Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Anything and everything that's made up of unequal parts will eventually fail, and that applies to the ill thought out Euro, if all Euro nations could find a way of returning to their own currencies, without too much problems, they would do it, if Greece still had the Drachma it would devalue and get out of it's debt, and so would all the PIIGS countries, there is some merit in the Jewish 50yr jubilee tradition, where debts are written off and a new start is given, because continuous building up of debt that will take decades to repay, is not good for anyone.  
Common sense.  The PIIGS would be booming if their exchange rates had collapsed reflecting their problems.  That would stop expensive imports, boost domestic production and see investment and tourism not to mention ex-pats pouring in.  The very basic principle which is clear to everyone is that the costs of an event should follow the liability for that event. Everyone should pay for their own mistakes. For any debtor country to expect to have part of their losses “socialized” via the ESM vehicle or any other Eurozone taxpayer funded system is just another way for easy monetary policy to continue to once again encourage over borrowing and deficit spending.  These are merely addictive drugs to a dysfunctional political establishment which is more than happy to avoid fiscal prudence if such policies remain available to delay the inevitable day of reckoning when monetizing debts will no longer work. At that point we would all be finished because the sharing of states’ insolvency by the creation of money and socializing of losses would have served  to progressively absorb the remaining areas of solvency in today’s insolvent Europe. In short, if my neighbor borrows or lends too much, any resulting insolvency and its consequences should affect the contracting parties only. Yet governments in general have run deficits to prevent engaging this important principle. They do not want to confront the debt directly via liquidation and largely, they will not significantly reduce the size of the state.
The premise that one can perpetually support the economy in this way is false. Certainly, government could  spend a Keynesian style accumulated surplus but there is no accumulated surplus.  So instead, governments having spent more than they take in tax, are now spending even more than they take in for the explicit purpose of propping up bad investments and preventing the consequences of those bad investments from being recognized.
Thus, the government absorbs all the banks’ bad debts and runs large structural deficits and the cost is transferred to the taxpayers.  If the central bank prints money in excess in order to absorb the banks’ bad debts, inflation rears its head, and everyone with savings and who earns wages pays the price via a loss of purchasing power. What should have happened and still could happen is that the banks be forced to into insolvency and their assets liquidated on the open market.  This would clear the decks of all impaired debt and distribute the losses to those who owned the impaired debt: banks, pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and exposed individuals.  The costs of reckless lending and borrowing  would be seen to correctly follow the liability for that event so that every owner of debt would share equitably and proportionately in the losses.  The costs should lie where they fall.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Critics said their prescriptions are tragically misguided, leading to double-dip recession and mass unemployment across southern Europe. Austerity has not succeeded in stablising debt trajectories. The severity of the slump itself has become the main cause of spiralling debt levels in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Spain, Greece, Ireland and increasingly France.

IMF officials say privately that the policy regime has repeated the errors of the 1930s Gold Standard, when the burden of adjustment was imposed almost entirely on the weaker deficit states. This pulled the global fixed-exchange system into a contractionary vortex. Everybody was engulfed in the end, though it took many years. The IMF seems far from convinced that this grim possibility has been safely averted today.