Paper appena pubbliato da Asimmetrie.org che ringrazio per ospitalità e sostegno finanziario.
Sergio Cesaratto
Abstract
A number of economists holding Keynesian or pragmatic
monetarist views warned that political union was a necessary premise for
a viable monetary union. Inspired by Goodhart, we name this the
Cartalist view. The European currency union was, however, strongly
influenced by New Classical Macroeconomics, which gave new strength to
older traditions, like ordoliberalism, that back separation of monetary
and fiscal policy, legitimizing a Stateless currency. Again like
Goodhart, we call this the Metallist view. This distinction is
particularly relevant for assessing two alternative perspectives of the
nature of the Euro area crisis. On one hand, there are those who argue
that the crisis is akin to a traditional balance of payment crisis of
the kind typically occurring in fixed exchange rate regimes. On the
other, there are those who attribute the crisis to obstacles to more
resolute intervention by the European Central Bank (ECB). Accordingly,
belated intervention by the ECB led to worsening of the fiscal crisis of
peripheral Euro area states, subsequently exacerbated by austerity
policies. In this view, a classical balance of payment crisis can be
excluded as a cause of the crisis, because Target 2, a payment mechanism
analogous to Keynes’s International Clearing Union, protects the Euro
area. In this paper, I argue that although a balance of payments crisis
cannot exist in a viable sovereign monetary union, it is still
conceivable in a flawed, stateless monetary union like the Euro zone,
possibly obscured by Target 2. In this regard, I also show that, while
timely and resolute ECB intervention would have been appropriate, in the
absence of federal institutions (particularly a federal budget
controlled by a European democratic parliament), once this intervention
finally took place, austerity measures necessarily accompanied it to
check moral hazard possibilities of peripheral member countries. I argue
that the German neo-mercantilist orientation and the influence of the
predominant mainstream credo that monetary policy should be detached
from politics and fiscal policy are obstacles to a viable federal union.
I also warn about the risk that the Parliament of such a union would be
divided according to national rather than ideological/class interests.
Virtue out of necessity, Hayek pointed out long-ago that a currency
union among different nation-States could only survive with a minimalist
federal State.
