More relevant stuff over on Vox. Amato et al. say sensible things. So does Micosi, but he is less polite (although more polite than Colm’s friend).
Category: Monetary policy
There are obvious difficulties and constraints on monetary policy in the 16-member Eurozone compared to more fully integrated currency zones like the fifty states of the USA, the ten provinces of Canada, etc. But could the lack of integration in the 16-member eurozone be used advantageously for some types of policies?
Over a VoxEU, Stanley Black suggests a way of breaking the EMU without breaking the Euro.
This is a very useful primer on interwar protectionism by the leading historian of US trade policy. (I had never heard of ‘Smoot Smites Smut’, which is worth the price of admission alone.) Although Doug could have usefully mentioned that the biggest costs of protectionism then were geopolitical, and those ended up being fairly catastrophic.
Economists sometimes assume that the right way to talk about protectionism is to moralize. I prefer analyzing the causes of protectionism: it may be a very bad idea, but sometimes, in democracies, it becomes inevitable. Doug, in a manner reminiscent of Adam Posen, argues that expansionary monetary policies in the US are a good way of keeping the protectionist wolf at bay there right now. The same logic applies to Europe as well.
Last week’s news was terrible, but I felt even more depressed the week before. If we enter a spiral in which we get worse news on GDP and GNP than expected, and then conclude that we will have to push through even more deflationary budgets than previously planned, then we have entered a doom loop from which there is no escape.
Unless.
(Unless what?)
Unless the cavalry comes charging to the rescue, is what. Unless Ireland is bailed out economically by the rest of the world, via a world trade boom that allows us to export our way to recovery.
Unfortunately, there are lots of question marks hanging over this scenario right now. The cavalry is uncertain as to where it is headed, and for every piece of good news we get from overseas, there is a corresponding piece of bad news (and vice versa). Any honest forecast of where we are headed in the immediate future will have extremely wide confidence bands associated with it, which in the Irish case will surely straddle the zero axis.
This is why it is so utterly in Ireland’s interests that policy makers overseas listen carefully to Adam Posen (short version here, longer version here). I strongly urge people to read the full speech. It is a carefully argued (and, for a central banker, passionate) plea for further stimulus measures, as well as for a certain way of thinking about the macroeconomy. It is nice to know that some central bankers, at least, understand how serious are the downside risks facing the world economy right now.
I am sure that our political leaders enjoyed their moment in the sun this spring as poster boys for austerity. But insofar as they contributed to a feeling that austerity was the right policy everywhere — and not just in basket cases like Greece and Ireland — they did their country a disservice. Far better to have a quiet word with their colleagues in more solvent states, pointing out to them our nine successive quarters of shrinking real GNP, and to say to them: this is what austerity can do, even in an economy as small and open as ours. Are you really sure you want to follow suit?