The Economist, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a weekly news magazine based in London. It has good world wide coverage, tells it fairly straight, and thinks it knows all the answers. This week they opine upon a fix for the Euro crisis. Here is their solution.
1. Create an EU bank regulator that would operate an EU wide version of deposit insurance (like the American FDIC), along with setting regulation about bank capital, winding up the affairs of failed banks, and have the money to "recapitalize" (otherwise known as "bailout") shaky or broke banks. Give this new agency control of the existing European bank rescue funds. Hopefully the EU regulator would shield banks from national government pressure to lend to national government favored industries or buy national government bonds.
2. Create "Eurobonds" backed by all the Euro countries. Unsaid, but understood by bond buyers is that Germany pledges to make Eurobonds good. Use the proceeds from Eurobond sales to make loans to countries that no one else will loan money to, like Spain and Italy.
"All that is required is for over indebted countries to have access to money and for banks to have a 'safe' euro-wide class of assets that is not tied to the fortunes of one country."
As the Economist sees it, German backed Eurobonds would be as good as American T-bills. Dead broke governments would not have to clean up their acts so soon. Out of the goodness of their hearts the Germans extend their excellent credit rating to the rest of Europe. Angela Merkel is the only person standing in the way of this financial nirvana. Shame on her.
I got another plan. Let the stupid banks go bust. Let the dead broke counties reduce their spending now, rather than after they run out of other people's money.
1 comment:
Agree with you. When the EU central bank opened up interest free credit they loaned it out like crazy to countries. Impact has been essentially nil as it is delaying the inevitable.
The Greeks want out of the Eurozone and they should leave and reform their economy (and maybe learn to pay taxes and not everyone can be on the public payroll).
You would like Boomerang by Michael Lewis, he does a great job of getting into the minds of the Greeks, Icelanders, Irish, Germans and Californians. He went to each place for research and is a fun guy to read. He wrote Moneyball for baseball awhile back.
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