Greece’s continued suffering

Greece is once again back on the agenda in the European financial markets and we are once again talking about Greek default and even about Grexit. There seems to be no end to the suffering of the Greek economy and the Greek population.

I must say that I have a lot of sympathy with the Greeks – they have terrible policy makers and no matter how many austerity measures are implemented there is no signs of any visible improvement either in public finances or in the overall economic performance.

Hence, the Greek economy has essentially been in decline for nearly nine years and there seems to be no signs of it changing.

To me there is no doubt what the main reason it – it is the monetary strangulation of the Greek economy due to the countries membership of the euro area.

I don’t like to see the euro area fall apart and I believe it can be avoided, but on the other hand I have a very hard time seeing Greece getting out of this crisis without either receiving a more or less complete debt write-off or leaving the euro area (or both).

ECB can’t do much more

Since 2008 there has been two dimensions to the monetary strangulation of the Greek economy.

First of all for much of the period since 2008 the ECB has kept overall euro zone monetary conditions far too tight to achieve its own 2% inflation target as illustrated by our – Markets & Money Advisory’s – composite indicator for monetary conditions in the euro zone, which shows that monetary conditions in the euro zone essentially were too tight from 2008 until early 2015 and only has been broadly neutral (indicator close to zero) over the past 20 months or so.

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Second, the euro zone is not an optimal currency area and it is very clear that Greece today needs significantly easier monetary conditions than for example Germany, which might need tighter monetary conditions.

Looking at these to factors it is clear that the ECB indeed has moved in the right direction in the last two years and overall we believe that monetary conditions right now are about right for the euro zone as a whole. However, the problem is that monetary conditions still is far too tight for Greece.

As long as overall euro zone monetary conditions were too tight there was a good argument that the ECB should ease monetary policy to ensure that it would hit its 2% inflation target over the medium-term and that would help Greece. However, that is not really the case now. While there is no reason for the ECB to tighten monetary conditions it is today much harder to argue for new measures to ease euro zone monetary conditions.

That makes Greece’s problem even more acute and makes the argument for Greek euro exit even stronger.

The problem of course is that Greece is damned no matter what. If Greece stays in the euro area then the hardship continues for the Greek people and there is no reason to believe that more austerity fundamentally will improve public finances and while there have been some signs of growth beginning to pick over the past year any minor tightening of monetary policy from the ECB will likely send Greece directly back to recession.

On the other hand if Greece where to leave the euro area it is unlikely it would happen in an orderly fashion. Rather it is likely to happen in a chaotic fashion and lot of things could go badly wrongly – also for the rest of the euro zone. Just think about what speculation it would create regarding possible Italian or even French euro exit. And will euro exit also mean EU exit and what will be the geopolitical ramifications of this?

So it is not an easy choice. However, I continue to believe that it would be both in the interest of Greece and of the rest of euro area as a whole that Greece leaves the euro area.

The suffering will have to end. However, Greece should not be kicked out of the euro. Rather Greece should be helped out of the euro. Unfortunately there is little will within the EU or the ECB to make this happen and populists around Europe are eager to use this debacle to further sabotage European reforms.

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See also my earlier posts on Greece her:

When effort and outcome is not the same thing – the case of Greece

A simple measure of European political instability – yes, Greece tops the ranking

Greece versus Turkey: It’s the exchange rate exchange rate regime stupid!

“You are both gentlemen…or something” – debating Greece with Lorcan Roche Kelly

How the RECOVERY will look like when Greece leaves the euro

The end game or a new beginning for Greece? We have seen all this before

Political unrest is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon – also in Greece

Greece in the news – 81 years ago…

Greece is not really worse than Germany (if you adjust for lack of growth)

Remember the last time Greece was kicked out of a monetary union?

Marek Belka suggests dual currency solution for Greece

Argentine lessons for Greece

Germany 1931, Argentina 2001 – Greece 2011?

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F. A. Hayek on Brexit

I am in Munich today to do a presentation on Brexit at the European Institute COO-CFO Roundtable.

As I was leaving home this morning I brought along Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom. I realized it was at least two decades since I had read it (all) last time so I thought it could be interesting to read it again.

And since I am speaking about Brexit today I started with chapter 15 “The Prospects if International Order” and lo and behold I found this very interesting quote that seems highly relevant to the discussion of Brexit:

“The English people, for instance, perhaps even more than others, begin to realize what such schemes (LC: an international federation) mean only when it is presented to them that they might be a minority in the planning authority and that the main lines of the future economic development of Great Britain might be determined by a non-British majority. How many people in England would be prepared to submit to the decision of an international authority, however democratically constituted, which had power to decree that the development of the Spanish iron industry must have precedence over similar development in South Wales, that the optical industry had better be concentrated in Germany to the exclusion of Great Britain, or that only fully refined gasoline should be imported to Great Britain and all the industries connected with refining reserved for the producer countries?”

I think this pretty well captures the sentiment among the Brexit campaigners today, which is pretty incredible given Hayek wrote this in 1944. That said, that does not mean that Hayek would have favored Brexit. In fact in the same chapter Hayek makes the following statement:

It is worth recalling that the idea of the world at last finding peace through the absorption of the the separate states in large federated groups and ultimately perhaps in one single federation, far from being new, was indeed the ideal of almost all the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. From Tennyson, whose much-quoted vision of the “battle of the air” is followed by a vision of the federation of the people which will follow their last great fight, right down to the end of the century that final achievement of a federal organization remained the ever recurring hope of the next great step in the advance of civilization.

In fact in his 1938-article “The Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism” Hayekmakes an argument for Federalism (even arguing for some kind of monetary union !), which surely could give some ammunition for the “remain” campaign.

And this pretty well sums up the dilemma for the classical liberal in the discussion over Brexit. There are classical liberal arguments both in favour and in against Brexit.

PS Listen to Tyler Cowen talk about “The Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism” here.

PPS The example of a Hayekian “remainer” in my view is the Dalibor Rohac, who in his new book “Towards An Imperfect Union – A Conservative Case for the EU” makes a strong Hayekian case for the EU.


If you want to hear me speak about these topics or other related topics don’t hesitate to contact my speaker agency Specialist Speakers – e-mail: daniel@specialistspeakers.com or myself at lc@mamoadvisory.

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