Author: Colm McCarthy

For Greece (or any other fiscally-challenged member) to ‘leave the Euro’ involves the launch of a new curreny. From scratch. People talk as if the drachma lives on, cryogenically preserved in some icy Limbo for Currencies.

So the Greek government could thaw it out overnight, at some devalued exchange rate, and Bob’s your Uncle. This is moonshine. The Eurozone is not a fixed-exchange rate system, it’s a common currency area. The drachma has been abolished. This parrot is deceased.

Launching a new currency is a formidable undertaking in calm circumstances. In current Greek circumstances, and abstracting from the enormous logistic challenges, it is not do-able. There would be little point launching a new currency unless people could be induced to hold it. The prospectus would have to mention the debt ratio at 113% of GDP and rising, weak competitiveness, the largest adverse sovereign spread in  the EZ and so forth. Who could be compelled to hold this currency even briefly (while it is being devalued) apart from domestic Greek recipients of pay and social transfers? Does anyone believe that the Euro would disappear from Greek trade and payments? Existing debts would have to be honoured in Euro – there is nothing else at present. Not even lawyers could hold that contracts were to be enforced in a currency which did not exist at the time the contracts were entered into.

There are 16 countries in the Eurozone, but 17 European countries use the Euro, the 17th. being Montenegro, which decided, at independence in 2002, not to launch a new currency. They use the Euro, do not get any of the seignorage as far as I know, but don’t have to spend half their lives in Frankfurt at ECB meetings, which sounds like a reasonable deal. (Memo to Montenegro: You may not have a currency to worry about, but you do have banks. Watch it!).

Who can say that Greece, having ‘left the Euro’, would not become a bit like Montenegro, with admittedly an unloved drachma for government internal transactions but most of the economy dollarised (or Eurinated)? Lufthansa reduces capacity a little on Athens-Frankfurt business class, but what else changes?

David McWilliams has advocated in his SBP column that Ireland should choose to ‘leave the Euro’. Please explain, in great detail (this is not a transition-year project) precisely

– how the introduction of a new currency in current circumstances would be executed, and

– how it would pan out in macro-policy terms.

German and other advocates of an expulsion option might join David in this exercise.

There is a strand in what passes for policy discussion which goes like this:

(i) There is an acknowledged problem in some sector or policy area;

(ii) the Government could  do something to ameliorate this problem;

(iii) QED the Government should do something, not always specified.

The result of this line of attack is policies like the Car Scrappage Scheme, of which more anon.

Examples in this morning’s media concern the excess supply of hotels, and the threat of global warming. The Government is being urged to take measures

– to reduce the hotel stock, and

– to support the hydro storage/windpower project called Spirit of Ireland.

Hotel Stock: Hotels are a pure private good. Due to policy-induced capacity expansion, there are now too many. Some are bust, and face receivership/liquidation/NAMA.  Room prices are falling. This is the natural market response. Where is the market failure?

It is true that some long-established hotels have seen their business undermined by State-subsidised competition, but this is a routine business risk in an interventionist political culture. Many of these long-established hotels enjoyed State grants for conference/leisure centres when the going was good. The industry is lobbying for some State-run scheme to take out capacity. Doing nothing will cost less and the industry will adjust. Intervening, yet again, will distort adjustment.

Spirit of Ireland: The externality of carbon emissions is addressed by putting a price on carbon, at which point the State can safely adopt a position of technology neutrality. Power generation, once externalities are dealt with, is a pure private good too. Whether these schemes make sense is a matter for the capital market, not for the Government.

Car Scrappage: Car sales have collapsed and some car dealers have gone out of business. The same has happened with €1,000 handbags, and some handbag retailers are struggling. Ireland manufactures neither cars nor handbags. The Car Scrappage Scheme will spend taxpayer money to sustain, temporarily, the retail distribution network for an imported consumer durable. Why not a Handbag Scrappage Scheme? This scheme is plain daft for Ireland. It is not even clear that it makes any sense for car-producing countries – the German scheme appears to have sucked in imports of smaller cars, which Germany does not produce. 

These ‘Something Must be Done’ schemes provide harmless entertainment for economists, fodder for the 24-hour news cycle and a playpen for lobbyists. But they contribute nothing to sustainable employment, cost the Exchequer money and hinder the necessary post-Bubble adjustment.  

In contrast, the Economics of Doing Nothing is that this is often the best policy, and the cheapest.

In today’s FT, Feldstein has spotted the obvious easy way out. Briefly, Greece should be allowed to leave the Eurozone temporarily, devalue, and rejoin. The drachma would start at one-for-one to the €, then fall (quickly!) to 1.3, at which point it would re-adopt the €. Greece would be competitive again. The only snag is that, as he puts it, ‘…other Eurozone members might object to giving Greece this improved competitiveness.’

In fairness therefore, everyone else would have to be given the same option.

Perhaps there could be an appointed day, once a year, when everybody could step out, as in Lanigan’s Ball, and then step in again, as soon as the competitiveness gain seemed adequate.

In the dollar zone, the lack of competitiveness in eg Michigan could be dealt with in the same way.

And thus the whole world could participate, with confidence, in sub-optimal currency areas, without fiscal discipline. I so wish I had thought of this.  

With one brave bound…..

Minister Batt O’Keeffe announced this afternoon that the Government has decided to scrap the National University of Ireland. UC Dublin, UC Cork, NUI Maynooth and NUI Galway were the constituent colleges. The total number of universities in Ireland has thus been increased, at a stroke, from four to seven. Ireland should now soar up the universities-per-capita league tables.

Sadly, it will no longer be possible for the NUI to play the role envisioned for it in the 1950s by Flann O’Brien (Myles na Gopaleen). He ended an Irish Times controversy about academic snobbery and the excessive use of academic titles by proposing that NUI should simply confer doctorates on all Irish citizens at birth. Although the government appears to have embarked on a slower progress toward the same destination.

There will now be a difficulty in arranging the next Seanad election, for which the graduates of NUI form a constituency. Unless of course….

In due course Ireland needs to have a functioning banking system which is adequately capitalised, does not impose excess costs on the productive economy, and does not enjoy any free insurance on its liabilities. The exit strategy from the guarantee is critical.

The banking problem for countries like Ireland is not addressed by the separation of commercial from investment banking – the Irish banks did’nt collapse through casino losses, but through explosive balance sheet growth and huge loan write-offs, a very old-fashioned commercial banking failure. Countries that have stood behind investment banks need to think about too-big-to-fail issues, reviving Glass-Steagal, much higher capital ratios and so forth, but this is not the Irish problem. 

Nor is it clear that, cet par, having ten commercial banks rather than three helps either. If all ten were to behave in the same way, you are in the soup anyway. The fisc ends up as lender of last resort in the Eurosystem as currently operated. But the fisc is’nt big enough to credibly underwrite the next failure in several countries, and the fisc in Iceland clearly not big enough to underwrite the last one.

Unless full-blown EMU emerges soon, with all commercial banks covered by a European FDIC with centralised European regulation and supervision, the implication is that the size of the domestic banking system which the state can stand behind must be constrained by the fiscal capacity of that state. In Ireland we got it wrong by permitting domestic bank balance sheets to expand beyond what could comfortably be supported by the fisc, and then failed to supervise them. Iceland made the same mistake muliplied by three or four. Scotland emerges as the smartest small European country, through not voting for the Nats.

The implication is that the contraction of Irish bank balance sheets is not just an important component of de-leveraging, it is necessary in order to match the state’s capacity to its responsibilities. Shifting existing assets off bank balance sheets through market transactions would complement NAMA, and help to avoid adjustment through an excessive restraint on, for example, working capital lending to private business.

It is difficult to see how an explicit deposit insurance system can be avoided, on a much bigger scale than the pre-crisis scheme. When push came to shove, it transpired that we had a much bigger scheme than we thought, and one which the banks cannot pay for. The next one should avoid any element of taxpayer subsidy.

Given the scale of the risk-to-the-fisc, commercial banking is an industry in which small European countries should plan to punch below their weight.  Shame the Irish banks were’nt bought out in a European consolidation!

The target size for the aggregate balance sheet of the domestic banks needs to be addressed in designing the exit strategy, and it would help if the Central Bank could arrange to publish a new table in the monthly bank return for guaranteed banks.