German Economists and Merkel, the Implicit Followers of the Gold Standard

With the introduction of the Outright Monetary Transaction Program (OMT) and “conditionality”, that requires austerity and implicitly the reduction of salaries in the European periphery, Merkel and German economists have created consequences similar to a gold-standard.

German economists: Supply-side, monetarist traditions and the euro crisis

German economists are generally monetarists, they prefer a gradual expansion of money supply, because they fear inflation. They are also supply-siders, whereas the English-speaking mainstream tends towards New Keynesianism (e.g. Krugman, Stieglitz and Eichengreen) and wants to stimulate demand. With the strict corset of the euro, this German approach means a new gold standard. Money printing cannot heal a weak economy, hence salaries must be adopt downwards.

Nonetheless, both Germans and New Keynesians are contained inside the “New Consensus Macroeconomics”, but they are on two opposite sides.

 

Monetarist Traditions: Hyperinflation in the 1920s

Due to Germany’s bad experience with the hyperinflation in the 1920s, German economists strongly fear inflation and are therefore usually proponents of monetarist theories, a gradual expansion of money supply, and not the one proposed by the Fed or the BoE.

 

German economists: Supply-siders and the euro crisis

Central bankers, especially in the German Bundesbank, believe that the Euro crisis can only be solved by supply side reforms contained in the Stability and Growth Pact, reforms that were already successfully introduced during the Thatcher/Reagan era and in Germany between 2000 and 2007.

The idea of these neoliberal reforms is to reduce the big imbalances in current accounts achieved up to 2008. Germany had huge current account surpluses and the periphery huge deficits, which were financed by loans from German to peripheral banks.

 

In the so-called “Memorandum of Understanding”, the official names of austerity programs, like the one for Spain here, one can always find a sentence similar to:

“A shift to durable current account surpluses will be required to reduce external debt to a sustainable level.”

A reduction of current account deficits or switch to current account surpluses can be achieved by a reduction of the (primary) deficits of the state, as stipulated in the fiscal compact. The reduction is achieved by “adjustment programs”, mainly higher taxes and austerity.

 

Global imbalances

Allowing the periphery to consume less, means on the other side, that German exports are reduced. And this weakens the euro and makes German products for the United States and other countries more attractive. As of October 2012, the austerity measures have not affect the German trade balance, because a lower trade surplus with the periphery was balanced by a higher surplus with the US, the UK and Asia. A second important reason was that the Germans consumed and imported less.

 

Eurobonds and common responsibility

Merkel’s CDU does not want Eurobonds, for them, commonly issued bonds would mean that the PIIGS would imply that they not need implement austerity as Merkel demanded in the Fiscal Compact. The Fiscal Compact wants a strong reduction of government debt and a balanced budget rule, which implies that the European states have to cut spending and implement austerity. To ratify the Fiscal Compact, including the balanced budget rule, is the precondition that countries can access the permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

In December 2011 Germany and France advocated steps towards a fiscal union. According to Merkel, a fiscal union would include Brussels having to approve national budgets, a step still rejected by France. Some commentators even advocate that the logical step of a fiscal union would be a centralized finance ministry under an EU or German lead.

After France’s new president, Francois Holland, revealed his plans to cut the pension age to 60 years, Merkel has additionally introduced the idea of a political union including common economic policy and a loss of sovereignty towards Brussels. Only after that would a fiscal union be possible.

In summary:
Step 1) Stability and Growth Pact
Step 2) Fiscal Compact
Step 3) ESM
Step 4) Political union with common economic policy
Step 5) Fiscal union including a central authority to approve budgets.
Step 6) Banking union and eurobonds

 

New Keynesians and New Classicals in the english-speaking countries and France

 

Central bankers and economists, especially in the English-speaking countries, have very influential papers like  ”The Financial Times” or “The Economist“; also, the IMF are generally New Keynesians or New Classicals. They rely on economic principles that overemphasize economic interventions based on the short-run and on the demand-side.

Together with the French president they want a direct shortcut to the introduction of eurobonds and a banking union; they want Germany to pay the bill. At the same time their domestic countries, the UK and the US do not want to pay higher contributions to the IMF.

 

The Southern european de-leveraging phase has just begun

 

Economists, like the chief-economist of the Nomura institute Richard Koo, reckon that the United States, the UK and most other European countries are seeing a “Yang phase”, a de-leveraging phase, a so-called balance sheet recession of firms and individuals.

We commonly know the “Yin” phase, a period, when companies want to invest funds whenever they become available at sufficiently low interest rates. Keynesian and many central bankers think we are always in the ”Yin” phase and firms will continue to invest and that the central banks just need to print money and then firms will invest.

But now, despite the huge availability of funds and record-low interest rates, firms are financing only the best projects. They know that other projects would not be profitable, because both consumers and companies want to reduce debt. This contradicts not only the Keynesian principle above, but due to high risk aversion also the Austrian-economic principle, that low interest rates might trigger wrong investments.

Since 2011, since the end of the latest important bubbles, the Chinese, Brazilian and Northern European and French housing bubbles fueled by QE2, most parts of the world are deleveraging and not piling up higher debt any more. The current economic cycle even suggests that the United States has finished its deleveraging phase. But rising house prices do not imply the end of de-leveraging.

 

There are just some developed countries that do not see a balance sheet recession, who are to afford higher debt and higher house prices, because they saw the bust of a bubble in the 1990s: these are Germany and Switzerland; countries where house prices still climb upwards. And this again strengthens the monetarist ideas in Germany and the fear of inflation.

German economists are now implicit followers of the gold standard

Most German and Northern European economists want to preserve the euro zone as it is. But the only way for the weak euro countries to get out of their debt and become competitive, is to reduce labour costs.This is as if we were in the gold standard, when it was not possible to devalue a currency, but weaker growth (as compared to other countries) needed to be compensated by lower wages.

 

 

The economic asymmetry of core and peripheral countries during the gold standard era from 1870 to 1914 has been well researched and analyzed. A 2003 IMF working paper documented the reliance of the peripheral countries in the first decade of the 20th century on demand “which was highly sensitive to world income growth and mostly financed by capital imports from the core.”

(source FT)

Higher taxes and austerity leads to less consumer spending and less imports. Unfortunately austerity and less consumer spending also leads to less employment. When fewer people work, exports are weakened and the current account worsens again. Moreover, the public debt/GDP ratio can rise: debt is only slightly reduced while GDP falls more than debt is reduced.

 

Periphery in the deflationary spiral

 

This implies for us that the periphery will go through a deflationary spiral during the next decade. GDP will most probably fall in most of the coming years. The deflationary aspect might be softened in the first years because many products will be still imported from Germany and elsewhere, from countries where price are still rising. Therefore we think that initially the periphery will see a soft form of stagflation, negative GDP growth and despite of that, rising prices.

 

Another decade of weak inflation globally

Deflation and lower wages in big parts of Europe and weak inflation in the very competitive Northern European countries implies that other countries like the United States or the UK are obliged to limit wage increases and/or to devalue their currency.

Since the ECB seems to be reluctant to hike rates, these other countries will probably not succeed in currency debasement.  Given that Chinese wages and the Renmimbi have increased a lot since 2009 and the effects of the balance sheet recession implies that inflation pressures will remain subdued for a couple  of years or maybe a decade even globally. We judge that after that decade, inflation pressures will start to be stronger, especially when the Chinese start to consume.

Conflicts among German economists

 

A group of 172 economists around Hans-Werner Sinn, the president of the IFO institute, have realized that the pressure on the periphery is too high and that they will not have a chance to exit this vicious cycle. They think that sooner or later these countries will leave the euro zone with even higher losses. They  wrote an open letter against the attempts to make Germany pay for the huge debt of the PIIGS and their banks, a smaller group of economists is in favor of the ESM.

Economists like Harvard’s Niall Ferguson reckon that Germany will have to sustain the periphery with 8% of German GDP every year to go through this debt deflation cycle.

 

The end of Euro in its current form

 

Will leaders finally react and accept losses in the German and Northern European official sectors preemptively - for example, with a quick introduction of the Northern Euro?

Or will eurocrats kick the can and rule against the Spanish people for another ten or twenty years? And against German tax-payers that after these ten or twenty years will have paid a lot more than in a preemptive loss scenario? 

Or will the monetary union finally break up when recession fears have become small and Germany shows high inflation and the periphery low or even the deflation we spoke of before?

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are not intended to be taken as investment advice. It is to be taken as opinion only and we encourage you to complete your own due diligence when making an investment decision. Even if we often write about Forex trading, our advices aren't written for day traders who follow technical channels, but rather for mid- and long-term investors. Our aim is to show discrepancies between fundamental data and current asset valuations, which can lead in mid-term to an inversion to technical channels.
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