Events have, in short, thoroughly falsified the premises of the original design. If that is the design the dominant members still want, they must remove some of the existing members. Managing that process is, however, nigh on impossible. If, however, they want the eurozone to work as it is, at least three changes are inescapable. First, banking systems cannot be allowed to remain national. Banks must be backed by a common treasury or by the treasury of unimpeachably solvent member states. Second, cross-border crisis finance must be shifted from the ESCB to a sufficiently large public fund. Third, if the perils of sovereign defaults are to be avoided, as the ECB insists, finance of weak countries must be taken out of the market for years, perhaps even a decade. Such finance must be offered on manageable conditions in terms of the cost but stiff requirements in terms of the reforms. Whether the resulting system should be called a “transfer union” is uncertain: that depends on whether borrowers pay everything back (which I doubt). But it would surely be a “support union”.
The eurozone confronts a choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution or open-ended official support. The existence of this choice proves that an enduring union will at the very least need deeper financial integration and greater fiscal support than was originally envisaged. How will the politics of these choices now play out? I truly have no idea. I wonder whether anybody does.
And as I have been warning in the Greek Fire series for over a year now, the end result will be the end of the Euro as a currency. The larger effects will almost certainly include another serious hit to the global financial system as well. The individual banks in countries like Ireland, Greece, and Spain owe German banks serious money, and if they default, the whole thing is going to come apart...either that or Germany's going to have to eat billions of euros in debt restructuring, causing basically the same thing.
The Greek Fire situation just got a whole lot worse, folks. Count on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment