O momento da Zona Euro (VII) - Estrutura da Zona Euro e Grécia, e mais Grécia

• Rising wages in China are a good thing: "[...]Unfortunately the euro today imposes a kind of gold standard on European countries – it forces them to adjust to excessively high domestic prices, large trade deficits, and/or large fiscal deficits in the same way they would have had to adjust under the gold standard, and I don’t think that is politically likely to be acceptable.  The countries that need depreciation to regain competitiveness or monetization of the debt to regain control of the deficit will have to choose between adjusting via deflation and high unemployment or exiting the euro.  Politics makes the latter more likely.There is one other way out, perhaps.  Martin Wolf discussed it last week in an important Financial Times article called “Europe needs German consumers”.  Wolf argued that trade imbalance within Europe helped to create the subsequent and damning financial imbalances, and that without resolving the trade imbalance it is pretty pointless to talk about fiscal belt-tightening and lower wages as the means by which the problems of outer Europe will be resolved.[...] O artigo fala ainda da China, no contexto da resolução dos desequilíbrios económicos mundiais.

• Fiscal unions and currencies: A reminder for the EU: America did not create federalism to back the dollar | The Economist" "[...] It is another argument to buttress my hunch, that regular readers will have heard several times: this is not a big enough crisis to trigger European federalism." Infelizmente, penso que isto é mesmo verdade.

• Keynes can help the eurozone | George Irvin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Much is being made of the pressure on the euro arising from the sorry state of Greek finances, and of the further risk posed by Portugal, Spain, Ireland and even Italy. What would a rational economic response to this crisis be? Broadly, there are four principles at issue. First, are sharp budgetary cuts desirable in a recession? Second, is a fall in the euro calamitous? Third, should the eurozone be prepared to bail out individual members who get into trouble? And, finally, is the economic architecture of the eurozone adequate to dealing with the problem?"

• Walker's World: Greek tragedy unfolds: "[...]Germany is relatively prosperous because its voters and workers acquiesced in keeping real wages static for more than 10 years, in order to ensure that German industry remained competitive. Meanwhile, the Greeks and Italians and Spaniards exercised no such discipline and saw their competitiveness decline against Germany by 30 percent over the same period. So German voters and politicians are in no mood to bail out bankrupt Mediterranean countries now [...].

• Grèce : les Européens sont-ils crédibles ? | Telos

• My Big Fat Greek Restructuring by Nicole Gelinas, City Journal 16 February 2010

• Gmail - RGE's Wednesday Note - The Greek Picture Complicates Further: Is the IMF the Solution? - jmcgmatias@gmail.com: "After years of running alternatively private and public sector deficits, Greece needs to implement not only fiscal constraints but also deep structural reforms in order to improve the country’s relative competitiveness and put it on a sustainable growth path. Importantly, Greece is not the only country facing a competitiveness issue—other countries such as Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy face similar longer-term issues. As Dr. Roubini and Arnab Das note, there are only three ways to restore competitiveness: first, a decade of deflation that leads to a reduction in traded goods prices and domestic private wages; second, an acceleration of structural reforms could increase labor productivity while private and public wage growth is kept in check (this is the path that Germany took in the aftermath of the reunification boom and bust in the early 1990s); third, the euro could weaken—though this still would not solve the intra-EMU competitiveness gap. As the German experience shows, the strucural reform process takes time. Unlike Germany two decades ago, however, "

• FT.com / Comment / Analysis - The eurozone: Athenian arrangers: "As the crisis around Greece’s public finances has deepened in recent weeks, Greek and other European officials have been expressing growing unease – if not outright anger – about the role played by western investment banks and hedge funds. That is partly because of the manner in which hedge funds and others are perceived to be betting against the euro in general, and the debt of economically “peripheral” countries such as Greece in particular, by using derivative instruments such as credit default swaps. But it also stems from the role that Wall Street titans such as Goldman have played in helping Greece and other eurozone countries to massage their debt data over the past decade to meet European limits – and thus to mask some of the fiscal woes that have now come back to haunt international markets."