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 III
(CONTINUAÇÃO)
…
4. Recent Developments
In 2010 the interest rate spread widened between the Southern members of EMU and the most “virtuous” Nordic members of EMU, notably Germany – indeed too virtuous in view of its excessive success in promoting net exports currently of the order of €210 bn or 6% of its GDP, without any mechanism or policy attempt in Germany or in Europe to eliminate or even reduce that imbalance that has been very damaging to all other EMU and EU members and ultimately to Germany itself.
The history of the following three years to date is that of partial, slow and ineffective improvements, and of the courageous and imaginative unconventional measures introduced by the ECB President Mario Draghi to make the ECB function almost like a genuine Central Bank against stern German opposition.
In 2010-2013 two temporary EU funding programmes provided instant access to financial assistance to Euroarea member states in financial difficulties: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). In September 2012 they were replaced by the permanent ESM (European Stabilisation Mechanism, while the EFSF and EFSM will continue to manage transfers and programme monitoring for the earlier bailout loans to Ireland, Portugal and Greece). However the ESM was somewhat under-funded (€500bn) to be able to cope with a large-scale crisis that might include at least one of the larger member states, and subject to the adoption of recessionary austerity and painful reform programmes under Troika supervision (EC, ECB, IMF).
Two new unconventional instruments were introduced by the ECB under Mario Draghi’s leadership, in order to restore monetary transmission mechanisms: Long Term Re-financing Operations (LTROs), through which the ECB provided injections of low interest rate funding to euro zone banks against wide-ranging collateral, and Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) through which the ECB could purchase government bonds of troubled countries in the secondary markets – a master stroke whose sheer announcement has had a stabilizing impact on financial markets without the ECB spending a single cent yet. Recently interest rate cuts were made, down to a record low of 0.5% and announced to be persistent and possibly ready to fall further down to reach the negative range.
These developments have been persistently opposed especially by German representatives within the ECB Board and challenged as improper or outright illegal (including by bringing complaints to the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe). Germany also has been opposing vigorously any suggestion of even partial mutualisation of debt within the Eurozone through the issue of Eurobonds subject to collective and several responsibility of member states – an understandable objection as Germany would risk to end up with sole responsibility as the most creditworthy party (though similar operations both in the early stages of the United States Federation and in 1862 in United Italy are said to have been advantageous to all parties involved).
Of course the ECB has access to large-scale resources which are not recorded in its balance sheet, namely the present value of its seigniorage on the Euro (the profits obtained from monetary base issues, the interest obtained from the investment of past issues, the anticipated inflation tax i.e. the loss in real value of the stock of monetary base caused by expected inflation, as well as the unanticipated inflation tax).
The present value of ECB seigniorage was estimated by Willem Buiter to have a present value of the order of €3.3 trillion (in “The Debt of Nations Revisited: The Central Bank as a quasi-fiscal player: theory and applications”, 2011). Its use to retire a sizeable part of Euroarea members’ debt in the same proportions in which they hold ECB shares would solve the Euro crisis without transforming the Eurozone into a “Transfer Union”, as it would not involve any redistribution across member states. Potentially inflationary consequences of such an operation could be neutralized by reducing the size of the ECB balance sheet (selling assets and reducing loans), sterilizing monetary liabilities, raising obligatory reserves and raising the remuneration of excess reserves in order to induce banks to keep them inactive. However this kind of operation would go against the grain of German and other Nordic members’ monetary conservatism and is unlikely to be undertaken.
Hopes have been expressed of a softening of German opposition to the creative transformation of the ECB, or at least of its staunch support for austerity, after the German elections of September 2013. But there are always frequent elections in every country at the national, regional and/or at the European level (next in 2014), and German opposition does not encourage the notion of a change of mind even in unlikely case of political alternation in power.
(continua)
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Para ler a Parte II deste trabalho de Domenico Mario Nuti, publicada ontem em A Viagem dos Argonautas, vá a:
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