• Euro kan knække midt over

“USA tænker fortsat på Europa som en investeringsforening, så vil man som investor have fingre i Nordeuropa, er man tvunget til at tage Sydeuropa med. Det er euroens skæbne og kan føre til en opdelt euro.”

• The Stages of Libertarian Denial

Caplan definerer seks stadier:

Stage 1: Deny the problem exists.

Stage 2: Blame the problem on the government.

Stage 3: Admit that the government didn’t cause the problem, but insist that government action would only make the problem worse.

Stage 4: Concede that government action wouldn’t make the problem worse, but say that the cure is so expensive that we’re better off just living with the problem.

Stage 5: Admit that government action could solve a problem at a low cost, but claim that the libertarian principle is more important.

Stage 6: Yield on libertarian principle, but try to minimize the deviation.

Ganske interessant… Hvilken type argumente bruger libertarianske læsere af denne blog mest?

I en artikel på EU Business udtaler Klaus:

I am convinced the IMF should be dismantled or radically restructured as soon as possible,” he said at a conference in Prague, calling the fund “a barbaric relic from the Keynesian and fixed-exchange rate era.

(…)

“To whom, and how at all can the IMF be held responsible for its activities? And if its proposals or measures turn out to be mistaken… who will face the consequences? Certainly not the IMF,” said Klaus.

Om EURO’en siger Klaus:

My conviction is that the European single currency, the euro, will survive its current acute crisis. Its long-term crisis will, however, continue and we will pay a very high price for the continuation of this experiment,” said Klaus.

“Introducing one currency and one exchange rate for 16 in many respects different economies was not a rational solution,” he added, warning that Europe was now facing “an era of long-lasting sluggish economic growth, if not stagnation.

Jeg kipper hermed med flaget…

HT: Steven Horwitz

But the euro’s founders also set debt and deficit limits. The problem is not that these limits were too loose. The problem is having them at all. The mere existence of the limits says, in effect, that politicians will have a hard time resisting bailout pressure. So the markets lent at low rates and gave high bond ratings. The EU rediscovered that it’s much harder to grow a spine in the middle of a crisis.

The euro founders should have said instead, “Go ahead, use our currency if you like. Rack up any debts you want. We don’t care, because we are not going to bail you out—we’ve set it up so we can’t bail you out. Bond buyers beware.”

The euro founders never decided whether they were creating the perfect currency without fiscal union, or if they were creating a fiscal union on the way to political union.

Cochrane leverer en interessant tanke, men jeg tror desværre også, at den er yderst naiv.

Jeg ved godt, at nedenstående er blevet et langt citat-helvede, men jeg synes bestemt det er værd at læse – jeg tillader mig at vurdere, da jeg ikke selv har skrevet det.

Mankiw – Bernanke on Happiness:

I am reminded of a story about Abraham Lincoln. According to the story, Lincoln was riding with a friend in a carriage on a rainy evening. As they rode, Lincoln told the friend that he believed in what economists would call the utility-maximizing theory of behavior, that people always act so as to maximize their own happiness, and for no other reason. Just then, the carriage crossed a bridge, and Lincoln saw a pig stuck in the muddy riverbank. Telling the carriage driver to stop, Lincoln struggled through the rain and mud, picked up the pig, and carried it to safety. When the muddy Lincoln returned to the carriage, his friend naturally pointed out that he had just disproved his own hypothesis by putting himself to great trouble and discomfort to save a pig. “Not at all,” said Lincoln. “What I did is perfectly consistent with my theory. If I hadn’t saved that pig, I would have felt terrible.”

Æren burde strengt taget tilfalde Bernanke, men jeg læste det hos Mankiw.

Tyler Cowen – Sentences to Ponder:

“There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics.”

Paul Krugman – Ignoring The Elephant In the EURO:

[N]ote that if you pretend that it’s all about fiscal profligacy, the problem seems solvable with a bit more discipline, but if you admit that the original optimum currency area issues are key to the situation, you wonder whether the common currency really makes sense.

Tyler Cowen – Social welfare expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries:

Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries.

James Hamilton – Inflation, taxation, and the underground economy:

Even though much of economic activity is outside of the government’s control, the government can still tax that activity by choosing a higher inflation rate

(…)

(…)

Aruoba’s interpretation is that the weaker a country’s institutions, the greater the attractiveness of the informal sector, and the more the government is likely to rely on inflation rather than standard taxes to raise revenue.

(…)

Tyler Cowen thinks those bars look unsettlingly like dominoes.

Martin Feldstein – For a solution to the euro crisis, look to the states:

The structure of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) that created the euro actually encourages members to run large deficits. A country with its own currency would see that currency deteriorate and its interest rates rise if it sold large amounts of debt to global investors. But because EMU countries share a currency, there has been no market feedback to warn when a country’s deficit is getting dangerously high.

(…)

Here there may be something to learn from United States. (…) The basic reason for these small deficits is that each state’s constitution prohibits borrowing for operating purposes. States can issue debt to finance infrastructure but not salaries, services, transfer payments or other operating expenses.

(…)

The European Central Bank could accelerate this process by restricting collateral to bonds issued by governments with satisfactory constitutional limits on their deficits.

Jeg er simpelthen nødt til at dele dette fantastiske citat:

A single currency could no more subsume national identities than drinking Coke could make people American.

Det stammer fra følgende anbefalelsesværdige artikel fra Robert Samuelsen: The Welfare State’s Death Spiral. Artiklen handler, naturligvis, om EURO’en og hvordan fremtiden ser ud for EURO-landene. Læs!

For første gang siden folkeafstemningen i 2000 er et flertal imod, at Danmark bliver en del af eurosamarbejdet.

I en meningsmåling fra Megafon for Politiken og TV 2 siger 50 procent nej til at indføre euroen i Danmark, kun 43 procent vil stemme ja.

Lad os håbe, det holder.

Ellemann, Lykketoft og Krasnik nyt tv-trekløver

De er alle tre indsigtsfulde mennesker, go det er trods alt en god start. Ellemann er faldet fra tidligere tiders tinder, men han fik oprindeligt mig engageret i politik. Lyketoft ved ofte, hvad han snakker om. Krasnik samme, selvom han har sine øjeblikke, hvor man enten må zappe eller bladre ekstra hurtigt i bogen. Men alt i alt et godt udgangspunkt.

Skatteminister lover afskaffelse af ejendomsvurderinger

Jamen Troels Lund dog… Og så indrømmer han endda, at de ter en ideologisk øvelse.

Unge vil gerne være Libertarianere men ikke kapitalister

People aged 18-29 were the most positive of any age group about the word “libertarian” but the most negative of any age group about the word “capitalism.”

Man bør nok ind at kigge lidt dybere på, hvad de ligger i begreberne, inden man konkluderer det helt store.

Der findes stadig folk, der ved, hvad et godt liv indebærer – en Cadillac reklame, der liiige skal igang:

• Indien: Flere mobiltelefoner end antal folk der har adgang til et toilet
• 99 år gammel fejl i Oxford English Dictionary
• Polen tidligere Premierminister, Finansminister og Centralbankdirektør, Balcerowicz, om EURO’en.
• Caplan spørger, hvornår hjælpepakkerne får ende?

Når Paul Krugman har en pointe, må man også hellere anerkende den – jeg har her på bloggen været god nok til at tale ham imod, når han sagde noget sludder. Med Titlen ‘How reversible is the EURO‘, skriver Krugman:

[as] Eichengreen argued, any move to leave the euro would require time and preparation, and during the transition period there would be devastating bank runs. So the idea of a euro breakup was a non-starter.

But now I’m reconsidering, for a simple reason: the Eichengreen argument is a reason not to plan on leaving the euro — but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands.

Det betyder, at det hele ramler om ørerne på dem, der ønsker det bedste for EURO’en. Som Krugman slutteligt bemærker:

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.