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Posts Tagged ‘Münchau’

Praising the Bundesbank

I am puzzled by Wolfgang Münchau’s latest piece in the Financial Times. Let me start by quoting the end:

[...] The ECB should have started large-scale asset purchase a year ago. It certainly should do so now. The EU should allow governments to overshoot their deficit targets this year, and suspend the fiscal compact, which will result in further fiscal pain from 2016.

Even a casual reader of this blog will quickly realize that it would be hard for me to agree more with these statements. The macroeconomic stance at the EMU level has been seriously inappropriate since 2010, with fiscal policy globally restrictive (thank you austerity), and monetary policy way too timid.
So, what is the problem? The problem is the first part of Münchau’s editorial, in which he attacks the Bundesbank for its plea in favour of faster wage growth in Germany (the Buba asked for an average wage increase of 3%).
This is frankly hard to understand. The eurozone problems, and it’s flirting with deflation, stem from the victory of the Berlin View, that laid the burden of adjustment on the shoulders of peripheral countries alone.
The call for wage increases in Germany signals, and it was about time, that even conservative German institutions are beginning to realize the obvious: there will be no rebalancing, and therefore no robust recovery, unless German domestic demand recovers. This means a fiscal expansion, as well as private expenditure recovery. Unsurprisingly, the Buba rules out the former, but it is nice to see that at least the latter has become an objective. Faster wage growth may not make a huge difference in quantitative terms, but it still marks an important change of attitude. This is a huge step away from the low-wage-high-productivity-export-led model that the Bundesbank and the German government have been preaching (and imposing to their partners).
Münchau is right in calling for a different policy mix in the EMU. But this is complementary, not alternative, to a change in the German growth model. I would have expected him to applaud a small but potentially important change in attitude. Instead I have read a virulent attack. Puzzled, puzzled…

Categories: EMU Crisis

ECB: One Size Fits None

Eurostat just released its flash estimate for inflation in the Eurozone: 0.5% headline, and 0.8% core. We now await comments from ECB officials, ahead of next Thursday’s meeting, saying that everything is under control.

Just this morning, Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times rightly said that EU central bankers should talk less and act more. Münchau also argues that quantitative easing is the only option. A bold one, I would add in light of todays’ deflation inflation data. Just a few months ago, in September 2013, Bruegel estimated the ECB interest rate to be broadly in line with Eurozone average macroeconomic conditions (though, interestingly, they also highlighted that it was unfit to most countries taken individually).

In just a few months, things changed drastically. While unemployment remained more or less constant since last July, inflation kept decelerating until today’s very worrisome levels. I very quickly extended the Bruegel exercise to encompass the latest data (they stopped at July 2013). I computed the target rate as they do as

$Target=1+1.5\pi_{core}-1(u-\overline{u})$.

(if you don’t like the choice of parameters, go ask the Bruegel guys. I have no problem with these). The computation gives the following:

Using headline inflation, as the ECB often claims to be doing, would of course give even lower target rates. As official data on unemployment stop at January 2014, the two last points are computed with alternative hypotheses of unemployment: either at its January rate (12.6%) or at the average 2013 rate (12%). But these are just details…

So, in addition to being unfit for individual countries, the ECB stance is now unfit to the Eurozone as a whole. And of course, a negative target rate can only mean, as Münchau forcefully argues, that the ECB needs to get its act together and put together a credible and significant quantitative easing program.

Two more remarks:

• A minor one (back of  the envelope) remark is that given a core inflation level of 0.8%, the current ECB rate of 0.25%, is compatible with an unemployment gap of 1.95%. Meaning that the current ECB rate would be appropriate if natural/structural unemployment was 10.65% (for the calculation above I took the value of 9.1% from the OECD), or if current unemployment was 11.5%.
• The second, somewhat related but more important to my sense, is that it is hard to accept as “natural” an unemployment rate of 9-10%. If the target unemployment rate were at 6-7%, everything we read and discuss on the ECB excessively restrictive stance would be significantly more appropriate. And if the problem is too low potential growth, well then let’s find a way to increase it

Look who’s Gloomy

Wolfgang Munchau has an excellent piece on today’s Financial Times, where he challenges the increasingly widespread (and unjustified) optimism about the end of the EMU crisis. The premise of the piece is that for the end of the crisis to be durable, it must pass through adjustment between core and periphery. He cites similar statements made in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook. This is good news per se, because nowadays, with the exception of Germany it became common knowledge that the EMU imbalances are structural and not simply the product of late night parties in the periphery. But what are Munchau’s reasons for pessimism? Read More

Categories: EMU Crisis

One Austerity (Should Not) Fit All

The run up to the Italian elections in February is a welcome occasion to come back to the issue of austerity. The debate in Italy was fired by the widely discussed Wolfgang Munchau editorial, blaming Mario Monti for not opposing austerity. In the heat of electoral competition, this unsurprisingly stirred harsh discussions on whether Italy has room for reversing the austerity that ravaged the country. Some commentators got slightly carried away, accusing those opposing austerity of “silliness and falsehood”. I wonder whether they include the IMF chief economist in the bunch… Whatever, this is a minor issue; the way I see it, these discussions totally miss the point.