Lessons for Eu Integration from Us History
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LESSONS FOR EU INTEGRATION FROM US HISTORY Jacob Funk Kirkegaard and Adam S. Posen, editors Report to the European Commission under Tender Reference 2016: ECFIN 004/A Washington, DC January 2018 © 2018 European Commission. All rights reserved. The Peterson Institute for International Economics is a private nonpartisan, nonprofit institution for rigorous, intellectually open, and indepth study and discussion of international economic policy. Its purpose is to identify and analyze important issues to make globalization beneficial and sustainable for the people of the United States and the world, and then to develop and communicate practical new approaches for dealing with them. Its work is funded by a highly diverse group of philanthropic foundations, private corporations, and interested individuals, as well as income on its capital fund. About 35 percent of the Institute’s resources in its latest fiscal year were provided by contributors from outside the United States. Funders are not given the right to final review of a publication prior to its release. A list of all financial supporters is posted at https://piie.com/sites/default/files/supporters.pdf. Table of Contents 1 Realistic European Integration in Light of US Economic History 2 Jacob Funk Kirkegaard and Adam S. Posen 2 A More Perfect (Fiscal) Union: US Experience in Establishing a 16 Continent‐Sized Fiscal Union and Its Key Elements Most Relevant to the Euro Area Jacob Funk Kirkegaard 3 Federalizing a Central Bank: A Comparative Study of the Early 108 Years of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank Jérémie Cohen‐Setton and Shahin Vallée 4 The Long Road to a US Banking Union: Lessons for Europe 143 Anna Gelpern and Nicolas Véron 5 The Synchronization of US Regional Business Cycles: Evidence 185 from Retail Sales, 1919–62 Jérémie Cohen‐Setton and Egor Gornostay 1 Realistic European Integration in Light of US Economic History Jacob Funk Kirkegaard and Adam S. Posen Europe is at times referred to as the “Old World.” Yet, when it comes to continental‐scale economic governance and institution building it is the United States that has a much longer and broader historical track record. Appropriately, scholars contributing to the European policy discussion pre‐Maastricht, and in particular during the early implementation phase of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) during the 1990s,1 tried to draw lessons from the US experience for integration. As the European Union and euro area contemplate how to reform and deepen EMU, following their financial crisis, we once again seek insight from historical examples—good and bad—offered by the long history of US economic integration. The scope of this report, however, is broader than that of the pre‐1992 efforts, because the remit for European policymakers today is rightly broader than before EMU. Monetary unification cannot stand stably on its own without additional integration of banking and capital markets, and some fiscal policies. In this regard, our analysis complements the initiatives proposed by European leaders in mid‐2017.2 It is not important whether the European Union is integrating more or less quickly than the United States did. Such abstract benchmarking misses all the important points about the nature and sequencing of integration as political processes. The many fundamental differences between the United States and the European Union prevent drawing too precise, let alone literal, a mapping from US economic development to Europe’s path forward today. The federal governing structure of the United States alone, established at the formation of the American republic in 1789 and successfully defended militarily during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, is completely different from European interstate cooperation after 1957 (even though the recent regulatory integration of euro area banking occurred far faster than in the United States). One overall message of our analysis is that the European Union will remain a unique hybrid, part Jacob Funk Kirkegaard is senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Adam S. Posen is the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 1 This literature includes, among many, Giovannini (1989), Eichengreen (1991a, 1991b), Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1992a, 1992b), Borner and Grubel (1992), Krugman (1993), Torres and Giavazzi (1993), Eichengreen, Rose, and Wyplosz (1996), and Frankel and Rose (1996). 2 The two most prominent initiatives in 2017 were (1) the European Commission’s Reflection Paper on the Deepening of Economic and Monetary Union, COM(2017) 291, May 21, 2017, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta‐political/files/reflection‐paper‐emu_en.pdf; and (2) the set of proposals for new European integration at both the EU and euro area levels presented by French President Emmanuel Macron in his speech at Sorbonne University on September 26, 2017. The full text of the speech is available here: http://international.blogs.ouest‐france.fr/archive/2017/09/29/macron‐sorbonne‐verbatim‐europe‐ 18583.html. 2 state and part international organization, for decades as the product of the exceptional political and economic circumstances in Europe since the mid‐20th century. What matters for European integration, as this report describes, is how the modern US national economic institutions formed gradually during the 19th and 20th centuries not only within the confines of a changing federal constitution but also often in response to the specific political events of the time. The report, therefore, focuses on the lessons for Europe from US political processes, as much as the economic ones, sequencing in institution building, and the emergence of long‐term national goals that helped shape today’s American state. Rather than pointing towards the current state of US continental integration as the guide for the European Union, we analyze the US responses throughout history to economic and political challenges and to numerous domestic political constraints—some not unlike what Europe faces today. We believe that EU leaders should draw lessons from these US responses for how, how far, and how fast their aspirations for EMU should progress. Yet, it must be acknowledged that the United States solved most of its political and economic challenges through centralization and federal government institution building. This means that the American federal state today, with a large central government budget funded predominantly through direct income taxation of American residents and businesses and the federal government acting as the dominant rule maker in the country, has significant economic benefits. Nonetheless, as this report shows, US economic integration was not a rapid, linear, or teleological process. US economic, fiscal, monetary, and financial history reveals that prior institutional integration was noticeably reversed on several occasions—the United States is after all on its third central bank today—and witnessed prolonged periods of institutional sclerosis even in the face of dire economic circumstances, such as fragmented banking despite the recurrent financial panics of the late 19th century. There is no automatic formula for advancing through crisis, as some Europeans assert, though crisis can provide opportunity. Parochial or provincial political interests repeatedly paralyzed or reoriented new federal government institutions. Lack of integration in the United States caused repeated acute economic disruptions throughout this period, as well as ongoing losses from inefficiency. Constraints on better, more uniform policies and markets are harmful—but not automatically corrected. In fact, the high visible costs were insufficient to create one‐way traffic towards greater economic integration. US history consequently displays ongoing and often stubbornly high economic and welfare costs of nonintegration across the continent, as financial market failures or regulatory missteps were allowed to persist, and the economic prospects of many Americans were impaired. In such periods, American leaders often had to lead public opinion and take significant risks by proposing and implementing centralizing federal institutions to get out of economically destabilizing situations that were nevertheless politically persistent. Understanding the specific historical contexts under which such political leadership was shown in the United States will provide important insights for today’s European leaders. 3 Thus, this report explores the principal economic tenets of a modern integrated state and how they developed in the United States: (1) formation of the US fiscal union, especially present day American fiscal institutions most relevant for Europe; (2) development of the Federal Reserve and its gain of the lender of last resort function; (3) evolution and policies leading to a unified US banking system; and (4) shift from diverging regional to relatively synchronized national business cycles in the United States. This historical analysis supports a major lesson of the European financial crisis, in contrast to the forecasts of the US parallel literature of 25 years ago: Monetary integration alone will not drive overall economic convergence across a diverse continent. But being chastened about taking integration for granted, combined with a more nuanced political economy–based assessment of US history, does yield some practical guidance for EU policymakers’ next steps today. Themes of US Economic Integration over the Long Run Institution Building Requires Repeated Attempts