One of the entertainments of the holiday period was reading Adults In The Room, the book by Yanis Varoufakis.

It describes his time as finance minister of Greece, and his negotiations with the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission.

Varoufakis was only in the job between January and July 2015. He had the unenviable task of trying to renegotiate the massive debts of the Greek government.

Reading between the lines, Varoufakis cannot have been an easy person to deal with. Indeed, he was effectively forced out of his position by the far-left Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

Still, the academic-turned-politician had many bright ideas. But he could get no traction.

Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet will undoubtedly have read the book. The more reflective among them will realise that negotiating with international bodies when you have a large burden of public sector debt is not exactly fun. In the end, exactly like the Greeks, you will be forced to adopt policies of austerity which you have spent your political life criticising.

But many of our more ardent Remainers would also benefit from reading the former Greek finance minister’s analysis and descriptions of events.

To them, the EU represents a kind of Garden of Eden, where milk and honey (as well, of course, as sweetness and light) flow in abundance.

The harsh reality is that, in their fanaticism for greater European integration and its crowning symbol of the euro, Europe’s elite are quite unable to get to grips with the fundamental problems which the continent faces.

The financial crisis of the late 2000s began to take hold of the wider economy during the winter of 2007/08. The year 2007 represented for most countries the peak level of output before the crash.

Over the past decade, western European countries in the Eurozone have grown much more slowly than comparable ones which have their own currencies.

Greece, of course, has experienced one of the deepest and longest recessions in the entire history of capitalism. Greek output in 2017 was 22 per cent lower than it was in 2007.

Even leaving Greece out of the calculations, the growth performance of western European economies in the Eurozone has been poor. Their average growth over an entire decade has been just 5.6 per cent.

In contrast, average growth in a group made of the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, the UK, and smaller non-Eurozone countries like Norway and Switzerland has been 16.2 per cent. The UK itself is below the average for this set at 11.4 per cent – still, a lot higher than the Eurozone average.

Towards the end of last year, much was made of the fact the growth in the Eurozone as a whole had slowed from 0.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2018 to just 0.2 per cent in the third quarter.

But Europe’s problems are much deeper-seated. The evidence of an entire decade shows the stultifying impact of the euro. The best decision that Gordon Brown ever made was to keep us out of it. If only Greece had done the same.

As published in City AM Wednesday 9th January 2019

Image: Street Art by Aesthetics of Crisis under CC BY 2.0

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published last week some figures which show how a successful monetary union works in practice.

It is not obvious at first sight, from the dry heading: “regional public sector finances”.

The ONS collects information on the amounts of public spending and money raised in taxes across the regions of the UK. The difference is the so-called fiscal balance of the region.

Only three regions generate a surplus. In London, the South East and the East of England, total tax receipts exceed public spending. The capital has a healthy positive balance of £3,070 per head, followed by the South East at £1,667 per head.

Essentially, these two regions subsidise the rest of the UK. Public spending in the North East, for example, is £3,827 per person above the level of taxes raised in that region. In Wales, it is even higher at £4,545. No wonder that one of the first things Carwyn Jones, leader of the Welsh Assembly, said after the Brexit vote was: “Wales must not lose a penny of subsidy”.

The region which benefits most is Northern Ireland, which gets £5,437 per head more than it generates in tax. Scotland, to complete the picture, receives around half of that, at £2,824 per person.

There is a lot of debate around Brexit and the border between the North and the Republic of Ireland. There is even talk of reunification, but on these numbers the Republic would be mad to want it.

Essentially, the regions receive these subsidies because they are running deficits on their trade balance of payments. The exports of goods and services from the North East, for example, to the rest of the UK are much less than it imports. In balance of payments jargon, the subsidy it receives is a monetary transfer from the rest of the country, principally from London and the South East.

The ONS does not actually produce regional balance of payments statistics. But the fact that most regions receive these large transfers implies that they are just not productive enough to sustain their living standards by their own efforts.

All the regions are in the sterling monetary union. Those running trade deficits cannot devalue to try to improve their position. They must instead rely on subsidy.

Exactly the same principles apply in the Eurozone. The massive difference of course is that there is no central Eurozone government to make sure the weaker performing regions receive the necessary funding.

This is why President Macron and Chancellor Merkel announced they will examine changes to treaties to allow for further Eurozone integration. Even the hardline German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said: “a community cannot exist without the strong vouching for the weaker ones”.

To be sustainable, a monetary union needs large transfers between its regions. London and the South East already put their hands deep into their pockets for the rest of the UK. Gordon Brown did get one thing spectacularly right. He kept us out of the Euro.

As published in City AM Wednesday 31th May 2017

Image: Euro sign by Alex Guibord is licensed under CC by 2.0

President Trump’s administration has made many criticisms of Germany. One of the more important was by his top trade advisor, Peter Nabarro. He accused the Germans of using a “grossly undervalued” Euro to “exploit” its trading relationship with America.

The complaint that when the Euro was formed the Deutschmark was too low relative to the other European currencies is a longstanding one within Europe itself.

The Trump administration has raised the stakes. The Euro was described as an “implicit Deutschmark”, whose value is manipulated to be artificially low. This gives Germany, and the rest of the Euro zone, an unfair advantage both in direct trade with the US and in other export markets such as China.

Certainly, the Germans have run a large trade surplus for years.  But this was not always the case. Between 1991, when Germany was re-unified and 1998, their average annual balance of payments deficit was around $20 billion, according to OECD data.

The Euro came into existence on 1 January 1999. Germany took a bit of time to adjust, with their deficit in 1999 and 2000 being just over $30 billion. This fell sharply to $7 billion in 2001. Germany has subsequently run a surplus in every single year. Indeed, since 2010, their average annual balance of payments surplus has been a massive $250 billion.

So the timing of the switch from deficit to surplus lends plausibility to the accusations of the US government.

The balance of payments is calculated in current price terms, reflecting the values of both imports and exports. These in turn are influenced by a wide range of factors, including both domestic costs and exchange rate changes. Another perspective is to strip these out, and look at changes in the volumes of exports and imports rather than their values. The difference between the volumes makes up part of the calculation of GDP, the total output of an economy.

The recession caused by the financial crisis had bottomed out in many economies by the middle of 2009. Output stopped falling, and began a tentative rise.

Since then, the pattern of recovery in terms of the component parts of GDP has been quite different in the Euro zone to both the US and the UK. The increase in the net trade balance in volume terms has been by far the biggest single contributor to the rise in output in the Euro zone as a whole. Just over 40 per cent of the total increase in GDP is accounted for by exports rising faster than imports.

GDP has grown by a lot more in the US and the UK, up 17 and 16 per cent respectively since mid-2009 than the 8 per cent increase in the Euro zone. But in both the Anglo Saxon countries, imports have risen more than exports. Their recoveries have been driven by the domestic private sector, by personal consumption and by strong increases in investment by companies.

From both these perspectives, there is substance in the attacks which Trump has made on Germany and the Euro zone.

At the end of last week Federica Mogherini met leading members of the Trump administration.

Mogherini, yet another Italian politician turned Euro-bureaucrat, is in fact the foreign policy chief of the European Union. She stood on her dignity, or rather the dignity of the European Commission, issuing a warning to America not to interfere with politics in Europe.

We might reasonably wonder what American armed forces have been doing for the past 70 years, effectively providing the defence of Continental Europe and so sparing local politicians the need to raise taxes to pay for it themselves. But this free riding by Europe is apparently an acceptable form of interference. On anything else, America has to be “warned”.

Mogherini went on to surpass herself, claiming that “the strength of the EU and the unity of the EU I believe is more evident today than it was”. Certainly, this “strength” and “unity” are on full display in the latest instalment of the Greek debt crisis. Output in Greece is over 20 per cent lower than it was in 2007, 10 years ago. And the Germans are showing the greatest reluctance to put their hands in their pockets yet again to bail out the Greeks.

More generally, the data on output – GDP – reveal an absolutely fundamental split between the economies of the EU. What we can think of as Greater Germany has performed far better since the financial crisis than the Club Med.

In the former group, to Germany itself we can plausibly add economies such as Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Belgium. The Club Med is represented by France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

To put it starkly, Greater Germany has recovered since the financial crisis and Club Med has not. In every individual year since 2009, Greater Germany has grown faster than Club Med.

Output in the former is just over 14 per cent higher than it was in 2009, the year of deep recession with output shrinking almost everywhere in the Western economies. In the latter, it has also risen, but only by 2 per cent. And growth of 2 per cent was typical for just a single year in the decades prior to the crisis.

In 2009, the two blocs were of very similar overall size. Total output in each was around €5 trillion, with the Club Med group being slightly the larger of the two. Stripping out inflation, output in Greater Germany is now around €700bn higher than it was in 2009, and Club Med has registered an increase of only €100bn. Even removing Greece from the latter makes little difference, given that the Greek economy makes up less than 5 per cent of the Club Med group as a whole.

A massive gap has opened up between two groups of economies within the EU in the space of less than a decade. One has grown almost as much as the dynamic UK. The other languishes with growth close to zero. Strength? Unity? It’s just the way Mrs Mogherini tells them!

Image: European and Greek flags by Reithose is licensed under CC by 2.0