Eurozone saga…what’s up?

by Rebecca Wilder

This is a post about my confusion, rather than my reporting, of the Eurozone saga. Here are some pieces worth reading if you want to catch up:

The NY Times (the basics); Ed Harrison (via Naked Capitalism); From the billy blog; The Financial Times (Martin Wolf, a must read); The Economist (will reference below).

Okay, a conditional guarantee for possible lending, maybe, with consultation from the IMF has been agreed upon by the Eurozone countries (Germany and France, really). But what I don’t understand is pretty well stated in the Economist article:

The Greek government has somehow to keep its economy on an even keel while pushing through a huge fiscal tightening. Countries that seek IMF help generally have to endure brutal cuts in public spending, which deepen recessions. To counter that effect, the IMF typically counsels a weaker currency. Sadly, this is not an option for Greece. Stuck in the euro, its exchange rate with its main trading partners is fixed. Greece cannot devalue, so it needs more time to adjust than the three years it has agreed with its EU partners—and a bigger safety net while it does.

Sadly? This is not an option? The Economist completely skips over the VERY LARGE issue of a singular currency and on to the competitiveness story, one that must be derived through internal devaluation, i.e., dropping wages and other nominal variables.

Financial crises, especially those in small-open economies (Sweden, for example), generally end with a massive currency devaluation that drives export growth (provided there is external demand to suffice). I honestly don’t see how a sufficient export-generated rebound is even a possibility, given that the rest of the Eurozone is essentially trying the “internal devaluation” bit simultaneously (chart above).

And who’s going to pick up the slack? In 2008, 64% of Greece’s export income was derived by the EU 27 countries, 70% for Spain, and 74% for Portugal. If the Eurozone as a whole is using this same internal deflation mechanism to spur export growth, only the “zone” as a whole really benefits, not any one country.

WIHTOUT a massive surge in export-driven GDP growth no “zone” country can drop its financial deficit without incurring behemoth debt burden growth (in the case of the Eurozone, the term “burden” actually applies since Greece, nor any one economy, can print its own money).

Look at the government’s period budget constraint (left), where the lower-case letters “d” and “p” stand for the debt and primary deficit as a share of GDP, respectively. r is the nominal interest rate, and (1+g) is the rate of NOMINAL GDP growth (including price appreciation). (Email me if you want the algebra.)

When Greece starts dropping p (the primary deficit), the fundamentals of the economy (i.e., nominal gdp growth (1+g)) must be robust enough to prevent a surging debt burden. And here’s the cycle: to drop the primary deficit, it does so by reducing G and raising T, which drags Y (as of Y = C + I + G + Ex – Im) and growth of Y, (1+g), since export growth is unlikely to be there to offset the decline in private spending; these effects then flow back to the primary deficit to raise p.

And likewise, only under the circumstances of heroic export growth can the government reduce its fiscal deficit to 3% WITHOUT the private sector levering up their balance sheets and contributing to a larger default risk (of the depressionary type). I’m confused.

All I’m saying is that this plan, in its current form, is really not much of a plan at all. The internal devaluation model has a lot of holes.

Rebecca Wilder crossposted with News N Economics