pepi Escreveu:Nyk Escreveu:"A Alemanha tem dívidas mais elevados do que Espanha. Mas aqui ninguém quer saber disso", comentou Juncker, que se mostrou compreensivo quanto aos receios daquele país perante a actual crise financeira.
A dívida tem que ser analisada em % do PIB... parece-me uma frase descontextualizada para fazer manchete de jornal.
pepi, aqui vai o contexto ou sobre como a Espanha está lixada com o Euro enquanto os alemães continuam a dizer (e a fazer) disparates destrás de disparates...
Myth and Reality About the Euro Crisis
By THOMAS CATAN
It's tempting to view the European debt crisis as a simple morality tale. Hard-working, fiscally responsible northern Europeans such as the Germans and the Dutch are being forced to pick up the tab for their profligate southern neighbors—the Greeks, the Italians and the Spanish.
Germans tend to see the problem this way and, increasingly, so do many U.S. commentators. Unfortunately, that attractively simple story doesn't always stack up—most notably in the case of Spain.
In 2007, before the crisis struck, Spain had a modest debt load representing just 36% of its economy, according to European Union figures. And those responsible Germans? They had 65%.
During the past decade, Germany repeatedly breached the euro rules by running too large a budget deficit. Spain actually ran a modest budget surplus in the years before the crisis hit.
But haven't things changed since then? The German economy has powered through the crisis while the Spanish economy has languished, so you would think the two would have traded places.
You'd be wrong. Last year, Spain's public debt load represented 61% of its economy. Germany's rose to 83%. In fact, Spain's debt burden last year remained below that of the Netherlands (63%), France (83%) and, for comparison, the U.S. (93%).
So if public debt is your yardstick, then the Spaniards were paragons of virtue. They borrowed lightly despite the fact that their euro-zone membership gave them an all-you-can-eat buffet of financing at bargain-basement rates.
As Europe scrambles to find a solution to a debt crisis that's threatening the world economy, it's crucial to understand what actually happened in countries like Spain. Otherwise, policymakers will end up prescribing the wrong medicine, with disastrous results.
"The whole euro-zone strategy is predicated on the assumption that fiscal ill-discipline caused this crisis," said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform. "That is a radically incomplete analysis."
If you believe that Spain's problem was that its government spent and borrowed too much, then the solution is simple: more austerity. But Spain's problem wasn't public debt—it was private debt.
For much of the past decade, the European Central Bank set interest rates at the appropriate level for countries like Germany. That rate was far too low for countries, like Spain, on the euro-zone's edge.
So for years, Spain actually had negative real interest rates, because its inflation rate was higher than the ECB-set interest rate. That gave Spanish households and businesses a huge incentive to borrow. They did, with gusto, and ploughed the money mostly into housing, inflating a giant property bubble.
When the financing dried up after Lehman collapsed, Spanish banks and households were saddled with a glut of overpriced housing. As Spaniards labor to pay off that debt with ever-shrinking assets, the economy has ground to a halt, and unemployment has soared to 23%.
That means that the economy cannot restart and makes investors leery of lending to a country without any growth prospects.
Seeking to get back into the good graces of investors, the newly elected Spanish government has vowed to impose punishing new austerity measures. That could prove counterproductive. With households and businesses still paying down their debt, further cuts in government spending could tip the economy back into recession. And that, in turn, will make Spain less able to service its debts.
"Fiscal austerity of this order against a backdrop of recession is only going to make things worse, says Mr. Tilford. By prescribing only austerity, euro-zone leaders "have already dramatically exacerbated the problems in Portugal, Greece and Ireland. Now they risk making similar mistakes in Spain and Italy."
So even though it's wrong, the idea that Spain took on too much public debt that it cannot now pay threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
If government spending wasn't the problem in Spain, then what was? The country's experience points to a different, more troubling culprit: the euro itself.
The prevailing view of the crisis is that southern Europeans destroyed the euro with their spendthrift ways. But in Spain's case, you could make the opposite case—that the euro has destroyed its economy.
According to this line or argument, Germany wasn't a victim of the single European currency—it was its chief beneficiary. Interest rates were set at a low rate for their benefit, even as other, overheating euro members snapped up their exports.
But after that unsustainable model broke, it was Spaniards who have been left to suffer the consequences. Nearly a quarter of their work force is unemployed and the country is facing years of economic misery. Meanwhile, Germany has been enjoying a spurt of economic growth.
The point here isn't to assign blame for the crisis. There's plenty of that to go around. It is that the truth is more complex than either of those caricatures. If Europeans accept the prevailing morality play that sets some member nations against others, they'll all end up the losers.
in
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 28632.html
Enviado: 13/12/2011 0:13
