(como casi siempre llego a el por vía de BI, sin duda el blog mas excitante de economía).
Lo que yo destacaría es el énfasis que pone en los efectos de la política "responsable" sobre la estructura social. La política de comprensión a tope de las rentas y los ahorros se carga a la clase media, que es la base de la estabilidad social de un país. ¿Como es eso, si se supone que el PP es el campeón de las clases medias, del trabajo ya del ahorro? Lean a Pettis, pero no hace falta pensar mucho. Un paro del 25%, una constante incautación de las rentas vía subida e impuestos, y un fracaso de esa política, que obliga a reforzar aun más la tuercas...
Hemos hablado aquí del camino hacia los años treinta, pero Pettis tiene razón, ese camino pasa por, o es el, de la destrucción de la clase media y su irremediable entrega al primer partido que le prometa ley y orden. No es necesario destacar lo duro y difícil que será recuperar esa clase media después de su defunción.
Entonces ¿No es responsable lo que esta haciendo el gobierno? No. Es lo único que sabe hacer, y no es peor que lo que hizo el anterior (por lo menos este frena el gasto y la deuda? Además, Zp dinamito lomque pudo a la clase media moralmente), pero es irresponsable sumamente, pues se está cargando el tejido básico social del país. Lo responsable es reconocer que el euro es el problema - que el rey esta desnudo- aunque eso ciertamente no es un camino de rosas.
El camino de la "responsabilidad" lleva a la destrucción de la clase media. El camino del abandono del euro tampoco garantiza que esa dale media se quede indemne. Pero al menos abre la vía para que se recomponga antes.
A menos que no sea que creamos - y esto lo añado yo- en una clase media multinacional, europea, alemana/francesa/ irlandesa/ inglesa/española... Y que la unión fiscal o total llevaría eso. Eso si que sería un largo camino. Y utópico.
For several years I have been saying that Spain would leave the euro and restructure its external debt. I should say that I specify Spain because it is the country in which I was born and grew up, and so it is also the country I know best. When I say Spain, however, I really mean all the peripheral European countries that, like Spain, are uncompetitive, have high debt levels, and suffer from low savings rates that had been forced down in the past decade to dangerous levels.
Spain had a stronger fiscal position and healthier bank balance sheets than many of its peers when the crisis began, so any argument that applies to Spain is likely to apply more forcefully to its peers. As an aside I will add that France is for me the dividing line between countries that will be forced into devaluation and restructuring and those that won’t – in my opinion France could go either way and we will get a much better sense of this in the first year of Hollande’s presidency.
There are two reasons why I was and am fairly sure that Spain cannot stay in the euro (or, which amounts to the same thing, that Germany will leave the euro instead of Spain). The first has to do with the logic of Spain’s balance of payments position, and the second has to do with the internal dynamics that drive the process of financial crisis.
To address the first, I would start by noting that thanks to excessively loose monetary policies driven primarily by German needs over the past decade, Spain has made itself wholly uncompetitive in the global markets and in so doing has run large current account deficits for nearly the entire past decade. Its fundamental problem, in other words, has been the process by which its savings rate has collapsed, its cost structure forced up, its debt levels soared, and a great deal of investment directed into projects, mostly real estate, that were not economically viable. As I have discussed often enough in previous issues of this newsletter, I think all of these problems are related and are the automatic consequences of the same set of policy distortions implemented in Spain and in Germany.
Until Spain reverses its savings and consumption balance and drives down its current account deficit into surplus, which is what a reversal of these distortions would imply, it should be pretty clear that Spain will continue struggling with growth and will continue to see debt levels rise unsustainably. But the balance of payments mechanism imposes pretty clear constraints on the process of adjustment. In that sense there are really only three ways Spain can regain competitiveness sufficiently to raise savings and reverse the current account:
... The adjustment will require that Spanish wages and prices are forced down substantially until Spain can reverse the higher price differential relative to Germany from which it suffers. Figuring out how to do this is not very hard – we have plenty of historical precedents upon which to draw. To simplify substantially, there are basically two things that have to happen in order to force a relative decline in prices. First, unemployment must remain very high for many years so that wages either decline, or rise by less than inflation and relative productivity growth. This is pretty straightforward.
Second, there must be some way to deal with the real increase in the domestic debt burden. Why? Because there are two ways relative prices can be forced down, and both of these result in a real increase in the debt burden. First, high inflation in Germany can exceed lower Spanish inflation, and second, Spain can deflate. In both cases the real cost of debt must increase substantially – in the former case because high German inflation will force up euro interest rates so that Spain’s refinancing cost will exceed its domestic growth rate, and in the latter case because deflation automatically increases the real debt burden.
How will we deal with the rising debt burden? Typically we do so by confiscating the wealth of small and medium enterprises or by confiscating the savings of the middle classes, and usually we do both.
So for Spain to adjust we need both very high unemployment for many years and we need to undermine the middle classes. Any policy that requires an enormous and unfair burden on both the workers and the middle classes is unlikely to be rewarded at the polling booths.
... I place the word “responsible” in quotation marks not because I am opposed to responsible behavior but rather because the attempt to tighten the budget and impose austerity in the name of remaining on the euro is being presented as the “responsible” thing to do. It is, however, no more responsible than the policies France used in the 1920s to revalue the franc to pre-War parity, which were also sold to the French public as the “responsible” thing to do.... The responsible thing to do is to acknowledge that the euro is indefensible and that Germany’s refusal to share the adjustment burden, after it absorbed most of the benefits of the mismanaged monetary position it imposed on the rest of Europe, means that Spain will be forced to take on far more than its share of the cost. But whether or not everyone agrees with my analysis of what really is “responsible” behavior, I think it most people will agree that, rightly or wrongly, Spanish voters are unlikely to accept high unemployment and an assault of middle class savings for many years without rebelling at the polls. Spain simply cannot accept the full burden of adjustment.
... This means that the first two of the three paths I listed above cannot be followed. If I am right, we are automatically left with the third. Spain (and by extension many other countries) must leave the euro. It will be very painful and chaotic for them to abandon the euro, but the sooner they do it the less painful it will be.
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