MD tviti od 2.6.2017 Junker-Euro Plan=realen predlog za nadgraditev EMU. Namesto »klicanja« propada s strani Sorosa, ZDAlaureatov+Trumpa? https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-01/the-commission-s-plan-to-keep-the-euro-zone-together 2/ 72% ljudi euro-območja podpira euro. Koristi tudi Nemcem, drugim še bolj. Niti Grki se euru niso želeli odpovedati. Ljudje≠neumni; slo=? 3/ SLO-podpora=podpovprečna–zaradi politike+medijev. Euro=disciplina. Izstop bi bil katastrofa za ljudi. Esteblišment bi dobil močno orodje. 4/ Problem eura=transparentnost+ni bankrota držav. Edina alternativa devalvaciji+inflaciji=nižanje plač/pokojnin/sociale, kar nihče ne mara.
Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg, 2.junij 2017 (Excerpt by MD)
Much has been written, including by Nobel Prize winners in economics, about the euro as an economic straitjacket that’s strangling southern Europe with the impossibility of currency devaluations. Yet the political reality is that in the euro zone as a whole, the euro has never been more popular — 72 percent of its residents support it.
The euro wasn’t what plunged several countries into massive crises at the end of the last decade and again in 2011. Sure, since the single currency’s introduction, credit resources flowed freely into countries with growing current account deficits. But the real problem was that these countries misused these resources, creating bubbles instead of “sustainable investment.” (Yet) the monetary union “lacked a developed surveillance framework to track or correct these imbalances.” Besides, the individual countries simply couldn’t cope with a crisis of this magnitude; they didn’t have the necessary fiscal buffers and cheap enough access to capital markets.
If that’s how the problem is framed, the solution is not a retreat from the euro’s overly tight embrace but rather further tightening. The (commission) paper presents it as a sequence of moves that starts with completing a financial and banking union, then creating a common fiscal system and, finally, building a governance system that wouldn’t irritate people with a lack of democracy.
The commission calls for a common approach to non-performing loans and to bailing out banks, including a euro zone-wide deposit insurance scheme (something Germany has long opposed) and a commitment from member states to backstop the common bailout fund. The latter too is a politically difficult issue for the northern European countries such as Germany or the Netherlands: Voters there hate the idea of subsidizing bailouts in Spain, Italy or Greece. To address that, the commission suggests that the backstop take the form of a credit line from the ESM, Greece’s main creditor, which is funded with debt against a joint guarantee of the euro-zone member states.
Joint responsibility for the perceived spendthrift ways of southern Europe is generally a fat German red line. So the reflection paper embraces, in addition to the ESM, an even bolder proposal for joint bonds for which individual countries wouldn’t be liable. The idea is to set up a European debt agency, which would buy up national bonds and issue its own paper backed by the payments on them — much like mortgages are securitized.
There’s no specific proposal on creating a European safe asset, the equivalent of U.S. Treasurys. Instead, the commission mildly suggests several ways of funding a common euro-zone budget: from the bigger EU budget, through the ESM, through direct contributions based on their size of member states’ economies, through a certain percentage of specific tax revenues. The money collected by one or several of these methods could be used, for example, to fund infrastructural or skill development projects or to provide unemployment reinsurance in case a member state’s own fiscal system is unable to cope with rising unemployment payments.
The euro-area treasury would be run by a EU finance minister, who would chair the Eurogroup — the council of member states’ finance ministers that would make all the formal decisions. The commission suggests that full banking and capital markets union should be completed by 2019. The deeper integration would occur by 2025. Importantly, the proposals are also more feasible than the alternative — the monetary union’s breakup with catastrophic consequences for savers throughout the euro zone. In a way, the reflection papers Juncker’s commission is now issuing on various aspects of the EU’s future are his intellectual legacy, and they bear the mark of his respect for the art of the possible.
