The latest collection of briefing papers for the European Parliament’s Monetary Dialogue with the ECB are available here (click on 4.10.2011). There are nine papers (including one by me) discussing Jean-Claude Trichet’s term as ECB President and the challenges facing his successor.
Category: EMU
Feasta (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) are holding an interesting conference on Thursday and Friday of this week titled National Strategies for Dealing with Ireland’s Debt Crisis: Exploring the Options. The webpage for the conference is here and the conference programme is here.
Many will have heard Alan Ahearne on Morning Ireland explain why we should try to work our way out of the crisis by ‘sticking to the plan’. He clearly believes that the Eurozone will survive in its present form and that the costs of Ireland defaulting and/or unilaterally leaving the currency union would far outweigh the benefits.
In their recent ESRI publication, John FitzGerald and Ide Kearney set out in some detail why they believe the Irish debt problem is manageable and why we should should stick to the plan. This was already posted by Philip Lane and has been discussed here.
Nouriel Roubini, on the other hand, believes that ‘sticking to the plan’ has no chance of working in Greece, so it should organize an orderly default and re-introduce the drachma. Some of the arguments he makes are compelling and many of them apply with some force to Ireland, especially the difficulty of restoring competitiveness and growth through a deflationary internal devaluation.
We need to evaluate the prospects for the Eurozone and our place in it.
It would be wrong not to have a thread on the latest unemployment and emigration data.
Together with the recent data on our consumer price level, relative to the rest of the EU, they show (as if there were any doubt on the matter) that even in small, open, flexible Ireland, the current poster boy for the EU’s preferred austerity/internal devaluation strategy, wage and price flexibility — while impressive — isn’t what certain macro theories assume it to be.
Here‘s the latest from Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari on the future of the Eurozone.