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Farewell & Thanks Religion As A Weapon Banking, Bankers and Government EU Arrogance - again !!Davie Goes To Strasbourg Index

by Chris Ellice - 08:44 on 30 March 2011

Peter Oborne, the chief political commentator for The Telegraph has an interesting piece on the Portuguese political (and debt) crisis.

We quote...

Here the facts are devastating, and bear repetition. Portugal has defaulted on its national debt five times since 1800, Greece five times, Spain no less than seven times (and 13 times in all since 1500).

By contrast, Anglo-Saxon countries rarely, if ever, default. In this country, we haven’t reneged on our debts in nearly 1,000 years, though there have been close shaves. The same applies to Canada, Australia and the United States.

Many European countries are culturally attuned to bankruptcy. Indeed, Greece has spent approximately half of the 182 years since it achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire in a state of default and therefore denied access to international capital markets – a position it is likely to resume in the very near future.

The importance of these statistics is very great. They show that the widespread assumption by bureaucrats, senior politicians and commentators alike that eurozone countries could never go bankrupt is simply wrong.

In fact, the opposite is the case. The normal and indeed the automatic response of Spain, Portugal, Greece and many other European countries to major financial crises such as the one we are living through today has been to renege on their debts. So it would be extraordinary were they not to do so. History also shows that currency unions such as the eurozone invariably fail: the most relevant case in point is the Latin monetary union formed by France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland in 1865, with Spain and Greece joining a few years later. Once again, these failures are invariably sparked by grand financial crises of the kind the world faces today.

These historical facts make contemporary European political discourse completely baffling. It is universally assumed by members of the European political class that the single currency cannot possibly fail because the political will to make the venture succeed is so powerful. There is no doubt about the will: French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will “never, never… turn our backs on the euro… We will never let the euro go or be destroyed.”

Sarkozy and Merkel are dreaming. They are out of their depth, struggling against forces they cannot control and which will in due course wash them away. It is economic reality, not political speeches, that will determine the success or failure of the single currency, and the facts on the ground are so devastating that it is hard to see a way forward.

(Emphases added.) Until here, it’s a blame-it-on-the-Mediterranean-people’s-story. The south is lazy, corrupt, and morally bankrupt. We’ve heard it before, and we’ll hear it again. But then Oborne changes tune and starts sounding like Paul Krugman, blaming the whole thing on the euro experiment rather than the problems of the Southern European economies:

The experiment of imposing a single currency and a single monetary policy upon economies as divergent as those of Germany and Greece has gone tragically wrong. Germany, bolstered by an artificially low exchange rate and rock-bottom interest rates, is enjoying a boom. But the economies of Ireland, Portugal, Greece and others are being destroyed – businesses closing, unemployment surging, dependent on bailouts, all self-respect and independence gone.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that were these countries outside the eurozone, there would be no real problem. The IMF could intervene, reschedule their debts and allow the national currencies to float until they reached a competitive level. In the case of Greece, this level would be well under half where it stands today as a member of the euro.

I couldn’t agree more with this latter part. Which is why I still think it’s more likely than not that the euro will in the end collapse. Not because of any happy-go-lucky bankruptcy by Greece, Ireland, Portugal, or Spain, but because once a bailout of those countries takes place, their political systems will not take the strain of imposing the reforms necessary to make their economies competitive again within the context of the euro. Give it ten years.

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