Holding Together a Special Report on the Euro Area L June 13Th 2009
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Holding together A special report on the euro area l June 13th 2009 EEuroCovNEW.indduroCovNEW.indd 1 22/6/09/6/09 115:27:285:27:28 The Economist June 13th 2009 A special report on the euro area 1 Holding together Also in this section A tortuous path From Bretton Woods to euro. Page 2 One size ts none The euro did not cause all the euro area’s troubles, but it will make them harder to put right. Page 3 No exit Staying in the euro will be tough for some members, but leaving would be too awful to contemplate. Page 5 The non•nuclear options In place of devaluation, troubled members could try reform. Page 6 Fear of oating The nancial crisis has made the euro look more alluring. Page 8 Soft centre The euro area, sorely tested by the nancial crisis, has survived intact Can a currency survive without a state? and is likely to expand further, says John O’Sullivan Page 11 N THE mid•1980s Rolling Stone magazine 1992. A rider to the act sketched out an am• Ipublished an essay by P.J. O’Rourke, a bition to complement the single market Warmer inside conservative American humorist, with the with a single currency. Few took that seri• The gains outweigh the losses. Page 13 splendid title Among the Euro•Weenies. ously, least of all British politicians, who In it the author poured scorn on Europe, an had signed up to the act with enthusiasm annoyingly fractured continent with its because they were keen free•traders, but dopey little countries, pokey borders, dismissed the grander kind of Community itty•bitty languages and Lilliputian rhetoric as euro•gu . drinks measures. The mosaic of countries made the visitor feel claustrophobic: You An idea whose time had come can’t swing a cat without sending it Yet by the time a 1991 European summit through customs, he complained. was held in the Dutch city of Maastricht, a He will not have been aware, or cared plan for economic and monetary union much, that plans were already in train to (EMU) was written into a new EU treaty, to give Europe the continental scale it so be ratied by member states later. That the painfully lacked, as well as a currency that proposal had gained ground so swiftly was would rival the dollar. In 1986, the year of a surprise to many. The British government Acknowledgments Mr O’Rourke’s visit, the European Eco• had thought that a committee of EU cen• In addition to those mentioned in the report, the author would like to thank: Marco Annunziata, Elsa Artadi, nomic Community (as the European Un• tral•bank governors, charged in 1988 with Katinka Barysch, Julian Callow, Andreas Galanakis, Luis ion was then known) expanded from 10 to studying if monetary union was feasible, Garicano, Stephen Jen, Philip Lane, Helen Louri, Spyros 12 countries, with the addition of Portugal would quash the idea. Instead the group, Papanicolaou, George Sfakianakis, Yannis Stournaras, Alan M. Taylor, Simon Tilford, Xavier Vives and Beatrice and Spain. Its members had spent most of chaired by Jacques Delors, then president Weder di Mauro. the 1970s erecting non•tari barriers to in• of the European Commission, the EU’s ex• ternal trade, and the early 1980s battling ecutive branch, gave it qualied approval. A list of sources is at over who should pay for its joint budget (a The Delors Report concluded that EMU Economist.com/specialreports ght which, to be fair to the others, Britain could work if control of the single currency started). With that settled, there was a fresh was kept from meddling politicians and An audio interview with the author is at desire to make progress towards a genuine• left to independent technocrats at a Euro• Economist.com/audiovideo ly open free•trade block. pean central bank, to be modelled on Ger• The rst fruit of that e ort was the Sin• many’s Bundesbank. The report gave More articles about the euro are at gle European Act, an agreement to disman• warning, however, that to prevent large Economist.com/euro tle barriers to internal trade by the end of trade imbalances, reforms would be need• 1 2 A special report on the euro area The Economist June 13th 2009 2 ed to make prices and wages more exible 1985 and 1994 marked the zenith of this sort population of 329m have handed over and workers and capital more mobile. of integrationist zeal. monetary sovereignty to an entity at arm’s EMU’s route from rhetoric to economic After many a ap (see box), EMU even• length from national politics: the European blueprint was a familiar one, if unusually tually metamorphosed into a bird of much Central Bank (ECB). swift. The push behind trade integration in grander plumage. On January 1st 1999 the So far the experiment has worked fairly Europe has been primarily political rather currencies of 11 countries were xed well. The ECB has fullled its remit to than economic. The EU itself was born of against a new currency, the euro, which be• maintain the purchasing power of the the catastrophe of two world wars, colli• came the unit of reckoning in wholesale • euro. Since the currency’s creation the av• sions of competing nation•states. It was de• nancial markets. In 2002 euro notes and erage ination rate in the euro area has signed to avoid a repeat of such conicts by coins came in and the old paper currencies been just over 2%. Fears that the euro forging ever closer union in Europe. Eco• were phased out. Since the single curren• would be a soft currency have proved nomic ties were viewed as much as a cy’s launch ve more countries have unfounded. It is unquestioningly accepted means to co•operation as an end in them• joined the euro area. In a unique economic at home and widely used beyond the euro selves. The Delors Commission between experiment, 16 countries with a combined area’s borders. (Several countries, includ•1 A tortuous path From Bretton Woods to euro HE idea of a single money as a path to cooling on monetary union. vent speculative attacks on currencies TEuropean political union goes back a Currency markets were also stirring. At and to ensure that Europe’s monetary long way. In the 1950s a French economist, the time all 12 EU countries, bar Greece, policy was not made exclusively in Ger• Jacques Rue , wrote that Europe shall be were in the exchange•rate mechanism many. Some German policymakers, pre• made through the currency, or it shall not (ERM), a system that tied currencies to viously sceptical of EMU, fretted that any be made. But the euro had pragmatic each other within narrow trading repeat of the crisis would be a threat to the roots too. After the breakdown of the Bret• bounds. Germany was at the scheme’s single market. ton Woods system of xed exchange rates heart: currencies were ocially pegged to It was residual German scepticism that in 1973 the Deutschmark emerged as the each other in a complex grid of bilateral caused sti tests to be set up for countries benchmark currency in continental Eu• rates but all were, in e ect, tied to the D• that wish to join the euro. The conver• rope. The instability of oating currencies mark. That became a problem when eco• gence criteria set out in the treaty called was a barrier to harmonious trade, but nomic conditions in Germany and the for would•be joiners to meet targets for in• schemes to peg exchange rates frequently rest of Europe diverged. To head o ina• ation, bond yields, exchange•rate stabil• had to be redrawn because few countries tionary pressures caused by Germany’s ity, budget decits and public debt. The could consistently match the Bundes• post•unication boom, the Bundesbank criteria were criticised as having little to bank’s anti•ination zeal. The might of in July 1992 raised interest rates to 8.75%, a do with a country’s ability to cope once German manufacturing forced frequent 60•year high. monetary policy was no longer tailored to devaluations on others to keep their in• Those German rates caused strains in national needs. Instead, they seemed de• dustries competitive. currency markets that worsened over the signed to favour a core group of like•mind• Changes to exchange•rate pegs often summer. In September rst Italy and then ed countries, centred around Germany, caused tensions. François Mitterrand, Britain were forced to devalue, in Britain’s and to exclude others, particularly Italy, who as French president was one of the case after spending billions of dollars try• which it was feared would use EMU’s low signatories of the Maastricht treaty, is said ing to defend its ERM parity against specu• interest rates to relax scal discipline. to have remarked that devaluations are lators. In the following months Spain, Por• Things turned out di erently. By 1997, never small enough to avoid losing face tugal and Ireland too had to let their the year in which the tests would be ap• and never large enough to make a real dif• currencies slide. France battled to hold to plied to a rst wave of would•be entrants, ference to exports. As soon as Maastricht its parity and only just succeeded. Its refer• Germany and others in the core group had been signed (with a British opt•out endum produced a narrow vote in favour had trouble tting into the Maastricht from EMU), those tensions resurfaced.