The IMF as a transmission mechanism for academic knowledge

In my recent post on the ‘biggest policy mistake of the last decade’, I emphasised the irrelevance of the academic consensus on austerity if politicians did not want to listen. It was, inevitably, a picture painted with a broad brush.

I did not discuss, for example, an element that should form part of the transmission mechanism for academic knowledge but didn’t, and that is European central banks. As I have discussed here, these central banks are full of economists applying state of the art macroeconomic knowledge, so they should be a source for the current academic consensus. But these central banks are also very hierarchical, and if the senior staff want to give out a different message they can. In Europe that message was that austerity was necessary, and worse still that the lower bound for interest rates was no impediment to their ability to control the economy.

This was a serious mistake for two reasons. First, central bank leaders were going against the knowledge that their own economic models and analysis gave them. Second, their implication that the lower bound for interest rates didn't matter was not only very wrong but also encouraged politicians to continue with austerity.

But there was a perhaps surprising route by which the academic consensus did get through, and that was the International Monetary Fund. The IMF itself wavered on austerity. At first (before 2010) it encouraged coordinated fiscal stimulus. As the Eurozone crisis began to unfold it changed its mind, and advocated austerity. But this did not last that long. I remember visiting the IMF in September 2012, and being told of empirical work by their Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh that suggested multipliers might be much larger than the received Fund wisdom at the time. It was nice for me, because one of the talks I gave was why from a theoretical point of view multipliers might be large when interest rates were stuck at their lower bound.

This was not the only piece of Fund work that undermined the case for austerity. This analysis questioned the empirical case for expansionary austerity, as I discussed here. Economists at the IMF also showed clearly how unusual the behaviour of government spending after the Global Financial Crisis was compared to previous recoveries: austerity, far from being the norm, was an untried experiment. Indeed I think it is fair to say that if you wanted a source of empirical analysis on the impact of austerity, the IMF was your first port of call.

As Ben Clift discusses here, the IMF have also pioneered analysis of how inequality, and perhaps even large financial sectors, may be bad for growth, and much more that you would not have expected from the IMF of the last century. But he also points out something I emphasised in a post I wrote after my visit. The IMF is extremely heterogeneous. Alongside more modern views of the role of fiscal policy you will also find traditional fiscal hawks. The IMF also has its hierarchy with more political masters, but the difference is that at the IMF today there is no rigid control of what gets published by its economists.

For example, the IMF have an Independent Evaluations Office, which appears to be lead by economics rather than politics and which is often critical of IMF practice. I noted here, for example, a 2014 analysis of austerity, which criticised the support the IMF gave to austerity from 2010. The report essentially suggested that parts of the IMF had been panicked by the Eurozone crisis, which also presumably gave the fiscal hawks in the institution the upper hand. The report also explains why this panic was unwarranted given what we now understand about the Eurozone specific causes of that crisis, and this together with the Blanchard and Leigh analysis helped turn the tide against a belief in the virtues of austerity in the IMF.

All this IMF work was clearly very helpful to those economists like myself who were arguing against austerity at the time. It didn’t change policies in the UK and among Republicans in the US because those policies were ideologically based. I doubt it had much impact in Germany either. However it might be possible to argue it had some influence in softening the line taken by the EU Commission. If you look at the OECD’s estimate of underlying primary balances, 2013 was the last year of fiscal contraction in the EU as a whole.

A European Monetary Fund

Sapir and Schoenmaker at Bruegel have a discussion of what a European version of the IMF might look like and do. Here are my thoughts on the sovereign debt (not banking) side, which I am sure will be regarded once again as radical and will therefore be ignored.

I think some new Eurozone institution is necessary, but not for the reason that most people might think. The idea that the Eurozone might have a common fund that lends to Eurozone countries in fiscal difficulties with associated conditionality, as the IMF does, is a terrible idea. We know it is a terrible idea because of Greece.

Think of the following scenario. A country getting into difficulties is lent some money by the EMF. That sum increases as existing private investors take fright. For whatever reason the ‘recovery plan’ imposed by the EMF goes wrong, and it becomes clear to all neutral observers that the country needs to default on its debts, including those to the EMF. As the EMF loan is regarded as ‘our money’ by a good part of the EZ electorate, this default is resisted and punitive austerity is imposed on the country so that the EMF can get its money back. This does not happen to the IMF because the electorate in any individual country do not think of their loans as ‘their money’, but it is naive to believe that wouldn’t happen with an EMF. It is exactly what happened in Greece, and it is also why moves to a political union are far too premature..

This raises an obvious question: why have an EMF, when we have an IMF? The wrong way of thinking about that question is that the Eurozone needed to supplement the IMF during the last crisis. The last crisis is not a good example because the ECB did not operate OMT until September 2012. The right way to think about the past is what would have happened if OMT had been operating from the start.

The ECB is (rightly) only prepared to operate OMT for a country that is returning its financing to some sustainable level. For some countries that may not be possible, or desirable, without default. That was the case for Greece. For others that will be possible without default, as Ireland and Portugal have shown. You need somebody, or some institution, to decide which category a country finds itself in. But whether default is needed or not, a recovery plan (austerity) has to be put in place to return the public finances to sustainability and once that plan is in place OMT then operates.

Once that happens, I think any lending should be done by the IMF for the reason I have already given [1]. However it may well be that as long as the austerity is sensibly mild and drawn out [2], private sector lending will resume because of OMT.

I think a new institution to do both the job of initially deciding about default and to create the recovery plan would be a good idea. But both decisions have to be kept as far away from politicians as possible. The reason again comes from history: the loans to the government that may require default are likely to be from banks or institutions in other EZ countries. That creates a serious bias towards ‘lend and pretend’, as we saw with Greece. 

How can you achieve such independence in the EMF? In addition, how do you justify giving an institution staff and resources when it hopefully will be hardly ever needed? One answer could be to use the IMF, although at the moment the IMF is not sufficiently independent of EZ politicians. Another is to utilise the network of independent fiscal institutions or fiscal councils that every EZ country now has. If those institutions live up to their name, they should be independent of politicians. In addition, they have exactly the expertise to decide on any default and to put together a recovery plan.

Now the great thing about this set-up is that it allows fiscal autonomy in countries that have not got into fiscal difficulties. Fiscal discipline through the market is restored, because there is a clear default risk (but not the self-fulfilling default risk that operated before OMT). There would be less of a feeling in countries like Germany that they had to worry about fiscal policy in other EZ countries because they will pick up the tab because there will not be any tab to pick up. In that sense the no bail out rule is restored. 

What would the Brussels machinery that currently monitors each EZ country do? Am I proposing to put some Brussels bureaucrats out of a job? Not necessarily. A potential problem with the system I suggest is that fiscal councils will be captured by their governments. Brussels could ensure that the fiscal councils are independent, which would involve checking their assessments and forecasts (or even supplying them with forecasts).

I can predict with almost certainty that some comments will be that I am taking crucial decisions away from democratically elected politicians and giving them to technocrats. We have enough of that in the Eurozone as it is they will say. There are two simple responses. First, in the absence of the Eurozone, governments that were no longer able to borrow would face the technocrats at the IMF. Second, we have tried the democratic route and it has failed spectacularly for reasons that will not go away in a hurry. 

There you have it. A feasible plan to increase sovereignty in the Eurozone and mitigate another Eurozone crisis and avoid another Greece. Now tell me why we have to move to fiscal and political union.

[1] Obviously in that case the IMF would also have to approve the recovery plan.

[2] A short sharp shock will almost inevitably lead to damaging negative feedback on output, perhaps creating another Greece.

Why German wages need to rise

An interesting disagreement occurred this week between Martin Sandbu and the Economist, which prompted a subsequent letter from Philippe Legrain (see also Martin again here). The key issue is whether the German current account surplus, which has steadily risen from a small deficit in 2000 to a large surplus of over 8% of GDP, is a problem or more particularly a drag on global growth.

To assess whether the surplus is a problem, it is helpful to discuss a key reason why it arose. I have talked about this in detail many times before, and a similar story has been told by one of the five members of Germany’s Council of Economic Experts, Peter Bofinger. A short summary is that from the moment the Eurozone was born Germany allowed wages to increase at a level that was inconsistent with the EZ inflation target of ‘just below 2%’. We can see this clearly in the following chart.

Relative unit labour costs, source OECD Economic Outlook, 2000=100

The blue line shows German unit labour costs relative to its competitors compared to the same for the Euro area average. Obviously Germany is part of that average, so this line reduces the extent of any competitiveness divergence between Germany and other union partners. By keeping wage inflation low from 2000 to 2009, Germany steadily gained a competitive advantage over other Eurozone countries.

At the time most people focused on the excessive inflation in the periphery. But as the red line shows, this was only half the story, because wage inflation was too low in Germany compared to everyone else. This growing competitive advantage was bound to lead to growing current account surpluses.

However that in itself is not enough to say there is a problem, for two related reasons. First, perhaps Germany entered the Eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate, so the chart above just shows a correction to that. Second, perhaps Germany needs to be this competitive because the private sector wants to save more than it invests and therefore to buy foreign assets.

There are good reasons, mainly to do with an ageing population, why the second point might be true. (If it was also true in 2000, the first point could also be true.) It makes sense on demographic grounds for Germany to run a current account surplus. The key issue is how big a surplus. Over 8% of GDP is huge, and I have always thought that it was much too big to simply represent the underlying preferences of German savers.

I’m glad to see the IMF agrees. It suggests that a current account surplus of between 2.5% to 5.5% represents a medium term equilibrium. That would suggest that the competitiveness correction that started in 2009 has still got some way to go. Why is it taking so long? This confuses some into believing that the 8% surplus must represent some kind of medium term equilibrium, because surely disequilibrium caused by price and wage rigidities should have unwound by now. The answer to that can also be found in an argument that I and others put forward a few years ago.

For this competitiveness imbalance to unwind, we need either high wage growth in Germany, low wage growth in the rest of the Eurozone, or both. Given how low inflation is on average in the Eurozone, getting below average wage inflation outside Germany is very difficult. The reluctance of firms to impose wage cuts, or workers to accept them, is well known. As a result, the unwinding of competitiveness imbalances in the Eurozone was always going to be slow if the Eurozone was still recovering from its fiscal and monetary policy induced recession and therefore Eurozone average inflation was low. [1]

In that sense German current account surpluses on their current scale are a symptom of two underlying problems: a successful attempt by Germany to undercut other Eurozone members before the GFC, and current low inflation in the Eurozone. To the extent that Germany can make up for their past mistakes by encouraging higher German wages (either directly, or indirectly through an expansionary fiscal policy) they should. Not only would that speed adjustment, but it would also discourage a culture within Germany that says it is generally legitimate to undercut other Eurozone members through low wage increases. [2]

From this perspective, does that mean that the current excess surpluses in Germany are a drag on global growth? Only in a very indirect way. If higher German wages, or the means used to achieve them, boosted demand and output in Germany then this would help global growth. (Remember that ECB interest rates are stuck at their lower bound, so there will be little monetary offset to any demand boost.) The important point is that this demand boost is not so that Germany can help out the world or other union members, but because Germany should do what it can to correct a problem of its own making.

[1] Resistance to nominal wage cuts becomes a much more powerful argument for a higher inflation target in a monetary union where asymmetries mean equilibrium exchange rates are likely to change over time.

[2] The rule in a currency union is very simple. Once we have achieved a competitiveness equilibrium, nominal wages should rise by 2% (the inflation target) more than underlying national productivity. I frequently get comments along the lines that setting wages lower than this improves the competitiveness of the Eurozone as a whole. This is incorrect, because if all union members moderate their wages in a similar fashion EZ inflation would fall, prompting a monetary stimulus to bring inflation back to 2% and wage inflation back to 2% plus productivity growth.    

Structural Reforms and Greece

Should the Troika - the Eurogroup, ECB and IMF - be concerned about how bread is sold in Greece? You would think they had more important things to worry about, like getting Greece out of the huge recession caused by their own policies. But no, you would be wrong. The Troika decided that standards specifying the weights that loaves could be sold at were a restrictive regulation, and demanded change.

This is one of the examples Joe Stiglitz quotes in his new book on the Euro, which I review in the New Statesman here. Now you might agree that at the very least this represents a misdirection of the Troika’s energies, and more generally that it involves unwanted interference in national sovereignty. But in Joe Stiglitz you have one of the best economists in the world, so he also tells you that there is a long-standing economics literature on how regulations like these can increase competition because they facilitate comparison shopping.

Stiglitz is very critical of many other ‘structural reforms’ that were imposed on Greece by the Troika. The only structural reforms that it might have made sense for the Troika to suggest were measures that would have moved resources into exports, thereby helping an external demand led recovery (see Ireland or Spain). As I note, even here Troika meddling may have had undesirable consequences.

As I said in a recent post, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But of the three parts of the Troika, the IMF ought to have the knowledge to do better. (The ECB has apparently just created a task force to consider economic reforms.) Over 1,500 economists work at the Fund. Whether that knowledge gets to the right people at the right time is another matter. But I suspect the main problem at the fund is politics rather than economics. I have written about this recently, in the context of an Independent Evaluation Office report on the IMF’s Troika role. Here is a more substantive piece by Edwin Truman at the Peterson Institute in a similar spirit.

Greece is currently trapped in a debtor's prison created by the Troika. The Troika insist that debts have to be repaid. The IMF knows the prisoner does not have the ability to do this, but does not have the political will to demand that as a result the prisoner should be released. Debt repayment requires yet more austerity, which kills the chance of the recovery, so even with austerity debts are not repaid. Some debt forgiveness is probably in the interests of everyone, including the creditors, because after a recovery Greece will be in a much better position to pay any remaining debts. But it is politically unattractive for the creditors, so it does not happen.

This is a disaster for Greece, but a bad omen for Brexit. Those who advocated Leave say it is in the Eurozone's interests to agree favorable trading terms with the UK. To do otherwise would be to sacrifice economic interests to make a political point. The obvious irony of course is that this is exactly what Brexit was: sacrificing economic interests to make a political point. But Brexiteers want to believe, in their topsy turvy way, that European leaders would not be as reckless as they are. Greece is an example of how Europe's political leaders can also discard economic logic if it is in their own political interest to do so. 

Hard truths for the IMF

It is to the IMF’s credit that they have an Independent Evaluation Office, and their recent report on the Eurozone crisis is highly critical of the IMF’s actions. The IMF’s own staff told them in 2010 that Greek debt could well not be sustainable, but the IMF gave in to European pressure not to restructure Greek debt. Instead the Troika went down the disastrous route of excessive austerity, and the IMF underestimated (unwittingly or because they had to) the impact that austerity would have. In the last few years we keep hearing about an ultimatum the IMF has given European leaders to agree to restructure this debt, and on each occasion the IMF appears to fold under pressure.

These repeated errors suggest a structural problem. Back in 2015, Poul Thomsen, who runs the IMF’s European department, said “we need to ensure that we treat our member states equally, that we apply our rules uniformly.” But that is exactly what the IMF has failed to do with the Eurozone and Greece. As Barry Eichengreen writes

“When negotiating with a country, the IMF ordinarily demands conditions of its government and central bank. In its programs with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, however, the IMF and the central bank demanded conditions of the government. This struck more than a few people as bizarre.

It would have been better if, in 2010, the IMF had demanded of the ECB a pledge “to do whatever it takes” and a program of “outright monetary transactions,” like those ECB President Mario Draghi eventually offered two years later. This would have addressed the contagion problem that was one basis for European officials’ resistance to a Greek debt restructuring.”

We could add that, since the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the fund have understood the dangers of taking actions which just favour creditors, but as part of the Troika it sits down on the same side of the table as the creditors.

As Eichengreen also notes, it is not as if the IMF have had problems demanding commitments from regional bodies such as African or Caribbean monetary unions and central banks in the past. The problem is much more straightforward. He notes that European governments are large shareholders in the Fund, and that “the IMF is a predominantly European institution, with a European managing director, a heavily European staff, and a European culture.”

In other words we have something akin to regulatory capture. The IMF’s job is to be an impartial arbitrator between creditor and debtor, ensuring that the creditor takes appropriate losses for imprudent lending but also that the debtor adjusts its policies so they become sustainable. In the case of the Eurozone it has in effect sided with the creditors, and ruinous austerity has been the result of that.  

More on Brexit and the politicisation of truth

I watched the BBC’s early evening news on Saturday: not something I would normally do but for the football. (Unfortunately I cannot find a recording of it.) The bulletin reported the IMF post-Brexit forecasts, and then (for balance) had Patrick Minford saying why the IMF had got it all wrong. The impression most non-economists viewers would have received is that the long run economic impact of Brexit could go either way.

I think we can talk about at least four types of politicisation of truth:

1. Ignoring facts: ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ type reporting.
2. Ignoring expert pluralities: for uncertain outcomes, failing to mention that one side is a minority view. The economics of Brexit is an example.
3. Allowing politicians to create untruths. Labour profligacy caused austerity is an example.
4. Repeating politically generated untruths. For example 'the 364 economists were wrong'.

The first is created by the overriding need for balance. The second and third may be, but they can also just reflect inadequate reporting, which is responsible for the fourth. They all are examples of political views overriding truth.

A clear Brexit example of ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ style of reporting is the £350 million a week figure. Furthermore it is a clever lie, because it focuses attention on a direct benefit of Brexit, and away from probable costs. (I’ve no idea if this is true, but I once heard that when Joseph McCarthy claimed there were many communists working in government, he would keep changing the number. As a result, the topic of conversation became how many there actually were, rather than whether there were any at all and whether it mattered.) It is not the only example from those campaigning for Brexit.

In practice I think more damage is done by the treatment of uncertain events with probable outcomes. The medium term cost of Brexit is of course uncertain. But a huge majority of economists think it is much more likely to be an economic cost rather than an economic benefit. So Minford was proposing something that only around 5% of UK economists believe. That is widely acknowledged on all sides, so when the BBC or any other media organisation fails to mention that, they distort the truth. Or, to put it another way, it is not balance at all but favours the Leave side. Another example from those campaigning for Brexit is the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. 

This is a generic problem which politicians and others exploit. There is a huge consensus among climate scientists, yet if the ‘balance’ model is applied to global warming - which it will be if the subject gets politicised - we get the media giving the impression of scientific division. That is why in the US over a third of people think that scientists do not generally agree about man made global warming. Perhaps it is also why so many people think Brexit will not be a medium term cost to them.

Greece under Troika rule

“The repayment of foreign loans and the return to stable currencies were recognized as the touchstones of rationality in politics; and no private suffering, no infringement of sovereignty was considered too great a sacrifice for the recovery of monetary integrity. The privations of the unemployed made jobless by deflation; the destitution of public servants dismissed without a pittance; even the relinquishment of national rights and the loss of constitutional liberties were judged a fair price to pay for the fulfilment of the requirements of sound budgets and sound currencies, these a priori of economic liberalism.”

Karl Polanyi (1944), “The Great Transformation” (p142)

This quote (HT Jeremy Smith) could almost be written today about Greece. I had once thought that the lessons of the interwar period and Great Depression had been well learnt, but 2010 austerity showed that was wrong. I therefore used in a 2014 post an earlier example of where one country allowed another to suffer for what was thought to be sound economics and their own ultimate good (‘a sharp but effectual remedy’): the British treatment of Ireland during the famine.

The British held back relief because of a combination of laissez-faire beliefs and prejudice against Irish catholics. Replace famine relief with debt relief and Irish operating an inefficient agricultural system with lazy Greeks and an economy in need of structural reform, and the two stories have strong similarities, although of course the scale of the suffering is different.

To understand why the Greek crisis goes on you need to understand its history. That the Greek government borrowed too much is generally agreed. What is often ignored is that the scale of the excess borrowing meant default was pretty inevitable. But Eurozone leaders, worried about their banking system (which held a lot of Greek debt), first postponed default and then made it partial. The real ‘bailing out’ was for the European banks and others who had lent to the Greek government. The money the Eurozone lent to Greece largely went to pay off Greece’s creditors.

There was absolutely nothing that obliged Eurozone leaders to lend their voters money to bail out these creditors. Pretty well all the analysis I saw at the time suggested it would be money that Greece would be unable to pay back. If European leaders felt their banking systems needed support, they could have done this directly. But instead they convinced themselves that Greece could pay them back. It was a mistake they will do anything to avoid admitting.

To try and ensure they got their money back, they along with the IMF effectively took over the running of the Greek economy. The result has been a complete disaster. The amount of austerity imposed caused great hardship, and crashed the economy. Whereas the Irish and Spanish economies are beginning to recover and regain market access, Greece is miles away from that, and the Troika’s structural reforms are partly to blame.

Austerity did achieve primary balance on the government’s accounts, which means that the government only needed to borrow to rollover existing debt. But the Troika wants 3.5% primary surpluses by 2018: they want to start getting their money back sooner rather than later. This was and is an absurd demand, and is quite likely to mean that the Troika gets less of their money back in the end. It is clearly preferable to allow the Greek economy to first recover, and then work out over what period debts could be repaid. Right now Greece needs more aggregate demand not structural reform, yet the Troika insists on taking more demand out of the economy.

The requests that the Syriza government made in 2015 were eminently reasonable, as my joint letter with Flassbeck, Piketty, Sachs and Rodrick explained. It was defeated by an exercise of raw political power: Germany and the ECB were prepared to expel Greece from the Eurozone. The Greek people were not going to be allowed to escape from the debtors prison of Troika rule. Greece is even excluded from the debt relief implied by the ECB’s quantitative easing.

Despite Martin Sandbu’s optimism, the recent deal is essentially more of the same. The IMF, which knows it makes no sense to ‘extend and pretend’, has again capitulated. The reaction to the IMF’s paper on neoliberalism has generally missed the key point. It is not fanciful to believe that the paper is directed at those within the IMF like Poul Thomsen, the head of their European department. Falling GDP will continue to be blamed on the Greek government, even without its former finance minister. Of course one day the Greek economy will recover, just as the Irish famine came to an end. But history, as taught in Britain as well as Ireland, does not remember the British troops guarding the shipments of grain leaving Ireland during the famine as heroic upholders of the rules of law and contract. Nor will it do the same for the members of the Troika that keep Greece in poverty.

The ECB as sovereign lender of last resort

Understandably the element of my talk at the Royal Irish Academy which generated most discussion was the role of the ECB. (Here is a media report, but ignore the last two paragraphs which are confused/wrong. Abstract for the talk is here. Paper will follow.) The proposition I put forward was that the ECB’s OMT programme should have been put in place in 2010, and if it had been countries outside Greece could have implemented a more efficient austerity programme (one that produced less unemployment) and might have retained market access (interest rates on government debt would have remained reasonable). [1]

There are two serious and related arguments against this view. The first is that it is unrealistic for the ECB to act as a sovereign lender of last resort because of the transfers between countries that this might lead to. (A sovereign lender of last resort is a central bank that is always willing to buy its government’s debt.) [2] The second is that in practice OMT is bound to be coupled with a requirement for austerity programmes that might have simply duplicated what was actually put into place by national governments. Both arguments speak to a real problem that remains unresolved within the Eurozone, but do not nullify the argument that things should have been done much better.

Government debt in advanced economies is regarded as a safe asset for two reasons. The first is that most governments that borrow in their own currency rarely default. The second is that an individual investor does not need to worry about market beliefs, because if the market panics and refuses to buy the government’s debt the central bank will step in (hence sovereign lender of last resort). If the central bank did not do this, the government might be forced to default because it cannot roll over its existing debt.

It makes sense for the central bank to act as a sovereign lender of last resort, because it avoids self-fulfilling market panics. Doubly so because such panics will be more likely to occur after a large recession when the social value of government borrowing is particularly high. The complication in the case of the ECB is the following. If the market panic is so great that the ECB was forced to actually buy a ‘distressed’ government’s debt (normally the threat to do so is enough), it is possible that this government might choose to default even with ECB support. If it did that, the ECB would make losses which would be born by the Eurozone as a whole (the transfer risk).

Partly for this reason, the ECB has to have the ability not to act as a sovereign lender of last resort, or withdraw support if circumstances change. If that ability exists (a point I will come back to), then the transfer risk associated with the ECB acting as a sovereign lender of last resort are tiny. It represents the kind of minimal risk that should always be offset by the trust and solidarity that comes with the territory of being in a monetary union. I suspect those that suggest otherwise are often trying to hide other motives.

A government that is receiving ECB support of this kind will naturally want to know what it has to do to maintain it, because the threat of its withdrawal is so great. It would be unreasonable to withhold that information. Does that in practice amount to nothing more than the kind of conditions that have in practice been imposed on Ireland and Portugal anyway? Absolutely not. Just as the market does not worry about the build up of debt in a recession in countries like the UK or Japan, a rational ECB would have no reason to impose fiscal consolidation at the time it would do most damage. The time a rational ECB might withdraw its support is once a recovery is complete and the government refuses to embark on fiscal consolidation.

So a sovereign lender of last resort in a monetary union must have the ability not to provide that support. In other words it has to sort Greece from Ireland. That decision is a huge one, because in effect it is a decision about whether the country will be forced to default. It is natural that the ECB wants to share that responsibility with member governments, but as we have seen with Greece member governments are hopeless at making that decision (particularly when their own banks may be compromised by any default). We have also seen that European central bankers are far from rational on issues involving government debt (compared with at least one of their anglo-saxon counterparts), so giving the decision to someone else other than the current ECB would seem like a good idea. However at present there is no institution that seems capable of doing this job.

In this post I suggested contracting out this task to the IMF, although that presumed a reduction in the political influence of European governments on that institution. I have also wondered about whether a body like the newly created network of European fiscal councils could play this role. Another possibility is to reform the ECB so that it is not subject to deficit phobia, and is more accountable. It seems to me that this is where current research and analysis should be going, rather than into schemes involving greater political union.

The existence of various alternatives here means that we should not take what has actually happened in the Eurozone as some kind of immutable political constraint beyond which economics cannot go. There is no intrinsic reason why the OMT that was introduced in September 2012 could not have been introduced in 2010. There is no intrinsic reason why any conditionality that went with that could not have been much more efficient in terms of unemployment costs. Beyond Greece, the Eurozone crisis happened because the ECB thought it could avoid undertaking one of the essential functions of a central bank. This was perhaps the most important of the many errors it has made.

[1] For a country within a monetary union which needs to reduce debt more rapidly than does the union as a whole, a gain in competitiveness relative to the rest of the union is required to offset the deflationary impact of fiscal consolidation. That ‘internal devaluation’ probably requires some increase in unemployment, but it is much more efficient to obtain that increase in competitiveness gradually.

[2] It could be argued that the Fed does not provide lender of last resort services to individual member states. But state debt is typically lower relative to GDP and income than for Eurozone governments. Before 2000, Eurozone governments were able to borrow more because they were backed by their central bank. That means that they are inevitably subject to a greater risk of suffering from a self-fulfilling market panic. The architects of the Eurozone might have initially believed that the SGP might avoid the need for a sovereign lender of last resort, but after the Great Recession they would have known otherwise.

Greece and Trust

Nick Rowe pulls me up on a point that I didn’t make in my account of what should have happened to Greece after 2010. I argued that some external body (e.g. IMF) should lend sufficient money for Greece to be able to achieve primary surplus (taxes less non-interest government spending) gradually, thereby avoiding unnecessary unemployment. Gradual adjustment is required because the improvement in competitiveness required to achieve ‘full employment’ with a primary surplus cannot happen overnight because of price rigidity.

Nick’s point is that for this to happen, the external body has to have a degree of trust in Greece: trust that it will not take the money and at some stage default on this new loan. This trust may be particularly problematic if Greece had defaulted on its original debt, which I think it should have done. This, after all, is one reason why Greece would not be able to get such finance from the markets.

This is what the IMF is for. Governments are more reluctant to upset the international community, and so defaults on IMF loans are rare. As Ken Rogoff writes: “Although some countries have gone into arrears, almost all have eventually repaid the IMF: the actual realized historical default rate is virtually nil.”

But does this help explain why other Eurozone countries keep going on about how Greece has lost their trust? I think the answer is a clear no. In fact I would go further: I think this talk of lost trust is largely spin. The issue of trust might have explained the total amount the Troika lent from 2010 to 2012. However, as I have said often, the mistake was not that the total sum lent to Greece was insufficient, but that far too much of it went to bail out Greece’s private sector creditors, and too little went to ease the transition to primary surplus. (The mistake is hardly ever acknowledged by the Troika’s supporters. Martin Sandbu discusses the - misguided - reasons for that mistake. [0])

The reason the Troika give for lack of trust is that Greece has repeatedly ‘failed to deliver’ on the various conditions that the Troika imposed in exchange for its loans. The Troika has tried to micromanage Greece to such an extent that there will always be ‘structural reforms’ that were not implemented, and it is very difficult to aggregate structural reforms. However this is exactly what the OECD tries to do in this document, and if I read Figure 1.2 (first panel) correctly, Greece has implemented more reform from 2011 to 2014 than any other country. [1] We can more easily quantify austerity, and here it is clear that Greece has implemented almost twice as much austerity as any other country. [4] The narrative about failing to deliver is just an attempt to disguise the fact that the Troika has largely run the Greek economy for the last five years and is therefore responsible for the results. [3]

You could argue with much more justification that the failure of trust has been on the Troika’s side. Greece was told that the austerity demanded of it would have just a small impact on growth and unemployment, and the Troika were completely wrong. They were then told if they only implemented all these structural reforms, things would come good, and they have not. You could reasonably say that the election of Syriza resulted from a realisation in Greece that the trust they had placed in the Troika was misguided.

Given these failures by the Troika, a reasonable response to the election of Syriza would have been to acknowledge past mistakes, and enter genuine negotiations. [2] After all, as Martin Sandbu points out in a separate piece, a pause in austerity in 2014 had allowed growth to return, and because Greece had achieved primary surplus new loans were only required to repay old loans. But it is now pretty clear that large parts of the Troika never had any real wish to reach an agreement. Over the last few months we were told (and the media dutifully repeated) that the lack of any agreement was because the ‘irresponsible adolescents’ of Syriza did not know how to negotiate and kept changing their minds. We now know that this was yet more spin to hide the truth that large parts of the Troika wanted Grexit.

The lesson of the last few months, and particularly the last few days, is not that Greece failed to gain the trust of the Troika. It is that creditors can be stupidly cruel, and when those creditors control your currency there is very little the debtor can do about it. 

 

[0] Greece was prevented from defaulting because of fears of contagion of one kind or another, which meant that Greece was taking on a burden for the sake of the rest of the Eurozone. The right response to these fears was OMT, and direct assistance to private banks, as Ashoka Mody explains clearly here. But given that this was not done, what should have then happened is that once that fear had passed, the debt should have been written off. But politicians cannot admit to what they did, so the debt that was once owed to private creditors and is now owed to the Troika remains non-negotiable.

 

[1] The Troika can also speak with forked tongues on this issue: see Mean Squared Errors here (HT MT).

[2] I am often told that the Troika had to stand firm because of a moral hazard problem: if Greek debts were written down, other countries would want the same. But the moral hazard argument has to be used proportionately. Crashing an economy to avoid others asking for debt reductions is the equivalent of the practice in 18th century England of hanging pickpockets.

[3] I am sometimes asked why I focus on the failures of the Troika rather than the mistakes of Syriza. The answer is straightforward - it is Troika policy that is the major influence on what happens in Greece. And when the Troika gives Greece’s leaders the choice between two different disasters, it seems rather strange to focus on the behaviour of Greece’s leaders.

[4] Postscript: Peter Doyle suggests that, all things considered, Greece overachieved on fiscal adjustment     

After Oxi, what next?

A lot of the commentary on Greece fails to see why the Greek No vote changes anything. This view tends to see the stance of the Eurozone group as simply expressing their own voters’ preferences which will not be changed by what happened yesterday. Here is an alternative reading.

It starts from a simple observation. The Troika will get far less of its money back (if any!) if Greece is forced out of the Eurozone. (I say forced out because Greece does not want to leave, so Greek exit is first and foremost an ECB decision: if you think otherwise read Karl Whelan and Matthew Klein and Paul De Grauwe. [1]) That is why creditors are generally weak in negotiations of this kind. Things are different in this case only because the creditors include the ECB, and Greece wants to stay in the Eurozone. The Troika has played this for all it is worth. They were relying (you could say gambling) on the Greek people, one way or another, deciding that they would agree to the Troika’s demands because they feared Greek exit more.

So far this strategy has failed. First they pushed Tsipras further than he could possibly go, hoping perhaps that Syriza would collapse in recriminations. Tsipras’s response was a unifying referendum. They then gambled that Greece would say no, and they lost that too. Tsipras continues to offer the Troika the chance to be more reasonable. He followed the referendum not with triumphalism but by removing his finance minister. This was both a signal - I really want a deal, even though it will in all probability inflict further (unnecessary) pain on Greece - and a lifeline, because the Troika can now say that an important obstacle to a deal has been removed. (An obstacle, because Varoufakis was too open - something politicians and much of the press hate - and too honest about the other side’s lack of economics.)

Now the Troika seem to face a simple choice. Agree a deal and get a little more heat from your political opponents at home for ‘giving in’, or force Greek exit with the risk that you will get a lot more heat when Greece defaults and people realise you have lost all their money. If they are really just interested in getting as much of their money back as possible, it would seem crazy to throw away their best card by forcing Greece out of the Eurozone.

Of course rationality may not prevail, or interests may be rather different. The IMF may continue to be an unhelpful nuisance. (If you think my criticism of their role was harsh, read this from Peter Doyle.) Some within the Troika will be happy to go for Greek exit because they think nationalist sentiment can overcome any kickback from the subsequent Greek default. Others may fear a deal may encourage anti-austerity sentiment in their own indebted countries.

Unfortunately there is a third possibility, which is probably the worst possible outcome. To prevent any loss of face, the Troika may continue to gamble, waiting for days or even weeks, and watch ECB pressure, together with reluctance by Tsipras to introduce a new currency, gradually bring chaos to the Greek economy. Only then will it negotiate, allowing any deal to be portrayed as the result of desperation by the Greek government. In which case, recent European politics will have reached a new all time low.    

[1] Postscript: Martin Sandbu provides a very clear account.

Greece and the political capture of the IMF

When governments borrow too much, and cannot repay, it generally falls to the IMF to sort things out. In playing this role, the IMF should be pretty tough on creditors. As Interfluidity so lucidly points out, this is where real moral hazard lies.

So what went wrong with Greece? Remember the Troika made a huge mistake in using their citizens’ money to lend to Greece so Greece could partially repay these private sector creditors - that is where most of the Troika’s rescue package went. The IMF’s own internal analysis was deeply flawed (being predictably wrong in how austerity would impact on the Greek economy), and even then the deal failed its own tests, so special dispensation had to be made.

The IMF should have been very worried about motivations here. After all, many of these creditors were banks from European countries, so the motivations of those bailing out these creditors were conflicted to say the least. They were nevertheless persuaded to go along because of fears of contagion. If the worry was contagion to other countries governments that was an obvious mistake, because it happened anyway but could have been solved ‘at a stroke’ by the ECB (as it eventually was). If the worry was a collapse in the European banking system, then that was the responsibility of the governments concerned, and not the Greek people.

To the present, and the negotiations that failed. Forget all the fluff you read in most papers about this. What is quite clear is the following. A deal could have been done if the Troika had allowed debt restructuring to be part of the package. The IMF agrees that debt needs to be restructured, as do most economists. It has made no secret of this, yet it has consistently soft pedalled when it came to dealing with the rest of the Troika. So it was allowed to be kept off the table in the current negotiations by the Troika: vague promises to look at this after a deal had been agreed would never be enough for Syriza to sell the deal. There are two reasons why Germany might have wanted it to remain off the table. One is that it never wanted a deal; the other is that to include it would have been politically embarrassing for German politicians.

What seems abundantly clear is that the IMF should have had no truck with either concern. It has to be tough on creditors, and in this case the creditors were the European institutions. It clearly had the political power to face down European governments on this issue, and if it had done so a deal could have been achieved. The only conclusion I can come to is that the IMF on this occasion has been captured by the rest of the Troika. [1] [2] [3] As Ashoka Mody puts it, it has become trapped by the priorities of [selective] shareholders, including in recent years the U.K. and Germany.

The following are not really true footnotes - they are too important for that - but I wanted to keep the main text crystal clear.

[1] Peter Doyle has also noted how dubious the IMF’s interventions on essential ‘reforms’ are both in economic and political terms. (If this report is true, it is even worse.) While other parts of the IMF seem to understand multipliers (see [2] below), those in charge of the negotiations seem to take a more German view. [Postscript: Ashoka Mody's verdict on this IMF analysis is restrained but blunt.]

[2] One of the reasons that it is part of the IMF’s job to be tough on creditors is that creditors have no concern for social welfare, by which I mean the aggregate welfare of both creditors and debtors combined. (Although, as Interfluidity says, you might have hoped differently on this occasion.) As this point is hardly ever made in the media let me set it out here (the numbers are based on a FT piece by Martin Sandbu). To achieve a primary surplus of 1% of GDP to transfer to the Troika, the Greek government needs to undertake austerity that will reduce Greek GDP by 3% (assuming a multiplier of 1.5, and a tax/transfer loss from lower GDP of a third). That reduction in GDP is a social loss (the loss to the Greek economy is 3% plus the 1% transfer) - at best pure waste, and probably for some the cause of much suffering.

[3] Here is the former head of the IMF's European department, on the need for both debt restructuring and the dangers of demanding larger primary surpluses.