Be careful what you wish for: or how Germany's blame game has backfired

The election of a Syriza-led government in Greece and its subsequent stand-off with Greece's creditors has disrupted Europe's preferred approach of kicking the can down the road. My colleague David Woodruff is not optimistic about Greece's bargaining position. Germany clearly has every incentive not to cave in to Greece's requests, not only because they prefer not to admit that Greece is insolvent, but also for fear of the ramifications a Greek win could have elsewhere.

Spain will vote in 2015, and current opinion polls gave Podemos, a party just past its first birthday, the lead over Spain's traditional governing parties, the Partito Popular and the Socialists, who together barely muster half of voter preferences in a recent poll. The failure of austerity has created a fertile terrain for alternative political forces, especially in the Southern periphery.


"The Grasshopper and the Ants" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

But there is a further reason for the success of new political forces such as Syriza, Podemos and Italy's Five Stars Movement. The dominant narrative of the Euro crisis is that of the Ant and the Grasshopper: unlike the virtuous North, who saved for the winter by running balanced budgets and reforming their economies to make themselves more competitive, the South overspent, overborrowed and failed to reform, leaving their economies vulnerable to downturns. Their politicians wasted money on pointless airports (although, see also Berlin's new hub), protected rent-seeking groups and often lined their own pockets. In a more sophisticated version of this story, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and colleagues argue that credit booms have an effect analogous to expansionary monetary policy, masking political incompetence in the eyes of voters and allowing corrupt politicians to claim credit for illusory economic growth.

Southern European politicians probably are exceptionally venal: Transparency International certainly thinks so. But blaming poor governance in the debtor nations handily shifts the focus away from the structural flaws in European Monetary Union that made such a crisis likely however well Southern European countries had been governed. German surpluses, in a monetary union, had to roll up somewhere, and they rolled up in the Eurozone's weakest economies, because that is where opportunities for investment appeared greatest.

The 'blame the victim' narrative has been effective up to now in distracting attention from the structural failure of EMU. So effective in fact, that it is widely believed in Southern Europe too: support for established political elites, the (mostly) men responsible for presiding over the disaster, has collapsed. Now that the credit taps have been turned off, Southern European voters have, albeit a little late in the day, reacted to the corruption and incompetence shown by the likes of Papandreou, Samaras and Berlusconi by turfing the rascals out. So now they will see sense and elect politicians that embody the austere virtues of Angela Merkel. Right?

Wrong. The elites that governed the South in the first decade of the euro may have been corrupt and incompetent, but they were committed to euro membership and (formally anyway) its rules. When the Troika came knocking, its recommendations - despite there being good reasons for thinking they would make matters worse - were accepted and largely implemented. Just as they escaped the blame for their own errors in the pre-crisis period, they are now crucified by their voters for policies decided elsewhere. And rather than turning to incorruptible experts to implement the austerity regime, Southern European voters now turn to politicians who would rather ditch that regime altogether. As Silvio Berlusconi's star waned, Italy voted not for the sober, Davos-attending former Eurocrat Mario Monti, but for rabble-rousing anti-euro comedian Beppe Grillo. And the Papandreou dynasty has been replaced by the tie-less Tsipras and Varoufakis.

The ant and the grasshopper indeed. Perhaps another fable is more appropriate here: the Tortoise and the Eagle. Or be careful what you wish for: you might get it.

A message from Germany: Not my problem

Paul Krugman complains (again) that Germany's tough line towards the South fails to appreciate how much its own relative economic success in recent years is the flip side of the Mediterranean countries' failure. By refusing to allow a higher eurozone inflation rate, Germany is effectively denying the South the chance to realign its relative costs in the same way Germany was able to do in the first years of the Eurozone. As Krugman shows in his post, Germany's success in holding down its labour costs was spectacularly successful precisely because the South did not manage to achieve zero real wage growth, and therefore provided a ready market for German products (not to mention an outlet for German financial surpluses). Resolving the crisis requires Germany to return the favour.

I'm always puzzled, looking at things from the perspective of the UK and Southern Europe, how it can be domestically politically impossible to persuade Germans to spend money. After all, the easiest solution to the crisis has always been that Germans dipped into some of their trade surplus to enjoy the South's warm beaches and hospitality, or maybe even buy a few second homes on the shores of the Mediterranean. It looks like a win-win solution. Yet, the hair-shirted Prussians prefer to stick it all under the mattress, and invite Southern Europeans to do the same, even if this does actually shrink the economy and put German savings at risk.

This can be seen as a cultural or ideological problem. In many ways, the discourse of belt-tightening on the European level has a quasi-religious quality. We need to suffer, and those who have least should suffer particularly, since being poor they probably deserve it. The poor, Weber would say, lack a beruf (calling), whilst the parsimonious rich are blessed and will be rewarded in the afterlife. The crisis becomes a morality play. Easy answers, like inflation or fiscal stimulus, must be wrong, because the crisis is a clear sign we have sinned and must atone.

I can't help thinking that it would be easier to convince Germans to adopt a more constructive attitude if Southern Europeans didn't enjoy such an enviously pleasant climate and physical environment. Whilst Germans have to endure long cold winters, the South basks in sunshine  - no wonder they don't work so hard. Of course, as has been well documented by now, the average Southern European worker has a much longer working week than the average German, and savings rates are also actually quite high in the South:

The truly profligate are the Anglo countries, with clearly lower savings rates than continental and Southern Europe.

The morality tale of Southern Europe's decline doesn't really fit with the facts, but my guess is that it is simply easier to digest for Germans than the harsh truth, which is that European Monetary Union was designed and is being governed in line with German interests. In other words, the moralistic tone of the Eurozone policy discourse is a cultural problem founded on a very real set of material advantages.

EMU was an extension of the process of market integration in Europe, removing one of the last remaining barriers to trade - national currencies. By creating a single currency, competitive devaluations became impossible. The usual beneficiaries of such devaluations - the weaker currency nations of Southern Europe - were prepared to sacrifice this competitive advantage in exchange for the inflationary anchor provided by Germany's dominance of the new currency union. What they didn't perhaps anticipate was quite how exposed they would become to Germany's extraordinary capacity to control price and wage rises, and how little help they would get from the ECB, which shaped monetary policy around the needs of slow-growing Germany, leaving the fast-growing periphery to inflate itself into an uncompetitive real exchange rate. And now, the only way back for the South is a brutal internal devaluation which, as well as closing off the labour market to anyone below the age of 35, will make debt servicing next to impossible.

Despite recent optimism about financial flows returning to Spain, this process of internal devaluation is far from complete, and there are incipient signs of deflation across the South, hence the ECB's increasingly desperate attempts to use monetary stimulus to get the economy moving. Still Germany protests that all of this has nothing to do with them, and refuses to play any part in raising internal demand in the Eurozone. But politics has an awkward habit of raising its ugly head in these situations. There will be elections in Spain within 2 years, and almost certainly in Italy and Greece even sooner. The problem will not go away, and Catalan nationalists and left populists in Spain, the Five Stars movement in Italy, Golden Dawn and Syriza in Greece, are all waiting in the wings. Barry Eichengreen established that you can't run a gold standard in a democracy. Is Europe trying to test this theory to destruction?

To Catch a Thief: What the Berlusconi sentence tells us about Italy

So finally, after 52 trials the communist judges that have infiltrated the Milanese courts and ultimately spread through the system all the way to the Cassazione (Italy's highest appeal court) have got their man. Berlusconi is convicted at the third and final level of judgement of a tax fraud committed some two decades ago and receives a prison sentence, although for a variety of reasons (age, an amnesty law, the possibility of 'alternative measures') he will not set foot in any jail.

The response from the convicted criminal himself was predictable enough: he has long argued that he is innocent of all charges and that his many trials are the result of left-wing judges trying to use the law to achieve a political end of eliminating the most popular politician in the country. What amazes many people outside Italy, and particularly in Northern Europe and the English-speaking countries, is that so many Italians still support him. After all, in some democracies the merest whiff of legal trouble or sexual scandal is enough to end a political career - British politician Chris Huhne was recently jailed and his political career terminated for evading a speeding ticket. Why do Italians seem so forgiving?

Let's try and get into the mind of the Berlusconi-supporting voter. First, there is the traditional deference with which many Italians view the rich and powerful - even Berlusconi's opponents refer to him as 'Il Cavaliere', after the honour of 'Cavaliere del Lavoro' (similar to our knighthood for services to industry) was bestowed on him by his friend Bettino Craxi back in the 1980s. Berlusconi plays to this role of the rich benefactor, giving supplicants gifts such as watches, jewels, apartments or simply money in the style of the traditional 'notables' of pre-democratic times. Of course, his TV channels are very helpful in cultivating this image.

But let's not assume that most of Berlusconi's support comes from these quarters. If there is one thing you can say about Italians, it is that they do not like to play the sucker. And in a country with such a Baroque administrative and legal culture as Italy, obeying the law and paying your taxes is fraught with danger. At best, you can end up out of pocket knowing that many others are cheating on their taxes. At worse, you can find yourself penalized for doing the right thing, since tax law is complicated and unpredictable, and very often tax levels are set on the assumption that citizens will indeed not report their full income. Not surprisingly, an estimated 13.5% of income is not declared to the tax authorities. More generally, Italy's legal system is exceptionally complex, with a much larger number of laws and regulations than other democracies, many of which are in flagrant contradiction with each other.

So when Berlusconi talks of the injustices he has faced at the hands of judges and the state administration, this chimes with the experiences of most if not all Italians. And those most likely to sympathize with him are to be found in the very large section of Italian society that owns property or their own business, or is self-employed. Sure, many Italians believe that the best way to deal with the problem would be if everyone paid their taxes and respected the law. Others take the view that that will never happen, and therefore the law should be applied in the most relaxed manner possible. When Berlusconi talks of 'liberty', he effectively means 'impunity'. Since the state and the law don't work properly, punishment is illegitimate, verging on totalitarian. This fits in nicely, of course, with Berlusconi's strident anti-communism.

In the end the saga of the justice system is representative of the broader problem of the development of the Italian state. The Piedmontese nation-builders of the late 19th century attempted to create a unified Italy on the basis of a French-style administration, in which local resistance to state power would be overcome by the imposition of a systematic, uniform set of laws to be implemented by a centralized bureaucracy. Unlike in France, the Italian state never quite succeeded in turning 'peasants into Italians'. The state remains, for many Italians, an unloved and even loathed presence, tolerated for providing tangible benefits such as jobs in the public sector, state pensions, and healthcare, but not respected. In large sectors of Italian society the state has failed to establish itself as a necessary framework for civic coexistence or an efficient and fair economic system.

For this reason, we can get rid of Berlusconi (perhaps), but it is much harder to overcome berlusconismo.

The Grasshopper and the Ant Revisited

Some interesting posts on debt from Antonio Fatas and Noah Smith which I'd recommend to anyone tempted to believe that debt is necessarily a bad thing (also Krugman here, here and here making similar points after David Stockman's rant). Noah Smith's post is headed by a picture of Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant, a typical metaphor used by the debt phobic.

Just in case you want the short version, the story is basically that headline debt figures don't tell us that much about their consequences, and we have to consider two important variables: what the debt is actually spent on (Smith), and the ratio of assets to liabilities (Fatas). Put simply, getting into debt to finance consumption probably places a burden (in the form of lower than otherwise consumption) on future generations, but doing it to finance investment all else equal has the opposite effect.

Drawing on Smith's analysis, we can see that the remedy of debt reduction can end up being more damaging than the debt itself. The UK, for instance, has succeeded in cutting its government borrowing only by cutting government investment, which in the current climate means cutting investment in the economy generally (given the private sector's pro-cyclical reluctance to invest). This reduces the productive capacity of the economy in the future, reducing future consumption. In this case then, debt reduction, not debt itself, is what is placing a burden on future generations, since George Osborne is (rightly) preserving the current consumption of the growing elderly population, which constitutes the lion's share of social spending.

Fatas' point about balance sheets is another way of making the same point. Debt corresponds to assets; or as Krugman keeps pointing out, at the level of a whole economy debt is largely money we owe to ourselves. We can see that clearly enough by looking at Germany, whose headline gross debt number is actually pretty high, but whose net external investment position is comfortably in the black. Ignoring the assets that correspond to liabilities is like equating a student loan with credit card debt to pay for a holiday.

So the emphasis on debt is missing the point. It is investment that is important for future generations, not debt. And of course, by squeezing current consumption debt reduction in a recession squeezes current production, reducing the ability to pay off the debt without unnecessary pain. In the periphery countries of the eurozone, unemployment is driving the young - the future productive workers - to migrate, perhaps never to return, whilst the old - who are current consumers, but relatively unproductive - remain. In Aesop's terms, austerity kills the ants, leaving only the Grasshopper, sitting unhappily under a leaking roof. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Well that's for a future post.

The Euro Crisis as 'Cheese Touch'

My favourite scene in the first 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' movie is the 'cheese touch'. A piece of mouldy cheese is left in the schoolyard, and the kids keep well away from it as it gets greener and slimier. Until, one day, someone touches it - and they are ostracised until they can pass it on to someone else who will get the same treatment. The cheese touch is passed around the school, creating horror and fear in everyone. It's kind of Camus' La Peste for pre-teens.

The euro crisis is starting to look a bit like the cheese touch. The banking crisis of 2007-8 created a financial blackhole, and at some point we are going to have to come to terms with the losses and start from scratch. But of course none of us want to take the losses ourselves. In the absence of some kind of sensible and credible agreement to spread the pain, each group/nation/individual has to try to protect themselves from taking a disproportionate share of the losses, and assume others will do the same. In short, we'll keep well away from whoever has the cheese touch. Today, it's theunfortunate small savers of Cyprus.

The answer has got to be that the burden of adjustment is shared. This is for moral, political and economic reasons. Morally, because, well, life isn't fair but it shouldn't be Mad Max. Politically, because unless we give up on democracy, the victims of adjustment will protest and remove representatives who impose unfair burdens. And economically, because the weakest groups politically tend to be the weakest groups economically, and they simply can't take the losses - witness the brutal yet futile welfare reforms in the UK.

Who decides how to share the pain of adjustment? In Wimpy Kid, the responsible adult - the school janitor - is also disgusted by the mouldy cheese and sweeps around it. The EU is probably our demotivated janitor. And in Wimpy Kid, the cheese touch's journey around the school ends when it lands on Dieter Muller, a German exchange student. Baffled by zey cheese touch, Dieter takes it with him back to Dusseldorf. My guess is that ultimately the euro crisis will end the same way.

The Italian Election: Why it's Actually Good News

So, with all the usual commonplace reactions to the Italian election: 'chaos', 'ungovernable', and so on - it's time for a contrarian view. In a number of ways this is a great outcome.

First, Berlusconi will be happy with the result for sure, because it gives him huge bargaining power - no majority in the Senate is feasible without him. But let's remember that his coalition won only 29% of the vote, down from 47% in 2008, and his party, the PDL, won 21%, down from 37%. So the worst expression of Italian corruption and conservatism took a battering in the polls. Italians are not as forgiving as we feared.

Second, the two parties that represented continuity in sticking to the absurd commitment to austerity - the PD and Monti's Scelta Civica - both performed way below expectations. Monti's result is hard to read as anything but a rejection of European technocracy and its perverse insistence on pain and sacrifice as the way to recovery. Greece and Spain have largely caved, Italy, the biggest and most important Southern economy, and probably the most self-confident despite its problems, has said 'basta'. This has got to be good for Europe - better we accept this now, then have to wait for Golden Dawn to win in Greece.

Third, Italy's venal and reactionary political class is obviously a huge problem, and the amazing performance of Beppe Grillo's Five Stars Movement - at 25% the most voted individual party - shows that many Italians, and especially the young, have had enough of their politicians. Again. Of course, Berlusconi himself emerged out of the ruins of the last exercise in eliticide, back in the early 1990s. He then proceeded to piece together a new regime of rent-seeking and policy paralysis which is responsible for Italy's long-term decline. Grillo may have no policies, but as a protest vote you can't get much better than that. If nothing else, Grillo sends a clear signal to the crooks that a large number of Italians have had enough of the stealing and incompetence.

Now, this does not mean I'm optimistic. But if we add this result to the steady shift in the debate towards the inescapable conclusion that austerity is a disaster (even Olivier Blanchard thinks so now), then perhaps Europe will edge towards some more sensible approach to preserving the euro. Will this solve all our problems? No. But if Merkel wants the euro to survive, she'll have to start listening to Southern European voters as well as her own.

New paper! The Trouble with Economic Reform in Southern Europe

The Trouble with Economic Reform:

Understanding the Debt Crisis in Spain and Italy

Jonathan Hopkin

Introduction

The ‘great recession’ of the late 2000s began as the collapse of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of highly leveraged capitalism, but the countries that have suffered most have been the Southern European democracies, often referred to as the ‘PIGS’[i]. The transformation of what started as a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis has ended up engulfing countries who, for the most part, were not particularly associated with the financial excesses of the boom years, and has allowed debate to move away from reform of the financial system in the Anglo-Saxon countries to the sustainability of government spending in Europe, and particularly Southern Europe, and the future of the euro currency.

To read the full paper, click here.

Grillo ergo sum

So in reply to Monti's Agenda, Beppe Grillo has decided he also ought to come up with a programme. Grillo's '16 points' is a pretty depressing read, confirming the total lack of any innovative thinking on the Italian political scene at the moment. Grillo's party basically represents the traditional 'antipolitica' - populist, pseudo-Poujadiste hatred of the political class - which has long been a powerful force in Italy, coexisting oddly with what has actually been a very stable party system for a most of the post-war period.

Italians have comparatively very low levels of trust in their political leaders, yet take a very long time to replace them. The last big political earthquake was in 1992-94, when the post-war political elite revolving around Giulio Andreotti and the slightly younger cohort of Bettino Craxi and Arnaldo Forlani was swept away by the Tangentopoli revelations of entrenched and often spectacular corruption. After the 1994 elections, a new elite based around Berlusconi's dominance of the right (alongside the former Fascist Gianfranco Fini and the Northern separatist Umberto Bossi), former Christian Democrats Romano Prodi and Pierferdinando Casini in the centre and the d'Alema generation of ex-communists on the left, took control and remained at the commands until now. A TV news programme in the UK in 1994 would have featured figures such as John Major, Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Italian telegiornali still revolve around Berlusconi, Fini, and Casini on the centre-right, and Bersani was already a minister in the first Prodi government elected in 1996.

The forthcoming elections look likely to change all this, with Bossi now off the scene (largely due to illness)) and Berlusconi fighting a last battle to remain relevant. But the novelties on the political scene - Grillo and Monti - seem themselves to be fighting the battles of the past. Monti, himself just short of 70, represents the generation of Eurocrats responsible for designing European Monetary Union, determined to apply the orthodox medicine of austerity to reassure the markets and senior European partners that Italy will keep its side of the eurodeal. Grillo, a comparatively youthful 64, proclaims a sweeping condemnation of the entire Italian political class, and offers a programme in which 10 of the 16 points are focused on reducing the financial costs of professional politicians and eliminating political parties from the decision-making process. On the economy, Grillo suggests a referendum on the euro, a guaranteed minimum income (in which currency?), a stop to big infrastructure projects and a vaguely defined programme to help small and medium-sized businesses. As an economic programme, this could have come straight out of the vague autogestionaire thinking of 1970s eurocommunism.

Faced with this choice, emigration looks the best bet for Italians who have not yet claimed their pensions. Torn between a dour and self-interested technocracy and an opportunistic and ignorant populism, the only viable choice is Bersani's stale recipe of timid liberalization and maintenance of a notoriously unjust and unbalanced welfare state. More than ever, Italy is suffering from its failure to develop a mainstream, social democratic, egalitarian and pro-market party on the left. The PD is trying to become this, but remains trapped by its conservative Catholic wing on the right and its traditional communist wing on the left, neither of whom seem to understand how markets need to be regulated in the modern age.

Privatize and be damned

The Italian elections are looming, and amidst the chaos of elite manoeuvrings there is the glimmering of a policy debate (a bit of a rarity in Italian election campaigns). Mario Monti, despite announcing he would not personally stand in the elections (being a life senator, he will be in parliament anyway) has nailed his colours to the mast publishing an 'agenda' (basically a manifesto) and inviting party lists to commit to electing him Prime Minister once the new parliament is formed.

Interestingly, Monti's programme has already been condemned as 'statist' by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, the economist duo that have spent the last few years vainly demanding liberalization and reform of the Italian economy. Alesina and Giavazzi's argument is that the Italian state acts as a break on economic activity, and a large-scale programme of privatization is needed to liberate Italians from one of the heaviest tax-burdens in the OECD. Rather than taxing the income of productive sectors and then giving them free services, for A % G richer citizens should be offered lower tax rates and invited to take out private insurance policies for healthcare and pay market-based fees for school and university. Mmm, it would be fascinating if that had ever been tried somewhere - then we could maybe get to see what would happen! Of course we have the natural experiment of the US, whose healthcare system is the most expensive and almost certainly the least efficient of any advanced nation. And sure, it has great universities, but I can't remember any studies showing US private high schools as being better than the largely state-funded systems in Europe.

But actually it's even worse than that. Privatization can be at best a modest improvement (for instance, airlines in the 1980s and telecoms, for the most part), a lot of the time, pretty disappointing (utilities without adequate regulation), and sometimes, totally catastrophic (UK railways, Russian... well, just about everything). The point being that even if you believe the market is likely to perform better than the state, privatization isn't enough on its own - it needs to be done properly. And the institutions that determine whether or not a privatization is done properly are precisely the same ones that determine whether or not a state company will fail. So privatization and liberalization in themselves don't solve anything, unless you manage to solve the original problem which is the failure of the political system to nationalize or privatize, regulate or liberalize, efficiently.

So to take an example, cited in the comments to A & G's article, car insurance in Italy before 1994 was a cartel regulated by the state, which fixed prices and allowed insurance companies to enjoy profits without competitive pressure. Then, liberalisation came along with the removal of price controls, and hoopla! Italian car insurance prices increased by 464% in less than two decades. The reason presumably being that the state failed to regulate competition properly in the market, and therefore the removal of price ceilings left the insurance companies free to fix prices at a higher level.

What makes Alesina and Giavazzi sure that privatization in Italy would not be just as bad as statism? No idea. But the fact is that wholesale privatisation - especially of delicate sectors like healthcare and education - would be an accident waiting to happen unless Italy manages to reform its politics. And pushing hard for American-style solutions, precisely when the US is in almost as bad a mess as Italy, doesn't seem politically smart to me.

Catalonia: First Step Towards Independence?

Some more thoughts on Catalonia, this time on the LSE EUROPP blog:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/11/27/catalonia-election/

Catalonia: a nation with a state?

After spending the last few weeks observing the slow-moving collapse of the Spanish state, the time has come to put down my thoughts on the idea of Catalan independence. Like in any debate on nationalism, these thoughts are part rational, part emotional, and like in any debate relating to identities, someone will probably be offended (for this reason I never blog on the Middle East). So here goes.

The first point is that there is something vaguely insane about using the term 'independence' to describe the putative creation of a Catalan state. As a small European economy, Catalonia would be totally dependent on its neighbours for trade, and assuming it is allowed to seamlessly remain in the European Union, it will have little to no real decision-making power over the issues of the future of the Eurozone and the European integration process in general. Even more than that, nearly four centuries of political integration into the rest of Spain has meant that the Catalan economy is deeply interconnected with the rest of Iberia. Again, decisions made outside Catalonia - potentially by a bitter Spanish electorate sour at the 'divorce' - will have a major effect on its future.

That of course doesn't mean Catalonia can't be a successful state in economic terms. Given the Catalans' famed parsimony, it was predictable that the debate on 'independence' has actually revolved around the economic consequences of the split with Spain. As one of the richer regions in Spain, located closer to the main European markets than other regions, there is every chance the Catalan economy will do just as well if not better outside of Spain. But here's the rub - Spain is in colossal economic trouble, and Catalonia, notwithstanding the supposed 'fiscal dividend' it would gain from no longer subsidizing poorer Spanish regions, is not significantly less exposed to the problems facing the Southern eurozone. Like the rest of Spain, it had a housing boom and bust, its government has racked up huge deficits since the crisis, and its wage costs are uncompetitive. However well the secession negotiations could go, the new Catalan state will remain in the group of troubled Eurozone economies, and all the signs are that these economies will take a very long time to return to growth. NB, no Catalan nationalists are advocating leaving the euro or defaulting on their share of the debt.

The economic crisis has clearly acted as a trigger for the calls for independence, but of course Catalan nationalism has long been about much more than economics. The centrality of the Catalan language and hostility to the reactionary nationalism of the Spanish right have been if anything more important in the period since Franco's death, in which Catalonia, like other 'historic nationalities' in Spain, has acquired significant powers of self-government. The autonomy enjoyed by the Catalan government, the Generalitat, has allowed it to push hard on linguistic policy, ensuring that recent generations of Catalans have been educated in the Catalan language (as well as learning a Catalan-centric version of Spanish history). Until recently, most Catalans were quite happy with their status as a decentralized region within Spain, which correponded to the largely dual national identity of the population (which the plurality of Catalans regarding themselves as both Catalan and Spanish in some measure). The push to independence marks a significant radicalization of Catalan national claims, and although it has clearly been building as a strand of Catalan identity over the past couple of decades, the shift towards independence of the centre-right CiU party led by Artur Mas is a major departure.

So the elections will be worth watching for signs of hesitation amongst the electorate. It is true now that a sizable majority of parties currently present in the Catalan Parlament are advocating independence, but these parties represent a percentage of the electorate which is clearly superior to the numbers expressing support for independence in the opinion surveys we have available. So the question is, will CiU be able to drag its more conservative electorate to the pro-independence camp? The weakness of the two main anti-independence parties - the Spanish Popular Party and the Catalan affiliate of the Socialist Party - makes them unlikely beneficiaries of any hesitance in the Catalan nationalist electorate. But it will be worth taking a close look at turnout. The Catalan population is actually fairly divided between a majority of Catalan speakers and a large minority of Castillian speakers, many of whom are now migrants from Latin America, rather than from Southern Spain as in the past. Will Spanish-speaking or Spanish-identifying Catalan citizens really want to go for an independent state? Will the older generation of Andalusian-born immigrants who have historically supported the Spanish national level parties really accept independence? It is true that Catalan nationalism is more civic and inclusive than, say, Basque nationalism, but how would non-Catalan speakers feel about the official status of Castillian in a new independent state?

The debate so far has barely registered these themes. In fact one of the oddest features of the campaign has been the intervention of overseas-based academics, most notably the economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, becoming vocal and emotive advocates of Catalan 'patriotism', revealing an uncharacteristic lack of seny (Catalan for a kind of pragmatic common sense). Nationalism is ultimately an emotive construct which fits ill with rational debate. For this reason, debate around identities is rarely conducive to sensible decision-making, as the history of the last couple of centuries has clearly established. Catalonia does not have to fall into the kind of disastrous traps of other secession processes, but the insouciance with which such a major change is being contemplated suggests a lack of awareness or a short historical memory.

The Economist discovers social democracy

Interesting to see The Economist lauding Sweden: The new model. Sweden has a generous welfare state, strong trade unions, and high living standards. What's more, at the moment Sweden is one of the few advanced democracies that is growing and has a budget surplus. So it's about time some of the mainstream commentariat starting to notice what was going on.

In fact Sweden is not really an outlier or an exception. If we look around the advanced democracies, the best performing countries have been those with the most generous welfare states and most entrenched trade unions (Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, and of course Germany). In contrast the countries with deregulated financial markets, weak trade unions and limited welfare states are mostly suffering, and the PIIGS of the Eurozone periphery, despite popular myth, also have weak unions and patchy social coverage.

So the crisis, in fact, has exposed the bankruptcy of the free market, anti-social model that has dominated politics and economic policy since the 1980s. Strangely, political leaders have failed to catch on, and continue to plug the same snake oil, in the guise of 'structural reform', which has brought disaster. The misery of the current recession, instead of sparking a search for equitable solutions, has instead led to a descent into masochistic and self-defeating austerity policies, with a bit of free market liberalism thrown in. After 2-3 years of this medicine has failed to turn around any of the economies it has been applied in, a rethink is overdue. Unfortunately it will probably take total social breakdown (probably in Greece and/or Spain) before the humble pie is consumed.

'via Blog this'

Stress-testing European democracy

One thing we have learned so far in the Great Recession is that stress tests for banks are pretty much a waste of time, because nobody seems to take them that seriously. Like all other estimates of the depth of our financial crisis, the stress tests understate the scale of banking losses and overstate their ability to withstand further shocks. Current estimates of Spanish banks' shortfall -  around 60 billion euros - are scarcely believable, given that the collapse of the housing bubble in Ireland - a country with a tenth of the population of Spain, was over 50 billion. So much for stress tests for banks.

But we are doing quite a lot better at stress-testing the democratic regimes of periphery countries. Yes, that's right, those countries with the most recent experience of dictatorship, the ones whose democracies are scarcely two generations old. Greece, Spain and Portugal began the 1970s, the last great economic crisis, as authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of brutality. By the time the years of stagflation were over, dictators had been booted out of all three countries and replaced by democracies which, on the whole, have been as successful as anyone observing events in the 1970s could have hoped.

Until now. Unemployment of 25% in Spain and Greece, well over 50% youth unemployment, a total GDP contraction in Greece of 25% since 2007, and more austerity to come.

I'm still pretty confident of democracy in Spain and, as far as I can tell, Portugal. And I think Italy, with all its huge failings as a political system, has far too powerful a democratic majority to regress to where it was in the 1930s.

But Greece, I have to say, really worries me now. Stories of the police referring citizens to the viligante arm of Golden Dawn, and the recent polls placing the thugs as third party ahead of PASOK, set my hair on end. In Spain, democracy is being stressed in different ways - not only on the streets, with increasingly tense demonstrations by the real victims of the crisis, the young (and a nostalgically brutal response by the police), but also with the Catalan challenge to the 1978 constitutional settlement, which has the potential to create political chaos.

Not only are we unlearning the economic lessons of the 1930s, as Paul Krugman keeps reminding us, we are also unlearning the political ones. When placed in an impossible situation, there is no guarantee voters will respond with trusting patience in the established elites when there are political entrepreneurs out there with easy solutions to their problems. So far, only Angela Merkel amongst major European leaders has survived an election since 2008. In Greece, rapid turnover has decimated the party system and opened up a huge space for the worst kind of racist nationalist demagoguery. And the worst thing is, that the mainstream parties are, generally speaking, at a loss to respond to the crisis, so we can hardly blame people for turning to the alternative.

There's more at stake here than economic growth. The EU elites need, as Samuel L. Jackson might say, to 'wake the f*** up'.

Italy and the EU debt crisis

Commentary on the Euro crisis to be published in the autumn:

In 2012, the Eurozone crisis has begun to follow a predictable script. First, a member state begins to show signs of financial stress, with a growing public deficit and debt burden alarming markets. The spike in borrowing costs sparks a policy response by the member state government, raising taxes and cutting public spending, which depresses economic activity further. The resulting poor growth data leads to further increases in borrowing costs. When these costs hit an unsustainable level, the European Union institutions intervene by lending the struggling country bailout money, in return for further commitments to reduce the deficit.  A further fiscal squeeze follows, sending the debtor nation into what economist Paul Krugman describes as a ‘death spiral’.

A footballing lesson

So Spain triumph again.

Not just triumph, but crush an Italian side that in turn had crushed the fancied Germans the other side. Maybe a game too far for the azzurri, they looked tired and barely got into the game. But how on earth do you play against this team?

And team is the operative word. Great international sides of the past have often been associated with one great player: Pelé's Brazil, Maradona's Argentina, Cruyff's Holland, Zidane's France and so on. And sure, Xavi and Iniesta have stood out in particular. But what is striking about Spain is that they could probably put out two elevens that would give any other team a game. Villa breaks a leg? Never mind, there is Jordi Alba. Torres is out of form? Who cares, we'll just play 8 attacking midfielders and let Fabregas and Silva score the goals. Puyol injured? No worries, play Arbeloa alongside Piqué and Ramos. If Casillas ever got hurt, you would get Pepe Reina, maybe the best keeper in the Premiership. Arsenal's Arteta doesn't even make the squad. In the end, Italy's players expended so many resources to get to the final they had little energy left, Spain could rotate and give key players a break without missing a kick.

God knows what would have happened had England encountered this team.

So much for dynamic provisioning

Nice piece in Bloomberg by Jonathan Weil (The EU Smiled While Spain’s Banks Cooked the Books), pointing out the perverse effects of the Spanish regulatory practice of demanding that banks adjust their accounts for the potential vagueries of the economic cycle ('dynamic provisioning'), supposedly giving them a buffer against downturns.

Turns out that Spanish banks were able in this way to hide their losses from the popping of the housing bubble until quite recently. Has this helped smooth the financial consequences of the downturn? No need to answer that question.

All this goes to show that tweaking accounting practices is never going to achieve much if the financial system is based on the kind of Ponzi schemes we've been seeing in the past two-three decades. Governments are going to have to start getting on top of what banks do, and providing better regulatory and fiscal incentives to real investment in real productive activities. How do they do this? Don't ask me, I'm not an economist.

From technocracy to populism

A blog post for the LSE's EUROPP blog:


In upcoming elections across the Eurozone periphery, voters are likely to react to austerity by replacing technocracy with populism | EUROPP

"As Spain lurches into economic and financial collapse only months after electing a new government with a landslide majority, the difficult relationship between crisis management and democratic politics once again comes into view. Spain’s rapid descent into economic meltdown has been greeted by anti-austerity commentators such as Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf as further evidence of the need for fiscal and monetary expansion on a massive scale in the Eurozone. But it also has important implications for the nature of democracy in the European Union...."

The myth of moral hazard, or why punishing debtors is futile

This crisis, and its Eurozone variant in particular, is teaching us an awful lot about the political economy. Sadly, most of what we are learning is entirely at odds with the conventional wisdom which still informs policy. And a good part of the wrongheadedness that we are subject to revolves around the concept of moral hazard.

The plausible expectation of bailouts creates moral hazard, we are told. Yes, it does. There is plenty of evidence that big financial institutions take risks because they expect governments to pick up the pieces if everything goes pear-shaped. Certainly, if top bankers are anywhere near as smart as their paypackets suggest, they should lever up and max on risk, confident that governments will plug the gap if their bets go bad.

Trouble is, we also know that finance is also prone to bouts of irrational exuberance and panic. Moral hazard may exacerbate the exuberant parts of the cycle, but it also mitigates the panic when things turn bad. Part of (maybe most of) the reason that the Eurozone periphery is in such a self-fulfilling debt trap is that there isn't enough moral hazard around - investors are terrified that if their paper goes bad, they will lose everything. And so the downward spiral accelerates, making bailout infinitely more expensive as panic sets in.

What about governments? Well here the virtuous Northern economies in the Eurozone are afraid that bailouts now will encourage Southern sovereigns to ignore their fiscal problems in the future, leaving Germany and the others on the hook forever. Moral hazard here gives politicians an incentive to run deficits and buy popularity, whilst others pick up the tab.

The trouble with this one is that the politicians that are punished are not usually the ones who exploited moral hazard. Mariano Rajoy took over when Spain's fiscal situation was already out of control, yet he is the politician being exposed to popular anger now. For the anti-bailout policy to work, voters would have to be sophisticated enough to gauge how likely it is that a party's fiscal proposal at time t will result in another party having to impose brutal austerity at time t + 1. Very often, as in Greece, successive alternating governments are responsible for the fiscal mess. How can voters cast a partisan vote that sends the correct signal to politicians, so that the risk of irresponsible policy is averted? Do we really think that if this crisis ever ends Greek voters will become eager observers of fiscal rigour on the part of their politicians, anxious to avoid this all happening again? For this to happen some Greek politicians would have to offer voters fiscal prudence whilst others stuck to deficit-fuelled patronage politics, making elections a clear choice between happiness and hazard. That's rarely the way politics works.

In short, moral hazard is a red herring, and theorizations of its role in the crisis are crude, confused and make no historical sense. In the real world of politics and markets, when you get to the point where bailouts are necessary, it's far too late to worry about moral hazard. This is what we should be worrying about.

Angela's dilemmas and the nightmare scenario

The FT has a nice piece today about the loneliness of Angela Merkel, torn between seeing the Eurozone fall apart and taking decisions that would rescue the periphery but provoke a furious backlash at home. It is indeed easy to criticize Merkel for her cagey approach, which given the fear in the markets seems almost designed to make the costs of rescue as high as they could possibly be. I agree completely with these criticisms, but what people like Martin Wolf and Paul Krugman often miss - focused as they are on debating the stupid austerian policies advocated by many economists - is that this is a political process.

Merkel is not doing what is necessary, but the reason may not be just that she doesn't know what she's doing. First, she is a government leader in a consensus-oriented democracy, with coalition government and federal institutions, and like any other party leader she faces the constant threat of dissent from within her own party. Juggling these various threats to her position are probably her main concern, regardless of how much she understands about the nature of the Euro crisis. It could well turn out that a plan for economic recovery, involving massive bailouts, permanent ceding of German fiscal autonomy, and the collapse of the Euro's monetary conservatism, would cost her her job.

Second, even if Merkel understood what Krugman and Wolf eloquently argue day after day, and had the political authority to convince the German political class and electorate of what needed to be done, she would run into another problem - the European-level joint decision trap, Fritz Scharpf's well known conceptualization of the restraints on policymaking in federal states like Germany and intergovernmental organizations like the European Union. What if the European Commission, the ECB and the other Northern Euro member states said no? Merkel would have blown her political clout in Germany for nothing. Getting anything through the European institutions is complicated and time-consuming. Add the permanent subsidizing of the hapless 'Club Med' nations by the virtuous Weberians of Northern Europe, and you get a recipe for the worst kind of Euro-paralysis.

Finally, we get to a further dimension to the politics of crisis that has been widely ignored, even by the smartest commentators - democracy and the people (easy to forget about, I know). Even if all the dilemmas outlined above could be resolved, there is no way a solution to the Euro mess can be sustainable if it doesn't have popular support. So far, this point has been made most obviously in the struggling periphery, where elections have wiped out the governments responsible for crisis and austerity in Ireland, Spain and Greece, whilst Berlusconi has been forced out in Italy. Yet the same problem could easily arise in the North, as Geert Wilders' recent departure from the Dutch governing majority shows. If Merkel signs up for a Eurozone welfare state, there's every chance that an electoral earthquake could shake the German party system just as it already has in Greece.

Which brings me to my nightmare scenario. I still believe that politicians will blink before allowing the Eurozone to implode, wreaking havoc all around. The reason for this is that I think most policymakers are sufficiently aware of what the consequences could be, and are rightly terrified. But democratic elections are a cruder instrument for making decisions. Greek and German voters, exercising the democratic right to express their outrage, could place Europe in an impasse which would lead inevitably to the catastrophe we all fear. Popular pressure for intransigence in the North, to match popular pressure against austerity in the South, could place Europe's leaders in a chicken game that will end badly for everybody.

The only way out is leadership. Come out, explain to people what is going on, and hope for the best. But that has never been the way European integration works.

The Eurozone: an economy without a state

In today's FT Martin Wolf, as ever, nails it (The riddle of German self-interest - FT.com). One of the peculiar features of the crisis is that the Euro was created with the express purpose of facilitating financial and commercial integration, and yet at the first crisis the Eurozone institutions have refused to backstop the cross-border financial commitments that have been made, leading to a flight for safety which has created havoc. Didn't anyone think this could happen?

Certainly the history of financial globalization offered a few hints. Eric Helleiner's excellent book States and the Emergence of Global Finance details the myriad ways in which governments backstopped the increasing financial integration of the period after the 1970s, most notably by stepping in to halt financial crises with bailouts. These bailouts confirmed governments' commitments to the newly integrated financial order and gave investors the confidence to continue treating the global financial arena as a properly functioning market.

The saddest thing about this whole crisis is that it underlines the fatal lack of understanding on the part of policymakers, and the academics who advised them, of how markets actually work. They designed institutions which essentially, like in Alan Greenspan's 'flawed' model, relied on market participants behaving rationally (whatever that means). Rational behaviour is, of course, difficult to define and operationalize, but one thing that we know for sure is that piling money into indebted states with a history of reneging on commitments and overinflated real estate markets was obviously outside any meaningful theory of the self-regulating market. It's time to recognize that the theory was wrong, and that the Eurozone, like any other economy, needs a government.