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继续支持英语版，呵呵。今天的文章稍微有点长，不过值得一读。
(By Charles calomiris)
What do economics and history have to tell us about the ways euro zone countries are likely to resolve their problems of fiscal unsustainability and banking system insolvency? In answering that question, I am among the most pessimistic observers of the likely future of the euro and its membership. In my view, the euro zone’s likely failure to avoid at least some departures, if not total collapse, reflects its poor initial institutional design. Countries were joined together that were unlikely to be able to survive as a common currency zone, and there were no credible institutions in place to enforce long-term fiscal discipline or to coordinate the resolution of exigencies.
Why doesn’t everyone share my view? I think their relative optimism can be traced to differences in worldview. My worldview is that of a non-European economist and historian. Here is why that worldview leads to pessimism.
Arithmetic Trumps Legalism
As an economist, I place more stock in arithmetic than in the legalities of what countries supposedly are or are not permitted to do; legislation or politicians’ pronouncements about the impossibility of a departure from the euro zone counts for little if the math ultimately requires it. I will argue that in the case of at least one country—Greece—the fiscal arithmetic strongly favors not only a sovereign debt restructuring but also a departure from the euro zone, and there may be others for whom this same outcome will soon become a necessity as well.
Real Exchange Rate Theory and Political Economy
Since before the establishment of the euro, American economists have had a distinctly more pessimistic view of the euro experiment than have their European colleagues.
Two years ago, distinguished European economists Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea published a detailed and quite humorous review of the differences in opinion about the euro between American and European economists. Its title characterized what it (then) regarded as the excessive pessimism of the Americans: "The Euro: It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last. U.S. Economists on the EMU, 1989-2002." In fact, my own 1999 paper predicting the eventual collapse of the euro was included in that review. The implicit theory behind the Jonung and Drea paper was that American economists (perhaps out of jealousy or nationalism) did not want to believe that the euro would work. In light of recent events, an alternative theory may have greater weight: Europeans were in denial.
As early as 1999, in an essay for the Cato Institute titled "The Impending Collapse of the European Monetary Union," I predicted that roughly a decade after its creation, either some members of the euro zone would be forced to leave, or the currency would depreciate dramatically as a means of keeping those countries in the euro zone. In particular, I predicted that southern European countries would become fiscally unsustainable, and that losses of European banks would create significant bank insolvencies, which would put further fiscal pressure on governments through the costs of bank bailouts.
The consequences of the euro’s launch were predictable for the simple reason that the euro zone was not an "optimal currency area." Its demise was a likely result of the deadly combination of fundamental economic inconsistencies among its members and the predictably myopic political palliatives that would be applied by individual members to ease the pain caused by those fundamental inconsistencies.
All signs point to Greece exiting the euro zone. Portugal could face a similar fate.
Southern Europe (especially Greece, Portugal, and Southern Italy) has low long-term productivity growth, particularly in tradable goods. This relative productivity growth gap was likely to persist as the result of a combination of pre-existing trade patterns, human capital differences, rigid labor laws in the south, and low labor mobility in Europe. As we learned from the experience of the East Asian fixed exchange rate collapses of 1997, and from the Harrod-Balassa
Samuelson theory of real exchange rate determination (as embodied in many macroeconomic models, including the rational expectations models of real exchange rates pioneered by Rudiger Dornbusch in the 1970s), if two countries with persistent productivity growth differences in their tradable goods sectors adopt a common currency, eventually the slow-productivity growth country will experience recessionary pressure. In time, that country will either have to suffer continuing price deflation or devalue its currency.
Of course, in the short run, countries do not have to accept the dismal choice between slow growth and currency devaluation. Instead, they can apply fiscal stimulus, or facilitate (through easy bank credit) the growth of the non-tradables sector (also known as housing). In fact, that temptation to compensate for low productivity growth with fiscal stimulus and easy credit will be greater if the establishment of the currency union itself lowers the interest rates on sovereign debt or bank debt that the low-tradables-productivity-growth countries face. That was an important contributor to the fiscal binge of Greece, which ran fiscal deficits in excess of 5% of GDP in its boom years of 2004-2006. It should not be a surprise that Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland all underwent (albeit in different degrees) significant fiscal spending and bank lending booms, and that some of them saw remarkable rates of appreciation in their housing markets. This is precisely what one would expect from the long-run implications of real exchange rate theory and the short-run implications of political economy theory.
"Why, Sometimes I’ve Believed as Many as Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast."
As a historian, I know that "impossible" things—from a legalistic perspective—happen regularly in financial and monetary history. For example, consider the U.S. departure from the gold standard at the beginning of 1862, which began a seventeen-year span known as the period of suspension under the "greenback" standard. Prior to the creation of legal tender notes by the federal government and the suspension of gold convertibility in 1862, the U.S. government had never issued legal tender notes, nor was there any credible basis for the view that the government had the Constitutional authority to do so.
The government had issued some treasury bills during the War of 1812, for a brief time, and had made them receivable for payments of taxes, but it promptly withdrew those notes after the war ended, and never declared them a legal tender for private debts. That experience comported well with the consensus that had emerged from the founders’ constitutional debates over the monetary powers of the U.S. government during the Constitutional Convention. Under the Constitution, the federal government was not given the right to declare anything but gold and silver a legal tender, but neither was it strictly forbidden from establishing other legal tender currency (in contrast, the individual states were forbidden). Delegates avoided the strict prohibition on the argument that it might be expedient as a temporary war measure to permit the federal government to issue paper legal tender, but there was also a consensus against allowing a permanent role for government-supplied legal tender.
Very few people would have argued, say, in 1860, that the federal government was likely to assert the right to create legal tender paper money as a permanent component of the money supply, or to substitute it for gold and silver as the definition of the dollar. But then the Civil War happened. Within a few months of the outbreak of the War—which was initially regarded as an event likely to cost the North little, and to last for only a few months—it became clear that the war would, in fact, cost much more, and take much longer, than anyone had guessed.
In the fall of 1861, the initial debt offerings by the government had not gone well, and the government enlisted the banks of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to subscribe to the debt as a syndicate. Within a few weeks of stuffing the banks full of new government debt, however, the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, released a report estimating substantial increases in war expenditures, and proposing not to increase taxes to help finance the war. The result was a collapse of the value of government debt, which prompted a suspension of convertibility of deposits in the banking system (whose assets had suffered major losses from the depreciation of government debt).
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