Making the Eurozone work better: sovereign default

Given the current problems in the Eurozone, it is understandable that many non-Eurozone economists remind us that they had doubts from the beginning. That, unfortunately, is not very helpful criticism, except in so far as it tells us how these problems were originally wished away. One lesson from the Greek tragedy is that voters' faith in the Euro project can survive even under tremendous strain. [1] The Euro was always a political project, and the political reasons for it have not gone away. For the governing elite of Europe this is likely to remain the case. So going backwards is not an option.

Yet while the people and the elite both want to keep the Euro, they part company when it comes to moving to a complete fiscal and political union: a United States of Europe. As Philippe Legrain notes, ever since the French and Dutch voted No, voter attitudes to further central control have hardened - and with good reason. If what he describes as the “Monnet method” (use any crisis to increase integration) continues, and as Andrew Watt points out it is continuing in a big way, the threat to the Eurozone could become existential. European policy makers have taken far too many liberties with democracy as it is: they should not take even more. Which is why I tend to get a little impatient with economists and institutions that spend a lot of time designed schemes for further substantial integration.

So the critical issue for now is whether the way the current union is run can be improved? I see three key unresolved areas here: sovereign default, competitiveness imbalances and the ECB. I talked about how to cope better with potential competitiveness imbalances recently. This post is about default.

I agree with Philippe Legrain that we need to have more decentralised fiscal control, and less rules from the centre. As I have noted before, there now exists in the Eurozone a system that is parallel to monitoring from Brussels, based instead on national fiscal councils. Can we design a system around that which negates any need for central control?

One way of making this work would be to deny any support to any EZ government that gets into trouble with the market. When the EZ was set up, its architects worried that market discipline would be too weak for this to work, so centralised controls were also necessary (the Stability and Growth Pact). In one sense they were right: the markets started treating Greek government debt as if it was German debt. But once a crisis happened they were wrong: governments with lower deficits than the UK were regarded as riskier by the markets.

What should now be clear is that the debt of member governments of a monetary union are subject to much greater rollover risk than equivalent countries outside the union because they do not control their own currency. That problem has been dealt with (for the moment) by OMT. But you cannot have OMT without conditions. For obvious reasons OMT cannot be a blank cheque to a monetary union member to run ever higher deficits.

So OMT has to be conditional, but who should set the conditions? Who decides that a future Greece has to default, but that a future Ireland should get the OMT guarantee without the need to default? At the moment the answer is both the other Eurozone governments and the ECB decide. But Eurozone governments have shown themselves to be hopeless at this task (see actual Greece), partly because they are subject to pressure from creditors. To leave this all to the unelected, unaccountable ECB is just asking for problems, and would represent too great a strain on ECB independence.

Let’s imagine the following. The Italian government at some time in the future finds that interest rates on its debt begin to rise well above average Eurozone levels. We get into a situation where a self-fulfilling default is possible. Should the ECB supply OMT cover to end that possibility or not? What conditions should be imposed on Italy as the price for that cover?

It would be nice if we could write down some simple rules (even complex rules) that could choose between a Greece and an Ireland. Fabian Lindner discusses some possibilities here. The major problem is that a great deal depends on something that embodies a political judgement: just how large will future primary surpluses be? Italy, because of its large debt, is used to running much larger primary surpluses than other countries. How do you judge what the upper limit is?

This is why ‘leaving it to the market’ is so attractive, because you appear to be asking a huge number of people to take a bet on the answer. But that method is flawed, because with rollover risk what they are actually taking a bet on is what they think other market participants think about rollover risk. OMT removes that rollover risk.

So if the market cannot do this, and the ECB and EZ governments should not do this, who is left? Do we set up a new institution of experts to decide and set conditions? (Conditions have to be set, because actions may change after OMT is granted.)

One obvious response is that we do not need a new institution, because we already have one, and it is called the IMF. It is imperfect, with at the moment too much influence from EZ governments on its decisions, but that means reforming the IMF rather than reinventing it. This may happen as a result of the Greek debacle. Philippe Legrain suggests using the IMF in a similar role here, although as a transitional measure while a new EZ institution is set up. However it is difficult to imagine EZ governments setting up a new institution that was truly independent of political pressure from member states.

The proposal would work like this. When Italy got into difficulties, it would go to the IMF. No EZ assistance would be allowed before this. The IMF would decide what level of default (if any) was required. The IMF, and not EZ governments, would set any conditionality thought necessary to return deficits to a sustainable level. That would include a path for deficits that the country could reasonably achieve without creating unnecessary unemployment. (If the country was uncompetitive, some unemployment would be inevitable.)

If Italy agreed to those conditions, then OMT would automatically be extended by the ECB. It is quite possible that in those circumstances Italy would regain market access at reasonable rates. If it did not, the IMF (and NOT other EZ governments) should provide the finance necessary to cover transitional deficits.

I suspect this scheme would not be attractive to many Eurozone policy makers, because they would be losing influence and control. But a better way to think about it is that the Eurozone contracts out (to the IMF) the tricky business of deciding whether a government’s debt is sustainable or not. That seems to me to be a small price to pay to avoid the kind of conflict between governments that became so clear in the recent Greek ‘negotiations’.

[1] Of the countries polled here, only two had more people thinking the euro had been bad rather than good for their country: Italy and Cyprus. See also Andrew Watt here.

Spain, and how the Eurozone has to get real about countercyclical policy

Matthew Klein has a good account of how Spain’s macroeconomic fortunes are improving, but only from a very bad place. I’m not that knowledgeable about the Spanish economy, so I cannot add any detail. However I do want to pick up on one point, which he and others (including Martin Wolf - see below) have made, which I think is wrong and misleading.

Before I do that, I just want to make a general point about the current recovery. At its heart it is export led, which is exactly what you would expect. Just as this post which compares Greece to Ireland shows, the Eurozone does have a natural correction mechanism when a country becomes hopelessly uncompetitive as a result of a temporary domestic boom (whatever its cause). The mechanism is a recession and what economists call ‘internal devaluation’: falling wages and prices. The problem with this correction mechanism is that, on its own, it is slow and painful, particularly when Eurozone inflation is so low.

So the key question is what could Spain have done to avoid having such a painful period of correction. The cause of the problem was the excess private sector borrowing of the pre-crisis period, and the associated capital inflows. This was part of an unsustainable property boom that led to a large current account deficit and rising inflation. (I liked the point that Matthew Klein made about how export orientated firms have recently increased their borrowing. Extra borrowing is not bad if the investment is sound.) What could Spain have done to cool things down? As Matthew Klein points out, Spain already had some sensible macroprudential monetary policies, and it seems likely that more of the same would not have been enough.

Which brings us of course to fiscal policy, and it is here that so many commentators go wrong. They say, correctly, that Spain’s problem was never a profligate government. They say, correctly, that the actual budget was in surplus from 2005-2007. Of course the relevant number is the underlying (cyclical adjusted) balance, and the IMF now thinks that shows a persistent although small deficit. But as Martin Wolf points out, again correctly, the IMF in 2008 thought very differently. As I have said many times in the case of the UK, ex post numbers for pre-crisis cyclically adjusted deficits can be very dodgy because of the depth and persistence of this recession.

The mistake everyone here makes is to judge the appropriate fiscal policy by the size of the deficit. That is like saying that a bigger fiscal stimulus in the US in 2009 was impossible because the deficit was already very large. For an individual country in a currency union the deficit is not the appropriate metric to judge short term fiscal policy. Unless there are very good reasons for believing the economy is too competitive, the appropriate metric is national inflation relative to the Eurozone average. From 2001 to 2007 the GDP deflator (the price of domestically produced goods) for the Eurozone as a whole increased at an average rate of just over 2%. In Spain it increased at an average rate of nearly 4%. 2% excess inflation over 7 years implies a 15% loss in competitiveness. So forget the actual budget deficit or any cyclically corrected version, fiscal policy was just not tight enough.

I have been told so many times that for Spain to have a tighter fiscal policy before the crisis was ‘politically impossible’. If that really is true, then Spain has little to complain about when it comes to the subsequent recession. If you cannot do any better, you have to leave the natural correction mechanism to do its slow and painful work. But I suspect what is ‘politically impossible’ is in part a reflection of the Eurozone’s flawed Stability and Growth pact itself, which focused entirely on deficits.

It seems more than likely that the existing monetary but not fiscal/political union is here to stay for some time. Many in Europe’s political elite plan to move quickly to greater union (see Andrew Watt here), but there are serious obstacles in their path. The current system can be made to work better, and strong countercyclical fiscal policy is an obvious part of that. Combining this with medium term deficit reduction is technically trivial. Just how many years and recessions does it take before what is obvious textbook macroeconomics can become politically acceptable?

The Eurozone: out of the ashes?

I was at a gathering a year or so back in which sensible economists were thinking about the transition path for the Eurozone to full fiscal (and banking) union. They viewed recent events as confirming that monetary union alone was not tenable, and that fiscal union was the way forward. Many share that view. I remember asking whether there was any likelihood that the treaty changes required for fiscal union would find democratic support, given recent events. To say that this interjection was regarded as unwelcome was an understatement.

In one sense this reaction was understandable. Democracy within the Eurozone is a strange thing. On occasions it has been of the ‘last time you voted you got the answer wrong, but don’t worry, we are going to give you a second chance by having another vote’ variety. On others it has been ‘if you vote the wrong way you will have to leave’ type. In these circumstances worrying about democratic opinion and fiscal union may seem beside the point.

But in a way, that is the point. My interjection at that meeting could have been far blunter. How can you be planning to move towards fiscal union when the governance structures of the Eurozone have clearly failed with a more limited set of tasks? That would be a classic economist’s mistake: of designing a set-up which works well in the hands of a benevolent social planner, but falls apart when run by actual politicians.

Take, for example, the ECB. Compared to the US Fed or the UK Bank of England, it comes a poor third. It actually raised interest rates in 2011, making its own contribution to the subsequent recession. It has consistently gone well beyond its remit in promoting certain fiscal policies or structural reforms. It took two years before coming up with OMT, giving us two years of continual crisis. It is only now thinking about QE. A basic problem is that it is not accountable for its actions, which is a serious deficiency for an unelected institution with such power.

The other reason for the 2012 recession was fiscal contraction. If you regard some fiscal contraction in the periphery countries as necessary to correct a lack of competitiveness, then the problem has been the lack of offsetting fiscal expansion elsewhere (not just Germany, but countries like the Netherlands). This has not happened in Germany in part because there is no compelling need within Germany for fiscal expansion: it has been benefiting from the lack of competitiveness of other countries, as its current account surplus shows.

In a fiscal union, fiscal policy is decided at the centre, so these national obstacles to fiscal expansion could be brushed aside. (This, of course, is one good reason why Germans might be rather reluctant to vote for such a union.) But in practice what would aggregate fiscal policy determined in Brussels look like? All the indications are that it would look much like the fiscal policy we currently have: obsessed with debt, and completely ignorant of any significant multiplier effects. The fundamental misunderstandings about fiscal policy that are embedded in German thinking are now deeply ingrained elsewhere.  

To make the more general point, if a core problem is with the governance structures of the Eurozone, then handing those structures more power through fiscal union could be a huge mistake. But this realisation seems to leave us in a horrible position: we do not like the place we are in, we cannot and/or should not ‘go forward’ to fiscal union, yet ‘going back’ by leaving the Euro seems too traumatic. (See, for example, Kevin O’Rourke.)

Yet this may be a too limited, one dimensional point of view. As I have argued before, the 2010-12 crisis and the subsequent recession demonstrated the failure of one version of monetary union, but there are other possible versions. As studies before the formation of the Euro showed, monetary union needs countercyclical fiscal policy. The Eurozone ignored this point, partly because it worried that fiscal policy in the Eurozone would no longer be ‘disciplined by the market’. Until 2010 this fear was understandable, but after Greek default the opposite is true. So the need for central control on that account has disappeared.

The current Eurozone fiscal architecture is chaotic, but within it there are now two mechanisms to discipline national governments. The first and currently dominant is central control from Brussels. The second is national control through a combination of fiscal rules decided at the national level and independent national fiscal councils. Having two systems in place can be a nightmare, but the optimistic view would be that this presents the opportunity for evolutionary change. The central control mechanism could be gradually phased out, but held in reserve for when the national system broke down.

Many years ago I suggested that Eurozone countries could be allowed to opt out from the Stability and Growth Pact if they established their own sound fiscal rules and institutions. There are now enough fiscal councils around that it would be easy to get advice on whether countries had established these sound fiscal rules and institutions. A great advantage of this form of fiscal control is that there are established channels of accountability at the national level. Memories of the 2010-12 crisis, and market discipline, should ensure that a combination of fiscal rules and fiscal councils prevent deficit bias, yet leave scope for countercyclical action when required.

Commission based monitoring would be still needed in the background for two reasons. First, if a government persistently ignored the advice of the fiscal council, or compromised its independence, control at the Eurozone level could be re-established. Second, there may be occasions (like now) when coordination of national fiscal decisions is required, and here a Commission role would be essential.

I am not optimistic that this evolutionary change is going to happen anytime soon. Like any bureaucracy, the Commission will resist a reduction in its power. Germany’s own regional fiscal setup involves strong central control, so it will resist a change like this. Arguably this unholy alliance has helped create the dysfunctional system we now have. However, perhaps at some point countries like France will become galvanised by harmful pressure from the Commission to argue for some kind of alternative. That alternative does not have to be fiscal union, and in some countries a good part of an alternative institutional structure is already in place.

Is a monetary union without fiscal/political union doomed?

This seems to be a very common view at the moment. The view that the Eurozone will have to move to fiscal union, which implies some form of political union, comes from two directions.

1) Those working in the political unions that are the United States or the United Kingdom, know combined monetary and fiscal unions can work. From this perspective, the monetary only union of the Eurozone was a largely untried experiment, and it appears to be failing. (For just one example of this view, see Acemoglu and Robinson here.) Let me rephrase that: it is failing. The perpetual crisis of the markets may be over as a result of OMT [1], but the crisis that is unemployment in the periphery just gets worse. (Kevin O’Rourke puts it bluntly but accurately here.)

2) Within the Eurozone itself, there has always been a powerful lobby for further integration. It is therefore not surprising that actors like the Commission see further integration as the longer term solution to the Eurozone’s problems.

Yet we should be very cautious about making generalisations from a single observation. It may be worth reminding ourselves about why the Eurozone has not been a fair test of monetary union without fiscal union:

1) The crisis of competitiveness was partly a result of a mistaken belief in the market that default risk on everyone’s debt was similar to German debt, a mistake that is unlikely to occur again in decades. In the years before the recession, no attempt was made to use fiscal policy to offset overheating in periphery countries. (For more on why countercyclical policy is key, see Antonio Fatas here.)

2) In probably only one case, Greece, was there a clear problem of underlying fiscal excess. Yet instead of recognising the need for default early on, the union made a futile attempt to avoid it by replacing private debt with intergovernmental lending, which had disastrous consequences. This major and avoidable error produced the worst moment of the crisis, when Greece was threatened with exit. It continues to impose a disastrous degree of austerity on Greece.

3) The fiscal position of other Eurozone economies became critical because the ECB refused to act as a lender of last resort. If the ECB had introduced its OMT programme two years earlier than it did, the crisis might well have dissipated very quickly. This is hardly wisdom from hindsight, as anyone reading Paul De Grauwe (or indeed this blog) will know. Market reaction always had much more to do with the ECB than the fiscal position of the countries involved, an observation that inspired my first blog post and which research confirms.

4) The current double dip recession in the Eurozone is largely about a collective failure of fiscal and monetary policy. The position of the Eurozone would look significantly better if the ECB acted more like the US Fed, and if Germany and other fiscally untroubled economies were less obsessed with austerity. Neither has much to do with the absence of fiscal union.


To use evidence from one very badly designed test case to condemn the whole concept of  monetary union without political union is far too hasty. It is also potentially very dangerous. We should not forget that monetary union itself was encouraged by a belief that the fixed exchange rate regime that preceded EMU was untenable because of market pressure. (For more on the origins of the Euro see Harold James here.) The lesson of Eurozone failure so far is mainly about bad design, rather than disproof of concept. If this failure leads to a fiscal and monetary union imposed from above on an unwilling electorate, by an elite that played such a big part in creating the current failure, we may go on to find out that a badly conceived political union could be even more disastrous than a badly designed monetary union.


[1] The ECB’s programme to become a conditional lender of last resort