Greece – J. W. Mason

V for Varoufakis

I have a long review up at Boston Review of three books by Yanis Varoufakis: The Global Minotaur, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, and Adults in the Room. Here’s the start:

In the spring of 2015, a series of debt negotiations briefly claimed a share of the world’s attention that normally goes only to events where celebrities give each other prizes. Syriza, a scrappy left-wing party, had stormed into office in Greece on a promise to challenge the consortium of international creditors that had effectively ruled the country since its debt crisis broke out in 2010. For years, austerity, deregulation, the rolling back of labor rights and public services, the rule of money over society, had been facts of life. Now suddenly they were live political questions. It was riveting.

Syriza was represented in these negotiations by its finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. With his shaved head, leather jacket, and motorcycle, he was not just a visual contrast to the gray-suited Eurocrats across the table. His radical but rigorous proposals for a different kind of Europe—one based on meeting human needs rather than rigid financial criteria—offered a daily rebuke to the old refrain “there is no alternative.”

The drama was clear, but the stakes were a little obscure. Why did it matter if Greece stayed in the euro? Orthodox economic theory, after all, gives little role for money or finance. What matters are real wants and real resources, for which money is just a convenient yardstick. University of Chicago economist John Cochrane probably spoke for much of the profession when he asked why it made any more sense to talk about Greece leaving the euro than about Greece leaving the metric system.

But money does indeed matter—especially in economic relations between countries, as Varoufakis himself has convincingly shown. In his three books—The Global Minotaur (2011), And the Weak Suffer What They Must (2016), and Adults in the Room (2017)—Varoufakis offers a fascinating lens on the euro system and its masters. While the first two books chart the history of the international monetary system from World War II up to the debt crisis, his last and most recent book is a reflection on his five months as Greek finance minister. Taken together, they read as if Varoufakis is the protagonist in some postmodern fable, in which he is transformed from a critic of the play to one of the main characters in it. …

Read the rest there, and then comment here if you are so inclined.

What It’s About

Shortly after Syriza’s victory in January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis is traveling around Europe for his first official meetings with various and economics ministers. Here’s an interesting conversation with one of them:

Pier Carlo Padoan, Italy’s finance minister and formerly the OECD’s chief economist, is in many ways a typical European social democrat: sympathetic to the Left but not prepared to rock the boat… Our discussion was friendly and efficient. I explained my proposals, and he signalled that he understood what I was getting at, expressing not an iota of criticism but no support. To his credit, he explained why: when he had been appointed finance minister a few months earlier, Wolfgang Schäuble had made a point of having a go at him at every available opportunity…

I enquired how he had managed to curb Schäuble’s hostility. Pier Carlo said that he had asked Schäuble to tell him the one thing he could do to win his confidence. That turned out to be “labour market reform” – code for weakening workers’ rights, allowing companies to fire them more easily with little or no compensation and to hire people on lower pay with fewer protections. Once Pier Carlo had passed appropriate legislation through Italy’s parliament, at significant political cost to the Renzi government, the German finance minister went easy on him. “Why don’t you try something similar?” he suggested.

“I’ll think about it,” is Varoufakis’ diplomatic reply.

A couple days later, he has a meeting with the German finance minister himself, perhaps the most important single figure in the Euroepan establishment. Schauble brushes off Varoufakis’ suggestions for strengthening the Greek tax authorities, insisting instead on

his theory that the “overgenerous” European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched. Comparing the costs to Europe of maintaining welfare states with the situation in places like India and China, where no social safety net exists at all, he argued that Europe was losing competitiveness and would stagnate unless social benefits were curtailed en masse. It was as if he was telling me that a start had to be made somewhere and that that somewhere might as well be Greece.

I’m supposed to be writing a review of Adults in the Room.That right there is the story, I think. Debates over fiscal arrangements were a pretext, the real agenda has always been restoring the rule of market over society, over labor in particular. And Greece was just a convenient place to start, or to make an example of. Despite the constant framing of Eruope’s divisions in national terms, I think it’s clear that for German conservatives like Schauble, the real target has always been their own working class.

Links for May 5, 2017

Some economics content, for this rainy Friday afternoon:

Turbulence. Over at INET, Arjun Jayadev has posted the next in our series of “rebel masters” interviews with dissenting economists. This one is with Anwar Shaikh, who is, I’m sure, familiar to readers of this blog. Shaikh’s work resists summary, but the

broad thesis revolves around the idea that there is an alternative tradition-embedded in the classical approach of Smith, Ricardo and Marx which insists on understanding the world on its own terms rather than from an idealized economy from which the real world deviates. This approach focuses on what is termed “real competition” wherein competition between firms, each seeking to get the highest price they can, leads to a “turbulent gravitation” of prices around values. As such, there is never an equilibrium, but a dancing around some key deeper parameters.

As with all these interviews, there’s also some discussion of his own political and intellectual development, as well as of the content of his work.

I haven’t made a serious effort to read Shaikh’s big new book Capitalism. Given its heft, I suspect it will function more as a reference work, with people going to specific sections rather than reading it from front to back. (I know one person who is using it as an undergraduate textbook, which seems ambitious.) But if you want an admiring but not uncritical overview of the book as a whole, this review in New Left Review by John Grahl could be a good place to start. It’s written for people interested in the broad political economy tradition; it’s focused on the broad sweep of the argument, not on Shaikh’s position within current debates in heterodox economics.

The rich are different from you and me. [1] At Washington Center for Economic Growth, Nick Bunker calls attention to some new research on income inequality over the past 15 years. The key finding is that since the end of the 1990s, the rise in income inequality is almost all due to income from S-corporations (pass-through companies, partnerships, etc.) at the very top of the distribution. As a result, rising inequality shows up in tax data, but not in Social Security data, which captures only labor income. What do we take from this? First, the point I’ve made periodically on this blog: Incomes at the top are mainly capital income, not labor income. But there’s also a methodological point — the importance of constantly walking back and forth between your theoretical construct, the concrete social reality it hopes to explain, and the data (collected by somebody, according to some particular procedures) that stands between them.

What are foreign investors for? At FT Alphaville, Matthew Klein has a very interesting post on capital controls. As he notes, during the first decade of the euro, Spain was the recipient of one of “the greatest capital flows of all time,” with owners of financial assets all over Europe rushing to trade them for claims on Spanish banks. This created immense pressure on Spanish banks to increase lending, which in the event financed a runup in real estate prices and an immense quantity of never-to-be-occupied houses and hotels. (It’s worth noting in passing that this real estate bubble developed without any of the securitization that so mesmerized observers of the American bubble.) Surely, Klein says,

if you accept the arguments for regulating cross-border financial movements in any situation, you have to do the same for Spain. The country raised bank capital requirements and ran large fiscal surpluses, but none of that was enough. Plus, it didn’t have the luxury of a floating currency. Both the boom and bust would clearly have been smaller if foreigners had been prevented from buying so many Spanish financial assets, or even just persuaded to buy fewer bonds and more stocks and direct equity.

This seems right. But we could go a step farther. What’s the point of capital mobility? If you don’t in fact want bank balance sheets expanding and shrinking based on the choices of foreign investors, what benefit are those investors providing to your economy? They provide foreign exchange (allowing you to run current account deficit), they provide financing (allowing credit to expand more), they substitute their judgement of future for domestic actors’. These are exactly the problems in the Spanish case. What is the benefit, even in principle, that Spain got from allowing these inflows?

There’s always a first time. Also from Matthew Klein, here is a paper from the Peterson Institute looking at historical fiscal balances and making the rather obvious point that there is little historical precedent for the surpluses the Greek government is expected in order to pay its ~~conquerors~~ creditors. It is not quite true that no country has ever sustained a primary surplus of 3.5 percent for a decade a more, as Greece is expected to do; but such episodes are exceedingly rare.

My one criticism of Klein’s piece is that it is a little too uncritical of the idea that “market rates” are just a fact about the world. The Peterson paper also seems to regard interest rates as set by markets in response to more or less objective macroeconomic variables. Klein notes in passing that the interest rate Greece pays on its borrowing will depend on official choices like whether Greek debt is included in the ECB’s bond-buying programs. But I think it’s broader than this — I think the interest rate on Greek bonds is entirely a policy choice of the ECB. Suppose the ECB announced that they were fixing the interest rate on Greek bonds at 1 percent, and that they’d buy them as long as the yield was above this. Then private lenders would be happy to hold them at 1 percent and the ECB would not have to make any substantial purchases. This is how open market operations work – when a central bank announces a policy rate, they can move market rates while buying or selling only trivial amounts. If the ECB wished to, it could put Greece on a stable debt path and open up space for a less sociocidal budget, without the need for any commitment of public funds. But of course it doesn’t wish to.

Capital with Chinese characteristics. This new paper on wealth and inequality in China from Piketty, Zucman and Li Yang is an event; it’s a safe bet it’s going to be widely cited in the coming years. The biggest contribution is the construction of long-run series on aggregate wealth and the distribution of wealth and income for China. Much of the paper is devoted, appropriately, to explaining how these series were produced. But they also draw several broad conclusions about the evolution of the Chinese economy over the apst generation.

First, while the publicly-owned share of national wealth has declined, it is still very high relative to other industrialized countries:

China has ceased to be communist, but is not entirely capitalist; it should rather be viewed as a “mixed economy” with a strong public ownership component. … the share of public property in China today is somewhat larger than – though not incomparable to – what it was in the West during the “mixed economy” regime of the post-World War 2 decades (30% in China today vs. 15-25% in the West in the 1950s-1970s). … Private wealth was relatively small in 1978 (about 100% of national income), and now represents over 450% of national income. Public wealth [has been] roughly stable around 250% of national income.

It’s worth noting that the largest component of this increase in private wealth is housing, which largely passed from public to private hands, The public sector, by Piketty and coauthors’ measures, continues to own about half of China’s non-housing wealth, including the majority of corporate equity, and this fraction seems to have increased somewhat over the past decade.

Second, income distribution has become much more unequal in China over the past generation, but seems to still be more equal than in the United States:

In the late 1970s China’s inequality… [was] close to the levels observed in the most egalitarian Nordic countries — while it is now approaching U.S. levels. It should be noted, however, that … inequality levels in China are still significantly lower than in the United States…. The bottom 50% earns about 15% of total income in China (19% in rural China, 23% in urban China), vs. 12% in the U.S. and 22% in France. For the time being, China’s development model appears to be more egalitarian than that of the United States, and less than Europe’s. Chinese inequality levels seem to have stabilized in recent years (the biggest increase in inequality took place between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s)

The third story — much less prominent in the article, and of less important, but of particular interest to me — is what explains the observed rise in the ratio of wealth to national income. Piketty et al. suggest that 50-70 percent of the rise can be explained, in accounting terms, by the observed rates of saving and investment and their estimate of depreciation, while the remaining 30-50 percent is due to valuation changes. But in a footnote they add that this includes a large negative valuation change for China’s net foreign wealth, presumably attributable to the appreciation of the renminbi relative to the dollar. So a larger share of the rise in domestic wealth relative to income must be accounted for by valuation changes. (The data to put an exact number on this should be available in their online appendices, which are comprehensive as always, but I haven’t done it yet.)

This means that a story that conflates wealth with physical capital, and sees its growth basically in terms of net investment, will not do a good job explaining the actual growth of Chinese capital. (The same goes for the growth in capital relative to income in the advanced countries.) The paper explains the valuation increase in terms of a runup in the value of private housing plus

changes in the legal system reinforcing private property rights for asset owners (e.g., lifting of rent control, changes in the relative power of landlords and tenants, changes in the relative power of shareholder and workers).

This seems plausible to me. But I wish Piketty and his coauthors — and even more, his admirers — would take this side of the story more seriously. If we want to talk about the “capital” we actually see in public and private accounts, a theory that sees it growing through net investment is not even roughly correct. We really do have to think of capital as a social relation, not a physical substance.

On other blogs, other wonders.

Here’s a video of me chatting with James Parrott about robots.

Who’d have thought that Breitbart is the place to find federal government employment practices held up as an ideal?

At PERI, Anders Fremstad and Mark Paul have a nice paper on the distributional impact of different forms of carbon taxes.

Also at PERI, another whack at the Reinhart-Rogoff piñata.

I’ll be speaking at this Dissent thing on May 22.

[1] This phrase has an interesting backstory. The received version has it that it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line, to which Ernest Hemingway replied: “Yes. They have more money.” But in fact, Hemingway was the one who said the rich were different, at a lunch with Maxwell Perkins and the critic Mary Colum, and it was Colum who delivered the putdown. (The story is in that biography of Perkins.) In “Hills like White Elephants,” Hemingway, for reasons that are easy to imagine, put the “rich are different” line in the mouth of his frenemy Fitzgerald, and there it’s stayed.

Links and Thoughts for Feb. 17

Minimum wages are good for poor people. Here is an important paper from Arin Dube on the impact of minimum wage increases on family income. Using a variety of approaches, he asks what the record of minimum wage changes tells us about how the effects of the minimum at different points in the income distribution. The core finding is that, in his preferred specification, the elasticity of income at the 10th percentile with respect to the minimum wage is around 0.4 – that is, a one percent increase in the minimum wage will raise income for poor families by close to half a percent. This is, to my mind, a really big number – it suggests that pay at most low-wage jobs is tightly linked to the minimum wage, and that criticism of minimum wages as being badly targeted at low income households is off the mark. Tho to be fair, he also finds that minimum wage increases don’t do much for the very bottom of the distribution, where there is not much wage income to begin with. But beyond whatever this ammo this gives for minimum wage supporters, this is a great example of how you should approach this kind of question as a social scientist. The paper gets out of the box of qualitative debates about job loss that have dominated this debate and makes a positive, quantitative claim about what minimum wages actually do.

This is the effect of a doubling of the state minimum wage on family income, per Dube.

Why prefund? I’m still trying to finish this interminable paper on state and local government balance sheets. But one of the big things I’ve learned is that the biggest constraint these governments face is not the terms on which they can borrow, but the extent to which they are required to prefund future expenses. The idea that pensions should be fully funded has a solid basis for private employers but it’s not at all clear that the same arguments apply for governments. It’s good to see that some professionals in state and local finance have come to the same conclusion. Here is a new paper from the Haas Institute on exactly this question. It makes a strong case that the requirement to fully fund public employee pensions is costly and unnecessary, and is an important factor in local government budget crises.

Privilege: still exorbitant. Here’s a nice analysis of the international role of the dollar. This is the same argument I tried to make in my Roosevelt Institute piece on trade policy last summer. The Economist says it better:

Unlike other aspects of American hegemony, the dollar has grown more important as the world has globalised, not less. … As economies opened their capital markets in the 1980s and 1990s, global capital flows surged. Yet most governments sought exchange-rate stability amid the sloshing tides of money. They managed their exchange rates using massive piles of foreign-exchange reserves … Global reserves have grown from under $1trn in the 1980s to more than $10trn today.

Dollar-denominated assets account for much of those reserves. Governments worry more about big swings in the dollar than in other currencies; trade is often conducted in dollar terms; and firms and governments owe roughly $10trn in dollar-denominated debt. … the dollar is, on some measures, more central to the global system now than it was immediately after the second world war. …

America wields enormous financial power as a result. It can wreak havoc by withholding supplies of dollars in a crisis. When the Federal Reserve tweaks monetary policy, the effects ripple across the global economy. Hélène Rey of the London Business School argues that, despite their reserve holdings, many economies have lost full control over their domestic monetary policy, because of the effect of Fed policy on global appetite for risk.

… During the heyday of Bretton Woods, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a French finance minister (later president), complained about the “exorbitant privilege” enjoyed by the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. America’s return on its foreign assets is markedly higher than the return foreign investors earn on their American assets… That flow of investment income allows America to run persistent current-account deficits—to buy more than it produces year after year, decade after decade.

Exactly right. You can have free capital mobility, or you can have a balanced trade for the US. But you can’t have both, as long as the world depends on dollar reserves.

Greece: still a catastrophe. Over at Alphaville, Matthew Klein makes a strong case that Greece’s experience in the euro has been uniquely catastrophic – no modern balance of payments crisis elsewhere has led to anything like as large and as sustained a fall in output and employment. Martin Sandbu objects, arguing that the Greek catastrophe is the result of austerity, not of the single currency per se. Which is true, but also, it seems to me, misses the point. The problem with the euro — as Klein more or less says — isn’t mainly that it precludes devaluation, but that it surrenders authority over the basic tools of macroeconomic policy to a foreign authority — an authority, as it turns out, that has been happy to see Greece burn pour encourager les autres.

The myth of capital strike. I was more on Team Streeck than Team Tooze in their great LRB showdown. But this followup post by Tooze is very smart. Mostly he’s just trying to bring some much-needed order to a complicated set of debates about the role of private finance, credit markets, central banks and the state. But he also scores, I think, a stronger point against Streeck than in the LRB review: Streeck exaggerates the threat of capital strike in modern “managed-money” economies. As Tooze says:

Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland even Italy and France all experienced bond market attacks. But this is because they were left by the ECB in a situation which was as though they had borrowed their entire sovereign debt in a foreign currency with no central bank support. … That peculiarity is the result of deliberate political construction. To generalize and reify it into a general theory of capitalist democracy in crisis is highly misleading.

I think Tooze is right: behind the apparent power of the bondholders there’s always either a hostile central bank, or else other, stronger countries.

Things are speeding up here at the end. From Credit Suisse, here is an interesting discussion of longevity of firms in the S&P 500.

There is a general sense that the rate of change is accelerating and that corporate longevity is shrinking. This assertion appears frequently in the business press. Our research shows a more nuanced picture. Indeed, a common measure of corporate longevity, turnover of the companies in the S&P 500, shows that longevity has lengthened in recent years.

A hell of a way to run a railroad. For New Yorkers who are bored of the things they are mad about and want something new to be mad about: The Port Authority capital plan approved this week includes $1.5 billion for Cuomo’s pointless LaGuardia AirTrain. Of course it would be too much to ask that we extend the existing transit system, we have to create a special new system for airport travelers only. But Cuomo’s plan is useless even for them.

Strikes: still declining. Various people have been sharing a graph of strikes “involving 1000 or more workers” on Facebook. I expressed some doubts about this – it’s obviously true that the US has seen a drastic decline in strikes and in worker militance in general, but how well is this captured by a series that only includes the largest strikes? Andrew Bossie replies, showing that for the earlier period where we have more comprehensive strike data, it matches the 1000+ series pretty well. Fair enough.

Welfare is not only for whites. Here is a useful corrective from Matt Bruenig to claims that the welfare state disproportionately serves white Americans. I assume the idea behind these arguments is to disarm claim that welfare is just for “them.” But the politics could cut other way – it’s equally easy to see “welfare goes to whites” as a move to advance the idea that racial justice and economic justice are unrelated, even conflicting, goals. Anyway, whatever it rhetorical uses, we still need a clear and honest assessment of how things work. Which Matt as usual provides.

TPP is dead … or is it? My collaborator Arjun Jayadev has a nice piece in The Hindu (circulation 1.4 million, not far off the New York Times) on the legacy of the late, unlamented Trans-Pacific Partnership. It can be hard to rememebr, amid the shrieks and shudders and foul smells coming from the Oval Office, how destructive and, in its own way, insane, was the pre-Trump liberal consensus for free trade and endless war.

Just give people nice things is a sound basis for policy. “When we decided peoples’ houses shouldn’t burn down, we didn’t provide savings accounts for private fire insurance, we hired firefighters and built fire stations. If the broad left takes power again, enough with too-clever-by-half social engineering. Help people and take credit.”

Links for May 25, 2016

Deliberately. The IMF has released its new Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece. Frances Coppola has the details, and they are something. Per the IMF,

Demographic projections suggest that working age population will decline by about 10 percentage points by 2060. At the same time, Greece will continue to struggle with high unemployment rates for decades to come. Its current unemployment rate is around 25 percent, the highest in the OECD, and after seven years of recession, its structural component is estimated at around 20 percent. Consequently, it will take significant time for unemployment to come down. Staff expects it to reach 18 percent by 2022, 12 percent by 2040, and 6 percent only by 2060.

Frances adds:

For Greece’s young people currently out of work, that is all of their working life. A whole generation will have been consigned to the scrapheap. …

The truth is that seven years of recession has wrecked the Greek economy. It is no longer capable of generating enough jobs to employ its population. The IMF estimates that even in good times, 20 percent of adults would remain unemployed. To generate the jobs that are needed there will have to be large numbers of new businesses, perhaps even whole new industries. Developing such extensive new productive capacity takes time and requires substantial investment – and Greece is not the most attractive of investment prospects. Absent something akin to a Marshall Plan, it will take many, many years to repair the damage deliberately inflicted on Greece by European authorities and the IMF in order to bail out the European banking system.

For some reason, that reminds me of this. Good times.

Also, here’s the Economist, back in 2006:

The core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that will change, alas, only after a diabolic economic crisis. … The sad truth is that voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change. Reform is always painful. And there are too many cosseted insiders—those with secure jobs, those in the public sector—who see little to gain and much to lose. … One reason for believing that reform can happen … is that other European countries have shown the way. Britain faced economic and social meltdown in 1979; there followed a decade of Thatcherite reform. … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people.

I bet they’re pretty pleased right now.

Polanyism. At Dissent, Mike Konczal and Patrick Iber have a very nice introduction to Karl Polanyi. One thing I like about this piece is that they present Polanyi as a sort of theoretical back-formation for the Sanders campaign.

The vast majority of Sanders’s supporters … are, probably without knowing it, secret followers of Karl Polanyi. …

One of the divides within the Democratic primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton has been between a social-democratic and a “progressive” but market-friendly vision of addressing social problems. Take, for example, health care. Sanders proposes a single-payer system in which the government pays and health care directly, and he frames it explicitly in the language of rights: “healthcare is a human right and should be guaranteed to all Americans regardless of wealth or income.” … Sanders offers a straightforward defense of decommodification—the idea that some things do not belong in the marketplace—that is at odds with the kind of politics that the leadership of the Democratic Party has offered … Polanyi’s particular definition of socialism sounds like one Sanders would share.

Obamacare and the insurers. On the subject of health care and decommodification, I liked James Kwak’s piece on Obamacare.

The dirty not-so-secret of Obamacare … is that sometimes the things we don’t like about market outcomes aren’t market failures—they are exactly what markets are supposed to do. … at the end of the day, Obamacare is based on the idea that competition is good, but tries to prevent insurers from competing on all significant dimensions except the one that the government is better at anyway. We shouldn’t be surprised when insurance policies get worse and health care costs continue to rise.

It’s too bad so many intra-Democratic policy debates are conducted in terms of the radical-incremental binary, it’s not really meaningful. You can do more or less of anything. Would be better to focus on this non-market vs market question.

In this context, I wish there’d been some discussion in the campaign of New York’s new universal pre-kindergarten, which is a great example incremental decommodification in practice. Admittedly I’m a bit biased — I live in New York, and my son will be starting pre-K next year. Still: Here’s an example of a social need being addressed not through vouchers, or tax credits, or with means tests, but through a universal public services, provided — not entirely, but mainly and increasingly — by public employees. Why isn’t this a model?

The prehistory of the economics profession. I really liked this long piece by Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger on the early history of the American Economics Association. The takeaway is that the AEA’s early history was surprisingly radical, both intellectually and in its self-conception as part of larger political project. (Another good discussion of this is in Michael Perelman’s Railroading Economics.) This is history more people should know, and Steinbaum and Weisberger tell it well. I also agree with their conclusion:

That [the economics profession] abandoned “advocacy” under the banner of “objectivity” only raises the question of what that distinction really means in practice. Perhaps actual objectivity does not require that the scholar noisily disclaim advocacy. It may, in fact, require the opposite.

The more I struggle with this stuff, the more I think this is right. A field or discipline needs its internal standards to distinguish valid or well-supported claims from invalid or poorly supported ones. But evaluation of relevance, importance, correspondence to the relevant features of reality can never be made on the basis of internal criteria. They require the standpoint of some outside commitment, some engagement with the concrete reality you are studying distinct from your formal representations of it. Of course that engagement doesn’t have to be political. Hyman Minsky’s work for the Mark Twain Bank in Missouri, for example, played an equivalent role; and as Perry Mehrling observes in his wonderful essay on Minsky, “It is significant that the fullest statement of his business cycle theory was published by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.” But it has to be something. In economics, I think, even more than in other fields, the best scholarship is not going to come from people who are only scholars.

Negative rates, so what. Here’s a sensible look at the modest real-world impact of negative rates from Brian Romanchuk. It’s always interesting to see how these things look from the point of view of market participants. The importance of a negative policy rate has nothing to do with the terms on which present consumption trades off against future consumption, it’s about one component of the return on some assets relative to others.

I’m number 55. Someone made a list of the top 100 economics blogs, and put me on it. That was nice.

Draghi Makes His Case

A few unorganized thoughts on yesterday’s press conference. Video is here. Transcript is … do they even publish transcripts of these things?

Draghi’s introductory remarks didn’t mention Greece but of course that’s what all the questions were about. The big question were about liquidity assistance (ELA) to Greek banks and under what conditions Greek debt would be included in quantitative easing, a big expansion of which was just announced.

There’s no way to hide the hypocrisy of the simultaneous expansion of QE and continued limits on ELA. You can say, the markets don’t want to hold this debt so we need to reduce our holdings too, to avoid excessive risk — then you are acting like a private bank. Or you can say, the markets don’t want to hold this debt so we need to increase our holdings, to keep its yield down — then you are acting like a central bank. But there’s no basis for applying one of these logics to Greece and the other to the rest of the euro area.

There was also no explanation for the decision to raise the ELA cap by 900 million. Draghi kept repeating the formula “solvent banks with adequate collateral” but obviously this implies a bank by bank assessment, not a hard cap for the country as a whole. Anyway, the logic of a lender of last resort is that, if you are going to support the banks, you need to be prepared to lend as much as it takes. A limited program only makes the problem worse, by encouraging depositors and other holders of short-term liabilities to get out before its exhausted. Paul de Grauwe has the right analysis here:

The correct announcement of the ECB should be that it will provide all the necessary liquidity to the Greek banks. Such an announcement will pacify depositors. Knowing that the banks have sufficient cash to pay them out they will stop running to the bank. Like the OMT, such an announcement will stop the banking crisis without the ECB actually having to provide much liquidity to the Greek banks.

These are first principles of how a central bank should deal with a banking crisis. I would be very surprised if the very intelligent men (and one woman) in Frankfurt did not know these first principles. This leads me to conclude that the ECB has other objectives than stabilizing the Greek banking system. These objectives are political. The ECB continues to put pressure on the Greek government to behave well. The price of this behavior by the ECB is paid by millions of Greeks.

Logically, ELA should either be ended or else provided on the a sufficient scale to restore confidence and end the run. Draghi suggested that there was something moderate and “proportional” about choosing a course in between, but this is incoherent. I was also very struck that he felt the need to reject the accusation that “there was bank run deliberately caused by the ECB,” which no one there had made. Remember that old line, attributed to Claud Cockburn: Never believe something until it’s been officially denied.

Another thing I found interesting was how much he treated the Bank of Greece as an independent actor, frequently referring to decisions “taken by the ECB and the Bank of Greece” and even trying to pass the buck to them on questions like whether the additional ELA was sufficient (“we have fully accommodated the Bank of Greece’s request”) and when the Greek banks would be able to reopen. Establishing that the national central banks have independent authority will be important if they become a terrain of struggle in future conflicts between popular governments and the euro authorities.

On the question of when the Greek banks would reopen, after deferring to the BoG, he then said that they hold all this government paper (which isn’t actually true — the ECB’s own numbers show that Greek banks have the lowest proportion of government loans on their books of any major euro-area country) and their solvency and the adequacy of their collateral therefore depend on what’s going on with the government. “The quality of the collateral depends on the quality of the discussions” with the creditors was one way he put it, a more or less explicit acknowledgement that this decision is being made on political criteria.

Someone asked him point-blank how the Greek banks could be ineligible for assistance when the ECB’s own analysis had concluded they were solvent; someone else asked why a hard cap was being announced when this was never done for individual banks, precisely because of concerns wit would intensify a panic. At this point (around 40:00 in the video) he changed tack again. Now he said that this was a special case because it wasn’t about conditions at individual banks but about a “systemic” problem of a whole banking system, so the old rules didn’t apply. Which of course made nonsense of the “solvency and adequate collateral” formula, without doing anything to justify the ECB’s actions.

On the question of whether or when Greek bonds would be included in QE, Draghi’s initial non-answer was “when they become eligible for monetary policy.” Pressed by the reporter (around 56:00), he turned to vice-president Constâncio, who explained that if a country’s bonds were rated below investment-grade, they could only be purchased by the ECB if (1) there was an IMF program in place and (2) the ECB’s Governing Council determines that there is “credible compliance” with the program. [1] Here again we see how monetary policy is used to advance a particular policy agenda, and more broadly, a nice illustration of how market and state power articulate. The supposed judgement of the markets is actually enforced by public agencies.

One of the few departures from Greece was when Draghi got going — I can’t remember in response to what — about the need for deeper “capital market integration.” Which seems nuts. Who, looking at the situation in Europe today, would say, You know what we really need? More uncontrolled international lending. It’s just like Dani Rodrik’s parable:

Imagine landing on a planet that runs on widgets. You are told that international trade in widgets is highly unpredictable and volatile on this planet, for reasons that are poorly understood. A small number of nations have access to imported widgets, while many others are completely shut out even when they impose no apparent obstacles to trade. With some regularity, those countries that have access to widgets get too much of a good thing, and their markets are flooded with imported widgets. This allows them to go on a widget binge, which makes everyone pretty happy for a while. However, such binges are often interrupted by a sudden cutoff in supply, unrelated to any change in circumstances. The turnaround causes the affected economies to experience painful economic adjustments. For reasons equally poorly understood, when one country is hit by a supply cutback in this fashion, many other countries experience similar shocks in quick succession. Some years thereafter, a widget boom starts anew.

Your hosts beg you for guidance: how should they deal with their widget problem? Ponder this question for a while and then ponder under what circumstances your central recommendation would be that all extant controls on international trade in widgets be eliminated.

[1] I’m not sure but I believe these standards were established by the ECB itself, and not by any of its governing legislation. So the answer is evasive in another way. In general, watching these things makes clear how helpful it is in resisting popular pressure to have multiple, shifting, overlapping authorities. Any decision can be presented as an objective constraint imposed from somewhere else.

UPDATE: Nathan Tankus has some very sharp observations on the press conference.

Lessons from the Greek Crisis

The deal, obviously it looks bad. No sense in spinning: It’s unconditional surrender. It is bad.

There’s no shortage of writing about how we got here. I do think that we — in the US and elsewhere — should resist the urge to criticize the Syriza government, even for what may seem, to us, like obvious mistakes. The difficulty of taking a position in opposition to “Europe” should not be underestimated. It’s one of the ironies of history that the prestige of social democracy, earned through genuine victories by and for working people, is now one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of those who would destroy it. For a sense of the constraints the Syriza government has operated under, I particularly recommend this interview with an unnamed senior advisor to Syriza, and this interview with Varoufakis.

Personally I don’t think I can be a useful contributor to the debate about Syriza’s strategy. I think those of us in the US should show solidarity with Greece but refrain from second-guessing the choices made by the government there. But we can try to better understand the situation, in support of those working to change it. So, 13 theses on the Greek crisis and the crisis next time.

These points are meant as starting points for further discussion. I will try to write about each of them in more detail, as I have time.

Continue reading Lessons from the Greek Crisis

Greece Thoughts and Links

Like everyone sympathetic to Greece in the current crisis, I was pleased by the size of the “No” vote in last weekend’s referendum. Even taking into account support from the far right, the 62% for No represents a significant increase in support from the 36% of the vote SYRIZA got in January.

But, I’m not sure how the vote changes the situation in any substantive way. Certainly it hasn’t led to any softening of the creditors’ position. The situation remains what it was before: Greece must comply with the full list of policy changes demanded by the creditors, and any further changes demanded in the future, or else the central bank will keep the Greek banking system shut down. The debt itself is just a pretext on both sides — repayment is not really what the creditors want, and default isn’t really what they are threatening.

I continue to think that the Bank of Greece is the key strategic terrain in this contest. If the elected government can regain control of the central bank — in defiance of eurosystem norms if need be — then it removes the source of the creditors’ power over the Greek economy. There is no need for a new currency in this scenario. If the Bank of Greece simply goes back to performing the usual functions of a central bank, instead of engaging in what is, in effect, a politically-motivated strike, then Greek banks can reopen and the Greek government can finance needed spending without the consent of the official creditors.

More broadly, I think we cannot understand the economics of the situation unless we clearly understand that “money,” in modern economies, refers to a network of promises between banks and not a set of tokens. In this sense, I don’t think it makes sense to think of being in or out of a currency as a simple binary. As Perry Mehrling emphasizes, there have always been overlapping networks of money-contracts, with various economic units participating in multiple networks to different degrees.

Here are a few relevant links, some spelling out my thoughts more, some useful background material.

1. Here is an interview with me on the podcast RadioDispatch. If you don’t mind listening rather than reading, this is my fullest attempt to explain the logic of the crisis.

RadioDispatch interview June 2015

2. I had a productive discussion with Dan Davies on this Crooked Timber thread. Since my last comment there got stuck in moderation for some reason, I’m reposting it here:

From my point of view, the key question is whether the ECB is constrained by, or at least acting in accordance with, the normal principles of central banking, or if it is deliberately withholding support from the Greek banking system in order to advance a political agenda.

Obviously, I think it’s the second. (And I think this is really the only leverage the creditors have — there is no reason that a default in itself should be particularly costly to Greece.) On whether it is plausible that the ECB would (ab)use its authority this way, I think that is unequivocally demonstrated by the letters sent to the governments of Italy, Spain and Ireland during those countries’ sovereign debt crises in 2011. In return for support of those countries’ sovereign debt markets, the ECB demanded a long list of unrelated reforms, mainly focused on labor-market liberalization. There is no credible case that many of these reforms (for instance banning cost-of-living clauses in private employment contracts) were connected with the immediate crisis or even with public budgets at all. I think it can be taken as proven that the EC has, in the past, deliberately refused to perform its function of stabilizing the financial system, in order to put pressure on elected governments.

We can debate how exactly this precedent fits Greece. But I don’t think a central bank that allows its country’s banking system to collapse can ever be said to be doing its job. Every modern central bank — including the ECB with respect to every euro-area country except Greece — will go to heroic lengths, bending or ignoring rules as need be, to keep the payments system operating.

3. Over at The Week, I talk with Jeff Spross about the idea that changes in private financial flows between euro-area countries can be passively offset by balances between the national central banks in the TARGET2 system, avoiding the need to mangle the real economy to produce rapid adjustment of trade flows.

Like many critics of the euro system, I used to think that they had succeeded in creating something like a modern gold standard, and that the only way crises could be avoided was with a fiscal union, so that public flows could offset shifts in financial flows. But I no longer think this is correct, I think that the TARGET2 system can, and has, offset changes in private financial flows without the need for any fiscal payments.

(The Week also had a nice writeup of the Reagan-debt post.)

4. I reached this conclusion after reading several pieces by Philippine Cour-Thimann, who is the source for understanding TARGET2 and its role both in the normal operations of the euro system and in the crisis. I recommend this one to start with. (Incidentally it was my friend Enno Schröder who told me about Cour-Thimann.)

5. One topic I’ve wanted to get into more is the (in my view) limited capacity of relative-price adjustments to balance trade even when exchange rates are flexible. In the past, I’ve made this argument on the crude empirical grounds that Greece had large trade deficits continuously for decades before it joined the euro. I’ve also pointed out Enno’s work showing that the growth of European trade imbalances owes nothing to expenditure switching toward German products and away from Greek, Spanish, etc., but is entirely explained by the more rapid income growth in the latter countries. Now here is another interesting piece of evidence on this question from the ECB, a big new study finding that while there is a substantial fall in exports in response to large appreciations, there is no discernible growth in exports in response to depreciations. This fits with the idea, which I attribute to Robert Blecker, that in a world where prices are mainly set in destination markets rather than by producer costs, changes in exchange rates show up in exporter profit margins rather than directly in sales volumes. And while large losses will certainly cause some exporting firms to exit or fail, large (potential) profits are only one of a number of conditions required for exporters to grow, let alone for the creation of new exporting industries.

6. This is a great post by Steve Randy Waldman.

7. Here’s an interesting find from a friend: In the 1980s, Fidel Castro proposed “a cartel of debtor nations” that would require their creditors to negotiate with them as a group. See pages 278-285 of this anthology.

UPDATE: Re item 2, here’s Martin Wolf today (his links):

The European Central Bank could expand its emergency lending to the Greek banking system. If the ECB were a normal central bank that is exactly what it would do. Greece has a run on its banks. As the lender of last resort, the central bank ought to lend into such a run. If the ECB believes the banks are solvent, it must lend. If the ECB believes the banks are insolvent, it should arrange recapitalisation — by converting non-insured liabilities into equity, by selling banks to new owners or by securing funding from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Unfortunately, the ECB is not a normal central bank…

What Greece Must Do

Greece doesn’t need a new currency, it needs control over its central bank.

The Greek crisis is not fundamentally about Greek government debt. Nor in its current acute current form, is it about the balance of payments between Greece and the rest of the world. Rather, it is about the Greek banking system, and the withdrawal of support for it by the central bank. The solution accordingly is for Greece to regain control of its central bank.

I can’t properly establish the premise here. Suffice to say:

(1) On the one hand, the direct economic consequences of default are probably nil. (Recall that Greece in some sense already defaulted, less than five years ago.) Even if default resulted in a complete loss of access to foreign credit, Greece today has neither a trade deficit nor a primary fiscal deficit to be financed. And with respect to the fiscal deficit, if the Greek central bank behaved like central banks in other developed countries, financing a deficit domestically would not be a problem. And with respect to the external balance, the evidence, both historical and contemporary, suggests that financial markets do not in fact punish defaulters. (And why should they? — the extinction of unserviceable debt almost by definition makes a government a better credit risk post-default, and capitalists are no more capable of putting principle ahead of profit in this case than in others). The costs of default, rather, are the punishment imposed by the creditors, in this case by the ECB. The actual cost of default is being paid already — in the form of shuttered Greek banks, the result of the refusal of the Bank of Greece to extend them the liquidity they need to honor depositors’ withdrawal requests. [1]

(2) On the other hand, Greece’s dependence on its official creditors is not, as most people imagine, simply the result of an unwillingness of the private sector to hold Greek government debt, but also of the ECB’s decision to forbid — on what authority, I don’t know — the Greek government from issuing more short-term debt. [2] This although Greek T-bills, held in large part by the private sector, currently carry interest rates between 2 and 3 percent — half what Greece is being charged by the ECB. And of course, it’s not so many years since other European countries were facing fiscal crises — in 2011-2012 rates on Portugal’s sovereign debt hit 14 percent, Ireland’s 12, and Spain and Italy were over 7 percent and headed upwards. At these rates these countries’ debt ratios — not much lower than Greece’s — would have ballooned out of control and they also would have faced default. Why didn’t that happen? Not because of fiscal surpluses, delivered through brutal austerity — fiscal adjustments in those countries were all much milder than in Greece. Rather, because the ECB intervened to support their sovereign debt markets, and announced an open-ended willingness to do “whatever it takes” to preserve their ability to borrow within the euro system. This public commitment was sufficient to convince private investors to hold these countries’ debt, at rates not much above Germany’s. Needless to say, no similar commitment has been made for Greek sovereign debt. Quite the opposite.

So to both questions — why is failure to reach agreement with its official creditors so devastating for Greece; and why is the Greek government in hock to those creditors in the first place? — the answer is, the policies of the central bank. And specifically its refusal to fulfill the normally overriding duties of a central bank, stabilization of the banking system and of the market for government debt, a refusal in the service of a political agenda. The problem so posed, the solution is clear: Greece must regain control of its central bank.

Now, most people assume this means it must leave the euro and (re)introduce its own currency. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. It’s not widely realized, but the old national central banks did not cease to exist when the euro was created. [1] In fact, not only do they continue to operate, they perform almost all the day to day operation of central banking in the euro area, with, on paper, a substantial degree of autonomy from the central authorities in Brussels. So what’s required is not “exit,” not a radical step by the Greek government. Rather simply a change in personnel at the Bank of Greece. The BoG only needs to halt what is in effect a politically motivated strike, and return to performing the usual functions of a central bank.

Now, I cannot exclude the possibility that if Greece takes steps to neutralize the creditors’ main weapon, they will retaliate in other ways, which will result in the eventual exit of Greece from the euro. (Though “exit” is not as black and white as people suppose. [2]) But this would be a political choice by the creditors, not in any way a result of economic logic. We should not speak of exit in that case, but embargo.

Here is my proposal:

1. The Greek government takes control of the Bank of Greece. It replaces the BoG’s current leadership — holdovers from the old conservative government, appointed at the 11th hour when Syriza was on the brink of power — with suitably qualified people who support the program of Greece’s elected government. The argument is made that the central bank has abused its mandate, and failed in its fundamental duty to maintain the integrity of the banking system, in order to advance a political agenda.

Either legislation could be passed explicitly subordinating the BoG to the elected government, or use could be made of existing provisions for removal of central bank officials for cause. The latter may not be feasible and we don’t want to get bogged down in formalities. Central bankers have critical public function and if they won’t do it, they must be replaced with others who will. Whatever the law may say.

2. The new Bank of Greece leadership commit publicly to maintain the integrity of the Greek payments system, to protect deposits in Greek banks and to prevent bank runs — the same commitment the ECB has repeatedly made for banks elsewhere in Europe. The Greek government asserts its rights to license banks and resolve bank failures. Capital controls are imposed. Greek banks reopen.

3. If necessary, the BoG resumes Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) or equivalent loans to Greek banks. While the promise to do this is important, it probably won’t be necessary to actually resume ELA on any significant scale because:

– removing the previous threats to withdraw support from Greek banks will end the bank run and probably lead to the voluntary return of deposits to Greek banks.

– capital controls and, if necessary, continued limits on cash withdrawals, block any channels for deposits to leave the Greek banking system.

– resumption of Greek payments to public employees, pensioners, etc., to be soon followed by resumed economic growth, will automatically increase the deposit base of Greek banks.

4. The Greek government resumes spending at a level consistent with domestic needs, including full pay for civil servants, full payment of pensions, etc. Taxes similarly are set according to macroeconomic and distribution objectives. The resulting fiscal deficit is funded by issue of new debt to domestic purchasers. This new debt will be senior to existing debt to the public creditors.

It may be that this debt will end up being held by the banks, but that is no big deal. Greek government debt currently accounts for less than 6 percent of the assets of Greek banks, the lowest of many major European country and barely half the euro-area average. And in the absence of capital flight, bank assets and deposits will increase in line, so there is no need for any additional financing from the Bank of Greece. Even more: If resolution of the crisis leads to a repatriation of Greek savings abroad, then the increase in deposit liabilities of Greek banks will be balanced by increased reserves at (or rather reduced liabilities to) the Bank of Greece. The BoG in turn will acquire a more positive Target balance, or if it’s ejected from Target (see below), an equivalent increase in foreign exchange holdings.

5. The interest rate on the new debt needs to be comfortably less than the expected nominal growth rate of the Greek economy. I see no reason why this will not be true of market rates — there are already private holders of Greek T-bills with yields between 2 and 3 percent, and the combination of a Greek central bank committed to stabilizing the market for Greek public debt, and capital controls preventing Greek banks and wealth holders from acquiring foreign assets, should tend to push rates down from current levels. But if necessary, the Greek central bank will have sufficient hard and soft tools to get Greek banks to hold the new debt at acceptable rates.

6. The official creditors are offered a take-it-or-leave-it swap of existing loans for new debt. (I think this kind of forced restructuring is preferable to outright repudiation for various reasons.) The new debt will have a combination of writedown of face value of the current debt, maturity extensions and reduced interest rates so as to keep annual payments at some reasonable level. I think it might be better to avoid an explicit reduction of face value and simply offer, let’s say, 30 year bonds paying 2%, of equal face value to the current debt. It would be best if the new bonds were “Greek-denominated.” Perhaps it’s sufficient to say that the new bonds are issued under Greek law.

7. The Greek government must be prepared for declarations from the creditors that its actions are illegal, and for possible retaliation. Rhetorically, it may be helpful to emphasize that Greece remains sovereign and Greek law continues to control the Greek central bank and private banks; that the ECB (and its agents at the Bank of Greece) have abused their authority to advance a political agenda; and that the wellbeing of the Greek people must take priority over treaty obligations. But framing may not make much difference here and anyway these kinds of tactical-political questions are for the Syriza leadership and not for an American sympathizer.

What concrete form will creditor retaliation take? One possibility is they will stop deposits in Greek banks from being used to make payments elsewhere in Europe, by shutting off Bank of Greece access to Target2, the settlement system that currently clears balances between national central banks within the eurosystem. [3] Concretely, lack of access to Target2 needn’t be crippling. Payments within Greece won’t be affected, domestic interbank settlement can use accounts at the Bank of Greece just the same as now. Foreign payments will be made using deposits at banks in the exporting country, just as trade payments outside the euro area are already made. Since Greece currently has a small trade surplus, there is no need for anyone outside of Greece to accept a Greek bank deposit in payment. And even if foreign borrowing is desired, the resulting funds can take the form of deposits at a bank in the lending country — again, just as already happens for loan transactions outside the euro area. In effect, by cutting off Target2 the ECB will just be helping Greece enforce its capital controls.

Now one potential issue is the foreign obligations of private Greek units. Can they be paid with deposits in Greek banks? Let’s be clear that a negative answer requires a change in the law by the other euro countries — they are the ones that will redenominate, not Greece. But to be safe, Greece should pass a law clarifying that euro-denominated deposits at Greek banks are legal tender for all existing payment obligations by Greek households or businesses. And it would be good to have a sense of the scale of such obligations.

Assuming Greece loses access to Target2, its export earnings, going forward, will take the form of deposits in non-Greek banks or equivalent claims on non-Greek financial institutions. Which leads to…

8. It is critical to ensure that Greek export earnings are available to finance Greek imports. Many discussions of Greek default focus on what are, to my mind, non- or minor problems, while ignoring this major one. [4] If payment for Greek exports takes the form of deposits in foreign banks, as will presumably be the case of Target2 access is shut off, steps must be taken to ensure that those deposits are available for import payments rather being used to finance private acquisition of foreign assets.

Given Greece’s overall near-zero trade balance, access to foreign loans should not be necessary to finance continued imports. But this assumes that export earnings are available to finance imports. There is a danger that exporters will seek to evade capital controls by holding export earnings abroad, manipulating invoices if necessary to disguise noncompliance with the law. This is a serious problem in subsaharan Africa and elsewhere — individuals involved in foreign trade overstate the value of imports and understate the value of exports in order to retain foreign earnings abroad for their personal use. This kind of capital flight can leave a country that notionally has a positive trade balance nonetheless dependent on foreign borrowing to finance its imports. (Ireland is a recent example within the euro area.) The Greek government needs to have enforcement mechanisms to ensure that export earnings are used to finance imports and not to accumulate foreign assets. This should be straightforward where foreign sales are easily visible to regulators, as in tourism or refining, but may be challenging in the case of shipping.

Other European countries will presumably not be cooperative with Greece’s efforts to enforce capital controls. This is a reality that has to be planned for, but it also should be called what it is: Collusion with criminals to steal goods and services from Greece.

9. The government may need to ration foreign exchange. If capital controls are ineffective, or, in the first year or two, if seasonal variation in Greek exports swamps the overall balance, Greek export earnings may be insufficient to pay for current imports for some period, and foreign credit may not be available. This need not be a crisis. But it does mean that the government should be prepared to allocate scarce foreign exchange to particular sectors. The mechanisms to do this are already implicit in the imposition of capital controls. And the centralized allocation of foreign exchange is consistent with….

10. In the long run Greece should learn from the model of Korea and similar late industrializers. (This, also, is the argument for nationalizing the banks, rather than the fact that the “true” value of their assets, in some sense, leaves them insolvent.) Little if any boost to Greece’s net exports should be expected from devaluation. The goal rather must be to channel savings and foreign exchange to sectors that are not currently competitive, but that plausibly might become so. Centralized allocation of credit and foreign exchange is needed to transform the industrial structure, rather than passively following current comparative advantage.

[1] Those requests themselves are largely the result of the hysterical fear-mongering by the BoG and its masters in Greece, the exact opposite of the normal efforts of central bankers to prevent panics. In any case, the rules of the eurosystem give the ECB/BoG almost unlimited discretion with respect to liquidity assistance, so they can’t claim this decision is forced on them.

[2] You can think of a continuum from current membership, to the situation of Cyprus with capital controls, to Andorra which prints its own euro currency but does not have shares in the ECB, to Montenegro which uses the euros as domestic currency without any formal participation, to Denmark which has its own currency but clears balances with euro-area central banks through a Target2 account at the ECB.

[3] The best discussions of Target2 I know of are by Philippine Cour-Thimann.

[4] Here as so often, the political authorities step in to do what “market forces” supposedly ought to be doing but aren’t.

[5] Don’t believe the stories you will hear that this is somehow a necessary or automatic reaction to replacement of BoG leadership. It is not. Countries that are not in the euro at all are still permitted to participate in Target2.

[6] When I was debating this stuff with the very smart Nathan Tankus a few days ago, he brought up the possibility that foreign ATM cards wouldn’t work in Greece, and of an adverse ruling from the European Court of Justice. Oh no!

Tag: Greece