Ambrose, genial

Ambrose Evans-Prichard Tiene una brillante columna en la que celebra el éxito de la politica monetaria en EEUU, RU, Suiza y Japón... Frente al fracaso estrepitoso, y mal digerido, de la Eurozona. Me permito destacar algunas cosas. Subrayados míos:

As the US Federal Reserve starts to drain dollar liquidity from the global system at long last, let us celebrate success. Quantitative easing has worked marvellously well. Monetary policy has been vindicated.

The US, UK and Japan are all recovering, moving closer to "escape velocity". The Swiss National Bank - that bastion of orthodoxy - has kept its economy on an even keel by quietly amassing a bond portfolio equal to 85pc of GDP.

The crippled eurozone alone has chosen to stagger on defiantly without monetary crutches. The result has been a double-dip recession of nine quarters, the longest since the Second World War. The austerity regime has been self-defeating even on its own crude terms. Debt ratios have ratcheted up even faster...

...You hear a refrain in Berlin and Brussels that the recovery of the QE bloc is somehow feckless, phony and illegitimate, that the money printers are just building up more debt, putting off their day of reckoning while Europe takes its punishment early. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Such thinking is a tangle of fallacies, reflecting the zero-sum mindset of the Puritans, almost Malthusian in character. It confuses debt levels (irrelevant) with debt ratios (crucial). It focuses narrowly on public debt, ignoring the displacement from austerity overkill onto private debt burdens.

What matters for an economy is public, corporate and household debt taken together. This combined figure has fallen from 280pc to nearer 260pc of GDP in the US since the post-Lehman peak as households slash debt.

The eurozone is a mirror image. Combined debt has kept on rising, overtaking US levels on the way up. Household debt ratios have hardly fallen at all. If the central thrust of EMU policy is to cut debt burdens, it has failed.

What QE does is to erode real debt. Call it theft from savers if you want, or call it an equitable distribution of the post-crisis costs between savers and debtors.

Those who feel angry over what has happened should rememer that creditors lose everything if economies are so bady mismanaged in a crisis that mass default ensues, as in Greece, or Cyprus, or the US in the early 1930s, or if the political system disintegrates altogether. Remember too that governments bailed out the banks after the Lehman crisis, and therefore bailed out savers, too. The moral contours of QE depend on your angle of vision. But would you rather be surrounded by mass unemployment?

So let us waive a fond farewell to the printing press. It has served us well.