Formulação da pergunta por Júlio Marques Mota
À pergunta formulada
Eis pois a questão que levanto aqui e agora, uma vez que Portugal se recusa viver em autarcia como um país pequeno que é, uma vez que a saída da zona euro unilateral é também ela inaceitável, uma vez que a saída apoiada pela UE é, por seu lado, impraticável, e tendo ainda em conta o conjunto, caracterizado pela ignorância, ganância e maldade, destes que nos governam, seja a nível regional seja a nível nacional, então o que fazer para não se morrer, mesmo que lentamente (!) com estas políticas que estão e estão mesmo para durar e talvez mais de dez anos, de acordo com as declarações de Jens Weidmann ao Wall Street Journal
continuemos a ver a troca de pontos de vistas havida com Domenico Mario Nuti
À publicação da versão inglesa do texto, seguir-se-à a versão em português e, por fim, a versão em italiano.
The Euroarea: Premature, Diminished, Divergent
By D. Mario NUTI, Professor Emeritus, Sapienza University of Rome, dmarionuti@gmail.com, Websitehttp://sites.google.com/site/dmarionuti/Home Blog “Transition”: http://dmarionuti.blogspot.com/.
Parte II
(continuação)
…
3. The Euro-Area: three failures
The Euroarea has suffered greatly from two major design failures, which are the original sins of the Common Currency, and from the member states’ increasing divergence from a common economic pattern instead of converging.
The first failure consists in the Euro’s premature birth. The Common Currency was supposed to be the very last stage of economic integration, “crowning” all the other prior stages: after political integration, after fiscal integration including a European budget on a large enough scale to allow for a European fiscal policy, after defense and foreign policy integration. Instead of which when the euro was set up, and still today, there is no European government, but only a movable collection of national Ministers that mostly legislate in place of a Parliament which remains largely a debating Club, next to a powerful European Commission of unelected Commissioners and powerful civil servants with executive powers, while policy-making remains at the inter-governmental level. The European budget was set at a derisory 1%-2% of European GDP (instead of around 20% as the US Federal Budget) and always balanced ex-post (thus without the possibility of a primary surplus, let alone one large enough to service bonds issued by the EU, which in any case the EU has no need or reason to issue because it is not allowed to run a deficit). In both defense and foreign policy only the first embryonic, bureaucratic steps towards European integration were taken.
The approach followed in Euro creation was the exact opposite of what it should have been, technically, not to mention democratically: the Common Currency was established out of sequence deliberately, precisely so as to create, through a kind of “controlled dysfunction”, the pressures and tensions that it was hoped would push forward “la finalité politique” and all the other integration stages that are still missing. This was a risky strategy that worked only temporarily and should have been rapidly followed, but was not, by filling in the missing stages in order to succeed.
The second failure of the Common Currency design was the creation of a diminished European Central Bank. The ECB was made independent – following the then fashionable theories of rational expectations and the alleged lack of a trade-off between inflation and unemployment associated with them – like the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Central Bank of Japan. However – unlike these sister institutions but on the Bundesbank template – the ECB was also totally disconnected from fiscal policy. The ECB was supposed to target inflation at a rate below 2%, though close to it; to disregard employment concerns unless and until the inflation target was met, but above all was prevented from buying government bonds whether they were issued by Europe (which the EU was not supposed to issue, other than through the European Investment Bank) or by member states. And when it was set up the ECB did not have any of the other traditional functions of a Central Bank: bank supervision, bank re-capitalisation and resolution in case of insolvency, deposit insurance – all functions that were retained by National Central Banks, and still are except for some devolution in progress of bank supervision to the ECB.
Inability to fund public expenditure, to supervise, re-capitalise and resolve banks and insure deposits made the ECB only half of a Central Bank, or possibly even less than half. There have been initiatives to establish some version of a “banking union”: strictly speaking there is no such a thing, and one would look in vain for such an institution in the textbooks on International Integration. There are only make-shift provisions to somehow alleviate the lack of those traditional Central Bank functions on the part of the ECB.
The third failure of the Euroarea is, after almost 10 wasted years of successful operation with low and uniform interest rates, the EMU member states’ failure to converge to the statutory parameters fixed by the Maastricht Treaty for EMU accession and by the euphemistically labelled Growth and Stability Pact for all EU members. This is true both of monetary convergence – of long term interest rate on 10 year government bonds, and of the rate of inflation – and of fiscal convergence maintaining the budget deficit and public debt respectively below 3% and 60% of GDP. EMU countries also failed to converge to other, real parameters that had never been targeted but – in view of the Euroarea premature and incomplete design – should have been targeted, like labour unemployment, unit labour costs (wage rates possibly remaining uneven but proportional to labour productivity), the trade balance, the share of bad loans in bank portfolios. Instead of converging, the relevant parameters of Euroarea members have become increasingly divergent during the recent crisis.
A premature birth would have been alright if the European Central Bank had been designed on the Bank of England or the Fed or the Bank of Japan template instead of the Bundesbank. Neither a premature birth nor a diminished Central Bank would have mattered if member states had converged to common monetary, fiscal and real parameters. But the combination of these three failures, including increasing divergence, is lethal. The Euroarea as it is today might be able to struggle on still for an unspecified time, but ultimately is undoubtedly doomed.
(continua)
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Ver a parte I deste texto de Domenico Mario Nuti, publicada ontem em A Viagem dos Argonautas, em:
http://aviagemdosargonautas.net/2013/08/24/saida-do-euro-segunda-resposta-de-domenico-mario-nuti/
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