A blog on the political, economic and social causes and implications of the crisis in the Southern periphery of the Eurozone.

I'm a political scientist working on political parties and elections, social and economic policy and political corruption, with a particular focus on Italy and Spain. For more details on my work, see CV here, and LSE homepage here. For media or consultancy enquiries, please email J.R.Hopkin@lse.ac.uk.

Friday, September 23, 2011

The Euro crisis is nothing to do with budgets

Krugman and Mansori on the Origins of the Euro Crisis: it's all about capital flows. The countries now in trouble were not all running fiscal deficits, but they were all running trade deficits, and that seems to be the best predictor of sovereign debt crisis.

So it turns out that the 'recklessness' that Southern Europe supposedly engaged in was allowing German and other Northern European savers to invest their money there. Doesn't quite have the same ring as the morality tale about budgets.