The ECB’s Lethal Inhibition
Eichengreen, Barry. Last December, with Europe’s financial system on the brink of disaster, the European Central Bank stunned the markets with an unprecedented intervention, offering banks across the eurozone essentially unlimited liquidity against any and all collateral for an exceptional period of three years. Πηγή: Project Syndicate πλήρες κείμενο
Reversing Europe’s Renationalization
Soros, George. Far from abating, the euro crisis has taken a turn for the worse in recent months. The European Central Bank managed to relieve an incipient credit crunch through its long-term refinancing operation (LTRO), which lent over a trillion euros to eurozone banks at one percent. This brought considerable relief to financial markets, and the […]
The Big Easing
Gros, Daniel. More than three years after the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, who is doing more to bring about economic recovery, Europe or the United States? The US Federal Reserve has completed two rounds of so-called “quantitative easing,” whereas the European Central Bank has fired two shots from its big gun, the so-called […]
The EZ breakup contest: Take ignorance seriously
Baldwin, Richard. The five finalists of the £250,000 EZ breakup contest were announced last week; only one has a graduate degree in economics. This column argues that three are amateurish efforts full of economic and factual errors. European economists should take such ignorance seriously. Failure to do so in the US allowed odious ideas to […]
The Mismeasure of Wealth
Dasgupta, Partha, Duraiappah, Anantha. Despite many successes in creating a more integrated and stable global economy, a new report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability – Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing – recognizes the current global order’s failure, even inability, to implement the drastic changes needed for true “sustainability.” […]
Greece Has Too Many Farmers
Dalton, Matthew. Southern Europe has a productivity problem. Workers in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy all produce below the euro-zone average per hour worked; the difference is particularly stark for Greece and Portugal, two of the countries getting loans from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund. Πηγή: The Wall Street Journal πλήρες κείμενο
A Centerless Euro Cannot Hold
Rogoff, Kenneth. With youth unemployment touching 50% in eurozone countries such as Spain and Greece, is a generation being sacrificed for the sake of a single currency that encompasses too diverse a group of countries to be sustainable? If so, does enlarging the euro’s membership really serve Europe’s apparent goal of maximizing economic integration without […]
Has austerity gone too far?
Corsetti, Giancarlo. Is austerity self-defeating? Is it keeping Europeans underemployed for years and destroying the very growth needed to pay off the debt? Or is it steering nations clear of Greek-like tragedies? So starts a new debate on Vox on austerity, introduced in this column. Πηγή: Voxeu πλήρες κείμενο
Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy
DeLong, Bradford, Summers, Lawrence. This paper examines logic and evidence bearing on the efficacy of fiscal policy in everely depressed economies. In normal times central banks offset the effects of fiscal policy. This keeps the policy-relevant multiplier near zero. It leaves no space for expansionary fiscal policy as a stabilization policy tool. But when inter-est […]
How not to be a lender of last resort
De Grauwe, Paul. While acknowledging that the massive amounts of liquidity injected into the eurozone banking system by the ECB were absolutely necessary to save Europe’s banking system, Paul De Grauwe now criticizes these lender-of-last-resort operations as ill-designed, making it likely that the ECB will have to discontinue them in the not so distant future. […]