El artículo es una buena review de la literatura, contrastada con la realidad. Destaco, para los que sueñan con que le euro se puede eliminar fácilmente y sin costes (que más quisiera yo), su último párrafo, que suscribo:
After all, given ev- erything I said, it looks increasingly as if the whole project was a mis- take. Why not let it break up?The answer, I think, is mainly political. Not entirely so—a euro breakup would be hugely disruptive, and exact high "transition" costs. Still, the enduring cost of a euro breakup would be that it would amount to a huge defeat for the broader European project I described at the start of this paper—a project that has done the world a vast amount of good, and one that no citizen of the world should want to see fail.That said, it is going to be an uphill struggle. The creation of the euro involved, in effect, a decision to ignore everything economists had said about optimum currency areas. Unfortunately, it turned out that opti- mum currency area theory was essentially right, erring only in under- stating the problems with a shared currency. And now that theory is taking its revenge.
Pero hay una cosa que se llama las diferentes lenguas, 19 en total, que se hablan en los paises, y que no son más que un indicio más de diferencias culturales bastante insalvables. Un factor que se consideró irrelevante. Irrelevante para los lerdos que no abren los ojos, porque yo tengo un pariente que trabaja en Alemania, y para el mismo puesto, le pagan menos que a un alemán. No solo hay barreras culturales: son barreras culturales potenciadas por los gobiernos. Y que no me vengan con estudiantes que salen en la Tv que se adaptan perfectamente, porque no se trata de mover a unos cientos, sino a millones...
La inmovilidad del factor trabajo es manifiesta, mientras que la del capital es casi inexistente, lo que no ayuda a equilibrar los mercados, pues si los parados nos e peinen mover y el capital sï que puede huir...
El euro es una de las grandes cagadas de la historia, y pesará mucho tiempo sobre nosotros. Pero estoy de acuerdo con Krugman. Su ruptura (que no descarto) será traumática, se llevará por delante no sólo el euro, sino la UE, y no sólo eso, sino probablemente aquellos estados fallidos que se echaron a sestear una vez cedida su soberanía. Así que mejor escuchar a Krugman (hay que leer el artículo) y paliar sus fallas:
1. Europe-wide backing of banks. This would involve both some kind of federalized deposit insurance and a willingness to do TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program)-type rescues at a European level—that is, if, say, a Spanish bank is in trouble in a way that threatens systemic stability, there should be an injection of capital in return for equity stakes by all European governments, rather than a loan to the Span- ish government for the purpose of providing the capital injection. The point is that the bank rescues have to be severed from the question of sovereign solvency.
2. The ECB as a lender of last resort to governments, in the same way that national central banks already are. Yes, there will be complaints about moral hazard, which will have to be addressed somehow. But it is now painfully obvious that removing the option of emergency liquidity provision from the central bank just makes the system too vulnerable to self-fulfilling panic.
3. Finally, a higher inflation target. Why? As I showed in table 3, euro experience strongly suggests that downward nominal wage rigidity is a big issue. This means that "internal devaluation" via deflation is ex- tremely difficult, and likely to fail politically if not economically. But it also means that the burden of adjustment might be substantially less if the overall Eurozone inflation rate were higher, so that Spain and other peripheral nations could restore competitiveness simply by lagging in- flation in the core countries.
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