Author: Kevin O’Rourke

The good news: confidence is just around the corner

You might have thought that the disastrous but wholly unsurprising eurozone GDP numbers indicate that the bloc is in a bad way, and will continue to be so until the current macroeconomic policy mix is jettisoned.

Happily, Olli “Don’t mention the multiplier” Rehn has good news for us:

The current situation can be summarised like this: we have disappointing hard data from the end of last year, some more encouraging soft data in the recent past and growing investor confidence in the future.

Thank goodness for that.

Eurozone links

With thanks to Eurointelligence, here are a couple of useful antidotes to the complacency that will kill the euro unless it is abandoned: here and here.

(If Ashok is right then, contra Manasse, the Eurozone crisis will become a bit more symmetric, but he is right to query whether this will be good news for the project.)

And here is an account of a Slovenian constitutional court decision. If the account of the legal reasoning is accurate then this is quite appalling.

America, Britain and Europe

I see that some people in Britain are in a bit of a kerfuffle about recent indications that the Americans would not be pleased if they left the EU. So it seems appropriate to quote at length from a well-known passage by Miriam Camps (1964, pp. 336-7):

Early in April [1961], Mr. Macmillan went to Washington for talks with the new Administration. Although he had met the new President at Palm Beach in connexion with the Laos crisis, the April visit was the first opportunity for a general review of common problems, and Britain’s relations with the Common Market was obviously one of the matters which Mr. Macmillan wanted to discuss. The available evidence suggests that Mr. Macmillan asked Mr. Kennedy a hypothetical question: ‘What would be your reaction if we decided to join the EEC?’ and that he was given an enthusiastic affirmative answer. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Macmillan was ‘pushed’ by Mr. Kennedy, as was alleged, and denied, at various times. But it is clear that Mr. Kennedy left no doubt in Mr. Macmillan’s mind that a British decision to join the Six would be welcome and that Mr. Macmillan left Washington convinced that, far from straining Anglo-American relations, Britain’s joining the Community might well lead to much closer and more far-reaching transatlantic links than the British could hope to achieve in other ways. The reflection that the shortest, and perhaps the only, way to a real Atlantic partnership lay through Britain’s joining the Common Market seems to have been a very important — perhaps the controlling — element in Mr. Macmillan’s own decision that the right course for the United Kingdom was to apply for membership. Mr. Kennedy’s warm response undoubtedly strengthened Mr. Macmillan’s own conviction that joining was the right course of action and encouraged him to continue his efforts to bring the sceptics in the Cabinet to accept this view. Also, like the discussions with General de Gaulle and Dr. Adenauer earlier in the year, the discussions with the United States Administration underlined, once again, the fact that ‘association’ arrangements were not likely to be negotiable. It was clear that the United States was prepared to accept the additional commercial ‘discrimination’ against itself because of the political advantages it saw in British membership in the Community, but that it would be hostile to arrangements short of membership which, in its view, would simply increase ‘discrimination’ but would not, like full membership, add to the political stability of the Community or strengthen the ‘Atlantic’ orientation of the new power-complex the Six were clearly coming to be.

Breaking the link between banks and sovereigns (or not)

The FT has a sobering report here.

Eurozone unemployment

Just like a year ago, we are hearing a lot of guff about how the euro crisis is over, and just like a year ago the people I talk to in Brussels are becoming increasingly alarmed by the complacency of the European establishment. It does seem as though the only thing that makes Europe’s useless political class worry is the risk of imminent cardiac arrest, as proxied by bond yields and the like; but the cancer of unemployment will do just as much damage if allowed to progress unchecked.

Here are the latest Eurozone unemployment statistics. Just because we are becoming used to this sort of news does not mean that they are even remotely acceptable. They are grim.

There are certain costs that are obviously not worth paying to keep the EMU experiment going. One is a dilution of the continent’s democratic traditions. Another is unemployment rates of the sort we are seeing in Spain and Greece. No doubt crocodile tears will be shed by supporters of status quo macroeconomic policies, but such responses are no longer acceptable. EMU supporters, and €-sceptics who are worried about the costs of an EMU break-up, now have to start being very concrete in terms of proposing Eurozone economic policies, including short run monetary and fiscal policies, that can start reversing these trends in 2013. (A group of us tried to do so here, for example.) And then we need to see such policies being implemented, quickly.

You have to live through times like this to really appreciate the wisdom of Keynes’ famous line about the long run.