Author: Kevin O’Rourke

Canaries in the coal mine

The European election results are coming in, and in France they are catastrophic.

There are two obvious points to be made which work in opposite directions.

First, the vote for the FN and similar parties is an under-estimate of eurosceptic opinion, since these parties come with so much baggage that many voters who hate what Europe has become would never, ever dream of voting for them. And quite right too.

Second, it may well be that these parties would have done less well if there had been national elections last weekend: voting for the EP is one thing, voting for national governments another. (But who really knows.)

Expect many mainstream commentators to point out that the centre has held, that the EPP have won, that Juncker is the people’s choice for EC President, and all the rest of it. This strikes me as exactly the wrong response.

My big worry this Monday morning is that Hollande and others (but I am mainly thinking of Hollande) will continue with their current economic strategy, which as far as I can see consists of crossing their fingers and hoping that something will turn up. Yes, some day this recession will end, since all recessions do, but the timing of this will depend (probabilistically, since life is uncertain) on policies: monetary and fiscal policies, obviously, but also policies to fix the European banking sector. Right now, given Europe’s policy choices, there is no good reason for the French government, or any other government, to expect that the real Eurozone economic crisis (which has to do with growth and unemployment, not yields on government paper) is going to end any time soon. And certainly not by 2017.

M. Hollande and his like may believe that sticking to the programme is their only option, and that any other course of action would be far too risky. They should ask themselves what the political landscape will look like if the Eurozone crisis continues for another 3, 5 or 10 years. It’s not impossible. Perhaps something will turn up, and perhaps the status quo merchants will get away with it. But perhaps it won’t, and perhaps they won’t.

People who argue that there is no alternative presumably see themselves as prudent and responsible. But you could just as easily regard them as drunken gamblers on a losing streak, forever doubling up.

Why vote for a left wing party so they can implement right wing policy that doesn’t even work?

Not irrelevant in Ireland. AEP, here.

De Grauwe and Ji on those yields

Here.

(H/T Eurointelligence.)

The eurozone recovery: still just around the corner

Paul Krugman is quite right: the most recent Eurozone GDP numbers are really disappointing. But hardly surprising, given current policies, unless you’re the sort of person who thinks that peripheral yields are the only thing that matters. (Not a great metric of success you would think, if they have been falling in Greece, but there you go.)

I recently read someone (can’t remember where, perhaps you can) saying — based on the yields —  that the eurozone crisis was now over economically speaking, and that the only thing that might derail things now was the politics. Which made me think two things:

1. It is surely unacceptable intellectually to regard the predictable political consequences of lousy economic policy as being somehow ‘exogenous’ and none of our business as economists.

2 If the politics of the eurozone crisis eventually turns sour, won’t this show up in various financial spreads , and wasn’t this the whole point of the ‘second generation’ crisis models we all starting teaching our students in the early 1990s?

Even if it’s cancer that kills you, death coincides with cardiac arrest.

Philippe Legrain on the need for a European spring

Here. The book on which the article is based is here.