Há uns que andam de bicicleta. A voar, não sei...

By Nouriel Roubini and Arnab Das
2/11/2010 | Last Updated
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The extent of the fiscal pressures facing Greece, and the inherent inability of the EU/ECB to handle such crises with the deliberation and conditionality required, suggest the need for IMF involvement if the EU is to avoid a larger, more devastating round of contagion across the weaker tier of eurozone members. The interlinked nature of EMU turns a relative midget – Greece, accounting for a mere 3 percent of the eurozone’s GDP, into a systemic entity. Thus, if Greece is, as RGE believes, “too-interconnected-to-fail,” the EU needs to put theoretical concerns about moral hazard and global prestige aside, [...]

(o resto é a pagar)

Roubini Global Economics

antes da irresponsabilidade grega, o €

esta é uma velha discussão: se o euro evita a guerra entre os europeus (Kohl), ou se o euro acaba por conduzir os europeus à guerra (Feldstein).
Voilà os capítulos mais recentes:


The Making of a Euromess

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 14, 2010

Lately, financial news has been dominated by reports from Greece and other nations on the European periphery. And rightly so.

But I’ve been troubled by reporting that focuses almost exclusively on European debts and deficits, conveying the impression that it’s all about government profligacy — and feeding into the narrative of our own deficit hawks, who want to slash spending even in the face of mass unemployment, and hold Greece up as an object lesson of what will happen if we don’t.

For the truth is that lack of fiscal discipline isn’t the whole, or even the main, source of Europe’s troubles — not even in Greece, whose government was indeed irresponsible (and hid its irresponsibility with creative accounting).

No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

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o resto está no jornal, mas o artigo acaba assim:

Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As Berkeley’s Barry Eichengreen puts it, an attempt to reintroduce a national currency would trigger “the mother of all financial crises.” So the only way out is forward: to make the euro work, Europe needs to move much further toward political union, so that European nations start to function more like American states.

But that’s not going to happen anytime soon. What we’ll probably see over the next few years is a painful process of muddling through: bailouts accompanied by demands for savage austerity, all against a background of very high unemployment, perpetuated by the grinding deflation I already mentioned.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s important to understand the nature of Europe’s fatal flaw. Yes, some governments were irresponsible; but the fundamental problem was hubris, the arrogant belief that Europe could make a single currency work despite strong reasons to believe that it wasn’t ready.