Has the ECB done enough to save the euro?

Written by John Springford, 25 January 2013

On July 26th 2012, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi told a London conference of bankers: “the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to save the euro”. He paused, somewhat theatrically. “And believe me, it will be enough.” His comments were an exercise in expectations management. The ECB was trying to convince financial markets that betting on the euro’s downfall would be a fool’s errand.

To all appearances, the plan seems to have worked. In the first half of 2012, investors had been withdrawing capital at an accelerating pace from Spain and Italy. Banks had been finding it increasingly difficult to get funding. Borrowing costs for the Spanish and Italian governments had risen to unsustainable levels. After Draghi’s comments in July, the ECB announced it would buy government bonds in Spain and Italy in unlimited quantities, if necessary (a plan it dubbed Outright Monetary Transactions, or OMT). This plan has not yet been activated, but Spanish and Italian borrowing costs have fallen by a fifth. This has led some to claim that the worst of the euro crisis is behind us. José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, said that “the existential threat to the euro has essentially been overcome”. The Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, said the crisis is “almost over”. Is this so?

Before the ECB announced its plan, markets had been pushing for it to act more like the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of England. Countries whose central banks had bought government bonds in exchange for newly created money – quantitative easing (QE) – have not suffered from capital flight, unlike the euro’s periphery. In 2009, the British government faced a banking bust and public sector deficit of a similar scale to those of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, but has since avoided their financial woes.

QE provided monetary stimulus, even as central bank interest rates could not go any lower. Moreover, it served to put a ceiling on government borrowing costs. This helped governments to fund their deficits in the short term. It also helped domestic banks get cheaper funding: they use government bonds as collateral and as safe assets that they can easily sell in exchange for money or more risky assets. When government borrowing costs rise, government bonds fall in value. This covers the balance sheets of the banks that hold them in red ink. QE also changed expectations: investors knew that if they dumped American or British government bonds, the Fed or the Bank of England would simply buy them up, swapping them for new money. So there was little point in trying it.

Thus, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England defined investors’ expectations, and made government borrowing safe and financial markets stable. The ECB’s interventions so far have been less far-reaching. It has lent money to banks at very low interest rates, and it has continued to accept the periphery’s government bonds as collateral. It has bought some government bonds – but exchanged them for money already in the system, so that there was no further monetary stimulus. But it has not done as much as its counterparts to make government debt safe.

The ECB’s OMT plan amounts to a promise to do QE, in a limited way, at some point in the future. The central bank said it would buy up the bonds of troubled governments if the integrity of the euro were threatened. The quid pro quo: governments must sign up to budget management by the Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the ECB. Spain and Italy have so far been reluctant to do so: borrowing costs came down after Draghi’s announcement, and governments have preferred to wait and see.

Will the current rally continue without the plan being activated? It seems unlikely. The eurozone as a whole is in recession. Spain and Italy’s economies are likely to shrink for most of next year: the European Commission projects GDP to fall by 1.4 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively. The Commission has consistently underestimated the impact of austerity on growth, and so these figures may turn out to be quite a lot worse, further undermining government finances. Little progress has been made on banking union, which would help to shore up banks’ and governments’ books. Given these conditions, markets are likely to test the ECB’s commitment to hold the currency together.
If Spain and Italy’s borrowing costs spike again, they will quickly sign up to budgetary oversight and the ECB will start buying bonds. If the ECB buys enough, it should secure the currency from immediate break-up. But there would still be grinding economic stagnation, years of high unemployment, and a fraught federalising process to create a currency union that works. A party committed to withdrawal from the single currency could win power and fulfil its mandate, pulling the eurozone apart. And this possibility, even if it failed to materialise, would hold back economic growth, because private investors would be deterred. The peripheral countries, which desperately need investment if they are to grow, would still be forced to pay premiums by financial markets to cover the risk of exit, even if those premiums were smaller than they are now. The eurozone would still be caught in a trap.

Is there anything the ECB could do in such a situation? Not by a narrow interpretation of its mandate. The ECB’s role, as currently constituted, is to keep inflation low and stable. All other objectives – unemployment, economic growth, financial stability, and so on – are subordinate. Draghi has interpreted the mandate flexibly, to mean that prices will not be stable if the single currency breaks up or if financial markets are not working. This makes the OMT plan legal. But the OMT is primarily a plan to keep the single currency together, rather than to promote growth.

However, other central banks have made growth the priority. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan have indicated that loose monetary policy will continue, irrespective of (moderately) higher inflation. The Federal Reserve is committed to monetary stimulus until unemployment falls to 6.5 per cent of the workforce, which it expects to happen in 2015. This shifts its priority from inflation to unemployment, although it has a mandate to tackle both. The Bank of England has been silent on what it will do in the future, other than its commitment to set policy to meet its 2 per cent inflation target. But it has consistently allowed inflation higher than this – it has averaged 3.5 per cent over the last five years – without tightening. The Bank of Japan has raised its inflation target, and is considering more QE. A consensus is forming: central bankers should favour employment over inflation, at least for now.

The ECB is the odd man out, because it was constructed in the Bundesbank’s image. Germany, given its corporatist wage-setting process and high savings rates, is allergic to price rises. Unions and businesses have agreed to keep wage growth low to maximise employment – and higher inflation would reduce living standards. German employees and businesses have very high savings rates, and savings are eroded away by price rises. But the eurozone faces years of low growth, not high inflation. Inflation in the eurozone is just above the 2 per cent target, but it has been pushed up by high energy prices and governments raising value-added tax rates, not higher wage demands by workers. The gap between the current rate of growth and its potential rate is large. There are 26 million people unemployed in the eurozone, which should hold wages and prices down. All of these reasons suggest that if the ECB eases monetary policy further it will not push inflation to unsustainable levels. By starting a QE programme – buying up all government bonds in proportion to their economies’ contribution to eurozone GDP – it would raise the bloc’s growth rate. And it would make clear to investors that the ECB will keep monetary policy loose until growth is restored, which would allay fears of break-up.

Political opposition from the Bundesbank and the German public would have to be overcome. A legal fix would have to be worked out to get over the prohibition on the ECB financing member-states. But the alternatives are far worse. Looser monetary policy through QE, with an explicit focus on growth, must be an important part of any plan to make the eurozone escape the trap of constant speculation about its future.

John Springford is a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.

Comments

Added on 02 Mar 2013 at 23:30 by George Georgellis

The problems of the euro are a reflection of the failure of the EU to create a trully common market. An unemployed worker in France cannot readily find employment in Germany even he speaks fluently German. Worker mobility between EU states is difficult because of different social security schemes and pension systems. At some level, it is even discouraged by the various policies and announcements of politicians in various countries. The average European citizen is becoming increasingly wary about the European Union. The only things that come from the European Union seem to be directives for more taxation and lower salaries. Moreover, the European Union seems to be powerless when it comes fighting corruption at national level and ensuring that taxes and European funds are used prudently. This must change today -- Not tomorrow! Today, Brussels must take initiatives that strengthen European Unity and improve the lives of European citizens.
For instance, it may be time for the creation of an optional European citizenship passport.
George Georgellis

Added on 31 Jan 2013 at 23:23 by Anonymous

The Bundesbank and the German public are already in the Euro-trap and they know, that there is no way out. In their week Mr. Draghi let Mr. Schäuble know (about Cyprus) who is the Boss in the Eurozone.

I don't think a legal fix have to be worked out to allow the ECB to finance the member states. The last years showed that all EU-contracts are not the paper worth they are written on. No one expects that EU commission or ECBwill follow contracts in the future.

Europe places too much faith in supply-side policies

Written by Simon Tilford, 18 January 2013

Supply-side thinking now dominates European economic policy. Most governments, and the European Commission, argue that attempts to boost demand would be counterproductive, achieving little but a delay to the necessary consolidation of public finances. With close to unanimity, they believe that structural reforms offer the only hope for depressed European economies: these reforms will improve competitiveness and confidence, leading to stronger growth, a rebalancing of trade between European countries and sustainable public finances. But are policy-makers and the Commission putting excessive faith in the power of structural reforms? Is there a risk that a strategy weighted so heavily towards supply-side measures could actually end up further eroding Europe’s growth potential? And is it right to argue that structural reforms will help bring about sustainable rebalancing?

Few doubt the need for structural reforms in Europe. The region needs faster productivity growth and this requires, among other things, more flexible and competitive markets: labour and capital must be freer to move from slow growing sectors to faster-growing ones. But structural reforms alone will not achieve this. Indeed, in the short to medium term such reforms will further depress demand. Only in the long-term could they have the desired effect and only then if businesses invest in new organisational structures and new products, and if workers (especially young ones) have the right skills and experience. But business investment is at historic lows in Europe as firms worry about the lack of demand.

And unemployment is back to levels last seen in the early eighties and set to remain chronically high for years. In short, the damage done to Europe’s supply-side by very low investment and mass unemployment is likely to offset the potential benefits of the reforms. For example, all the academic evidence shows that persistently high unemployment does lasting damage to economies’ human capital and hence growth potential.

A further problem is the nature of the structural reforms underway in Europe. Supply-side reforms in the context of the eurozone largely mean labour market reforms, or more particularly, labour market reforms that erode the bargaining power of labour. By contrast, there is much less emphasis on opening up markets for goods and services to greater competition, which is arguably more important from the perspective of economic growth. This is perhaps unsurprising. Germany’s Hartz IV reforms, which are the inspiration for much of what the eurozone is doing, led to a weakening of workers’ bargaining power, but did little to promote reform of Germany’s domestic economy. Indeed, according to the OECD, Spain’s product markets are considerably more competitive than Germany’s. This helps explain the persistent weakness of German domestic demand: it fell in 2012, with all of the economy’s 0.9 per cent growth down to net exports.

The European Commission argues that the structural reforms underway in the peripheral eurozone economies are boosting their trade competitiveness, and points to the narrowing of their current account deficits in 2012 as evidence of this. But this improvement is mainly the result of unprecedentedly weak domestic demand (and hence declining imports) in these economies, rather than rising exports. Faced with stagnation at home, some firms have successfully scrambled to boost exports. However, a sustained rise in exports requires investment in new capacity and products and stronger export demand. Neither is happening: investment in manufacturing is at all-time lows across Europe, but it is especially weak in the periphery. Demand across the European economy, meanwhile, is chronically weak.

Three years ago, the Commission argued that rebalancing within the eurozone needed to be symmetric if it was to be consistent with economic growth. It followed that the onus needed to be on the economies with big trade surpluses to rebalance their trade as much as the deficit ones. In reality, very little emphasis has been placed on rebalancing the surplus economies. And in a report published in December 2012, the Commission downplayed the role that stronger demand in the region’s surplus economies would have on the exports of countries such as Spain, Greece and Portugal. The Commission illustrated this by showing the limited impact a 1 per cent increase in German domestic demand would have on the exports of the country’s eurozone trade partners: the peripheral ones do less trade with Germany than the country’s immediate neighbours, and would hence benefit less from stronger German demand for imports. The Commission acknowledges that there would be second and third round effects – for example, stronger demand in Germany would boost the French economy, which in turn would boost the Spainish one – but almost certainly underestimates the significance of these.

However, the bigger problems with the Commission’s analysis are the narrowness of its focus and its use of such a modest increase in German domestic demand to illustrate its point. There is no doubt that a 1 per cent increase would have only limited impact on peripheral countries’ exports. But if domestic demand in Germany (and in other surplus economies such as the Netherlands and Austria) expanded by 4 per cent per year over a five year period, the impact on their trade partners would be significant, even on the assumptions employed by the Commission. Moreover, if their demand were to increase by this amount, the surplus economies’ ‘marginal propensity to import’ (that is, the proportion of any increase in demand spent on imports) would rise: their domestic industries would lack the domestic capacity to service the increased demand and a rising share of it would be met by imports. Firms would be likely to step-up investment in the domestically orientated-sectors of these economies, reducing their trade surpluses, and with it the drag they impose on the rest of the eurozone economy. The flip-side would be stronger investment in the export-orientated sectors of the peripheral countries.

On their own, the structural reforms underway across Europe will bring neither economic recovery nor rebalancing. The current reforms focus strongly on labour markets, and risk leading to similar results across Europe to those seen in Germany: very weak consumption and investment. Europe needs to do much more to strengthen demand, which requires symmetric structural reforms and stimulus. While there is no doubt that Spain needs to reform its labour market, Germany would also benefit from reforms of its product markets. Those governments that have the scope to provide stimulus need to do so: Germany actually posted a budget surplus in 2012. Stronger demand in the countries running trade surpluses will not suffice to rebalance the eurozone economy and return it to growth, but it is an indispensable element of what is needed. The European Central Bank, meanwhile, could redouble its efforts to boost credit growth. As it stands, demand is likely to remain very weak across Europe for a prolonged period of time, further eroding growth potential and the sustainability of public finances.

The Commission’s readiness to place so much faith in structural reforms as a solution to Europe’s economic ills is a product of the region’s political realities. The surplus countries have successfully resisted pressure to take steps to rebalance their economies and there is little appetite among eurozone governments for simultaneous reflation involving fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing by the ECB. The current strategy is not without political risk: the more European policy-makers talk about growth, the less growth there is. Whereas unpopular national governments can be voted out and replaced with ones that do not shoulder responsibility for unsuccessful policies, this is not the case with the Commission, whose standing could suffer long-lasting damage.

Simon Tilford is chief economist at the Centre for European Reform.

Comments

Added on 21 Jan 2013 at 06:20 by Heri

A leadership must have a policy, but that policy must be useful or that can bring good at something.

Added on 18 Jan 2013 at 17:05 by K Bledowski

Greater competition in products markets, lower cost and higher supply of labor and other measures would surely support growth. Yet import-, consumption- and overall spending elasticities vary widely across the continent. The impact of either supply- or demand-side measures is uneven. The ideal vehicle to help rebalance trade and demand is through floating exchange rates. What a pity that those are fixed across much of the continent …