The euro isn’t as bad as we all thought

It still was a mistake, most of all for Greece and Cyprus.  Yet overall its prospects are looking up, as I argue in my most recent Bloomberg column.  Here is the most revisionist passage:

I now think of the 2008-2012 period as unwinding a long-term bubble of overinvestment in the EU periphery, and thus those were special circumstances when virtually all economic policies were radically underperforming. Given that a recurrence of such conditions is unlikely, the euro will do much better in the future.

Along related lines, compare the performance of fiscal austerity now with that earlier period. Greece has been going through an unprecedented fiscal adjustment, with a primary surplus running at 3.9 percent of gross domestic product; yet Greek output, while ailing, has remained roughly stable. Portugal has been cutting back drastically on public sector investment, dropping its public sector deficit from 4.4 percent of GDP to 2.1 percent. Rather than imploding, the economy grew by 1.4 percent.

Of course, fiscal austerity didn’t perform nearly as well in the earlier part of this decade, and neither did the euro. The economic implosion from the unwinding of the bubble was simply too strong, so we should not overgeneralize from the very negative performance during those years.

Here is the most important passage:

One of the original goals of the euro was to tie countries to the European Union and its rules for free trade and free migration. The major EU country that eschewed euro adoption, the U.K., has now voted itself out the union altogether, to its detriment. Estonia and Latvia, which adopted the euro in part for political reasons to tighten their bonds with the EU, still seem secure against potential Russian aggression. The biggest political trouble spots seem to be Hungary and Poland, neither of which are euro members. That may be a coincidence, but it may also reflect a very real psychological tie resulting from the currency adoption.

Do read the whole thing, there are several other arguments at the link.

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