost by the Greek government because of systematic fiddling of national statistics to reduce the size of budget deficits. But the broader significance of the Greek crisis was not due to the inherent importance of the country. Rather, Greece represented potentially the start of speculative attacks on other peripheral countries – and even on countries beyond the eurozone, such as the UK – that faced expanding public debt.
The Greek crisis, therefore, is symptomatic of a wider malaise. It is notable that the institutions of the eurozone, above all the central bank, have performed badly in this context. For the ECB private banks were obviously ‘too big to fail’ in 2007–9, meriting extraordinary provision of liquidity. But there was no similar sensitivity toward peripheral countries that found themselves in dire straits. It made little difference that the problems of public debt were largely caused by the crisis as well as by the very actions of the ECB in providing banks with liquidity.
To be sure the ECB has been hamstrung by its statutes which prevent it from directly acquiring public debt. But this is yet more evidence of the ill-conceived and biased nature of European Monetary Union. A well-functioning central bank would not have simply sat and watched while speculators played destabilising games in financial markets. At the very least, it would have deployed some of its ingenuity to constrain speculation, and the ECB has demonstrated considerably ingenuity in generously supplying private banks with liquidity in 2007–9. Not least, a well-functioning central bank would not have decided what types of paper to accept as collateral on the basis of ratings provided by the discredited private organisations that were instrumental to the bubble of 2001–7.
Policy options for peripheral countries
The crisis is so severe that there are neither soft options, nor easy compromises for peripheral countries. The choices are stark, similar to those of developing countries confronted with repeated crises during the last three decades.
The first alternative is to adopt austerity by cutting wages, reducing public spending and raising taxes, in the hope of reducing public borrowing requirements. Austerity would probably have to be accompanied by bridging loans, or guarantees by core countries to bring down commercial borrowing rates. It is likely that there would also be ‘structural reform’, including further labour market flexibility, tougher pension conditions, privatisation of remaining public enterprises, privatisation of education, and so on. The aim of such liberalisation would presumably be to raise the productivity of labour, thus improving competitiveness.
This is the preferred alternative of ruling elites across peripheral and core countries, since it shifts the burden of adjustment onto working people. But there are several imponderables. The first is the opposition of workers to austerity, leading to political unrest. Further, the eurozone lacks established mechanisms both to provide bridging loans and to enforce austerity on peripheral members. There is also strong political opposition within core countries to rescuing others within the eurozone. On the other hand, the option of forcing a peripheral country to seek recourse to the IMF would be damaging for the eurozone as a whole.4
Yet, despite legal constraints, it is not beyond the EU to find ways of advancing bridging loans while at the same time enforcing austerity through political pressure. The real problem with this option is not the institutional machinery of the eurozone. It is, rather, that the policy is likely to lead to aggravated recession in peripheral countries making it even more difficult to meet public borrowing targets. Poverty, inequality and social division will increase substantially. Even worse, it is unlikely that there will be long-term increases in productivity through a strategy of liberalisation. Productivity increases require investment and new technologies, neither of which will be provided spontaneously by liberalised markets.
Peripheral countries would probably find themselves lodged in an unequal competitive struggle against Germany, whose workers would continue to be severely squeezed. Attempting to remain within the eurozone by adopting austerity and liberalisation would lead to sustained falls in real wages in the vain hope of reversing current account deficits against Germany. The eurozone as a whole, meanwhile, would continue to be faced with a weaker world economy due to the crisis of 2007–9. It is a grim prospect for working people in the periphery, and far from a bed of roses for German workers.
The second alternative is to reform the eurozone. There is almost universal agreement that unitary monetary policy and fragmented fiscal policy have been a dysfunctional mix. There is also widespread criticism of the ECB for the way it has provided abundant liquidity to banks, while keeping aloof of borrowing states, even to the extent of ignoring speculative attacks. A range of reforms that would not challenge the fundamentals of the Maastricht Treaty, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the Lisbon agenda might well be possible. The aim would be to produce smoother interaction of monetary and fiscal forces, while maintaining the underlying conservatism of the eurozone.
There is very little in such reforms that would be attractive to working people, or that could indeed deal with the structural imbalances within the eurozone. Hence there have been calls for more radical reforms, including abolition of the Stability and Growth Pact and altering the statutes of the ECB to allow it regularly to lend to member states. The aim of such reform would be to retain monetary union, while creating a ‘good euro’ that would be beneficial to working people. The ‘good euro’ strategy would involve significantly expanding the European budget to deliver fiscal transfers from rich to poor countries. There would be an active European investment strategy to support new areas of economic activity. There would also be a minimum wage policy, reducing differentials in competitiveness, and lowering inequality across the eurozone.
The ‘good euro’ strategy, appealing as it sounds, would face two major problems. The first is that the eurozone lacks either a unitary or a federal state, and there is no prospect of acquiring one in the near future, certainly not with the required progressive disposition. The current machinery of the eurozone is entirely unsuited to this task. The strategy would face a continuous conflict between, on the one hand, its ambitious pan-European aims and, on the other, the absence of state mechanisms that could begin to turn these aims into reality.
At a deeper level, the ‘good euro’ strategy would clash with the putative role of the euro as world money. If fiscal discipline was relaxed among member states, there would be a risk that the value of the euro would collapse in international markets. Were that to happen, at the very least, the international operations of European banks would become extremely difficult. The international role of the euro, which has been vital to the project from the beginning, would come under heavy pressure. It is not clear, then, that the ‘good euro’ strategy would be compatible with monetary union. In this light, a ‘good euro’ might end up as ‘no euro’. Those who advocate this