Economic growth

EU Budget: Schulz’s shenanigans

February 8, 2013 1:26 am by Joshua Chaffin

It’s hard enough to get 27 member states to agree unanimously on a seven-year, €1,000bn budget – as anyone following the latest EU summit wrestling match can attest. But completing an EU budget deal requires one more thing: the consent of the European parliament.

Martin Schulz, the German social democrat and parliament president, reminded EU leaders and the Brussels press pack of this fact on Thursday evening. In a mildly foreboding press conference, Schulz re-stated his threat that leaders should be prepared for MEPs to block any budget proposal that strays too far from the €1,033bn proposal submitted more than a year ago by the European commission, the EU’s executive arm.

“Yes, we are prepared to make savings, but we are not prepared to have the European Union budget simply amputated,” he said.

Schulz declined to say whether the latest €960bn proposal being considered by Herman Van Rompuy, the European council president, crossed the line from extreme weight loss to amputation. But he was clearly displeased. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, EU Commission, EU Parliament |

Are S&P and EU headed for eurozone reconciliation?

February 5, 2013 12:03 pm by Peter Spiegel

Over the course of the eurozone crisis, the relationship between EU leaders and credit-rating agencies has been, at best, a love-hate one, with officials frequently lashing out at the three major sovereign raters for the timing and severity of their downgrades.

So it was probably with some Schadenfreude that those same officials learned of the news that the US Justice Department will soon file a civil suit against Standard & Poor’s – arguably the most prominent of the rating agencies – for misleading investors when it gave gold-plated endorsements to US mortgage-related securities before the 2008 financial crisis.

But what happens when S&P starts pointing out that some of the most criticised eurozone policies – the austerity measures aimed at forcing internal devaluations in struggling peripheral countries – may be working? The silence thus far has been deafening. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Greece, Ireland |

Lagarde urges 2 years for Greece. What will it cost?

October 11, 2012 12:47 pm by Peter Spiegel

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, during this morning's news conference in Tokyo.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde’s declaration this morning that Greece should be given two more years to hit tough budget targets embedded in its €174bn bailout programme – coming fast on the heels of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s highly symbolic trip to Athens – are the clearest public signs yet of what EU officials have been acknowledging privately for weeks: Greece is going to get the extra time it wants.

But what is equally clear after this week’s pre-Tokyo meeting of EU finance ministers in Luxembourg is there is no agreement on how to pay for those two additional years, and eurozone leaders are beginning to worry that the politics of the Greek bailout are once again about to get very ugly.

The mantra from eurozone ministers has been that Greece will get more time but not more money. Privately, officials acknowledge this is impossible. Extending the bailout programme two years, when added to the policy stasis in Athens during two rounds of elections and a stomach-churning drop in economic growth, means eurozone lenders are going to have to find more money for Athens from somewhere. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Fiscal policy |

UPDATED: Is IMF pushing for an end to austerity?

October 9, 2012 11:46 am by Peter Spiegel

IMF's Blanchard unveils report at Tokyo gathering of finance ministers and central bankers.

[UPDATE] After a meeting of EU finance ministers in Luxembourg, Olli Rehn, the European Commission’s economic chief, said he would read the IMF’s analysis on the way back to Brussels. But he cautioned that while the impact of austerity on growth was important to consider, it was also essential to take into account the “confidence effect” budget consolidation has. He pointed to Belgium, which has gone from market laggard to nearly a safe haven after implementing tough austerity measures earlier this year.

Although the headlines generated by last night’s release of the IMF’s annual World Economic Outlook focused on the downgrading of global growth prospects, for the eurozone crisis the most important item in the 250-page report may just be a three-page box on how austerity measures affect struggling economies.

The box – co-authored by IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard and staff economist Daniel Leigh – argues in stark language that the IMF as well as other major international institutions, including the European Commission, have consistently underestimated the impact austerity has on growth.

For a eurozone crisis response that has piled harsh austerity medicine on not only bailout countries but “core” members with high debt levels –Italy, France and Belgium, for instance – the IMF finding could shake up the debate on how tough Brussels should continue to be on eurozone debtors. As French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the influential Brussels think tank Bruegel, tweeted yesterday:


#IMF finding that multipliers have been systematically underestimated in consolidation episodes is bound to trigger major policy debate.
October 9, 2012 5:09 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@BruegelPisani
Bruegel_Pisani

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Posted in Economic growth, EU |

Working for Syriza

October 9, 2012 10:45 am by Joshua Chaffin

Greek protesters prepare for Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit this morning in central Athens.

Since coming a surprise second in June’s Greek elections, Syriza, the radical left-wing coalition, can point to at least one (admittedly modest) success in addressing the country’s monstrous unemployment problem: It has found a job for Aphrodite Babassi.

Babassi, a Syriza supporter who appeared in the FT’s pages in May, had been jobless for three years before she took a post in July on the staff of one of the party’s new members of parliament, Afrodite Stapouli, researching science policy.

We bumped into Babassi, 27, at Syntagma Square on Monday night, where – as she prepared to protest against the pending visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel – she recalled the joy of receiving her first pay check. Read more

Posted in Economic growth, EU, Euro |

Spain, S&P and the austerty-growth debate

April 27, 2012 11:18 am by Peter Spiegel

Spain's Mariano Rajoy, after a meeting at the Spanish parliament in Madrid earlier this month

The recent turn in market sentiment against Spain has led to a somewhat unanswerable debate in European policy circles about what, exactly, the markets are worried about: Is it that the new Rajoy government tried to break from tough EU-mandated deficit limits last month…or the fact they eventually agreed to stick to next year’s stringent target?

If Standard & Poor’s downgrade of Spanish debt last night is any indication, it appears the markets are more concerned about the latter than the former.

Most senior EU officials have a different view, arguing that by unilaterally declaring he was going to ignore the EU-mandated 4.4 per cent debt-to-gross domestic target for 2012, prime minister Mariano Rajoy spooked the bond market by signalling Spain had lost its sense of discipline.

But S&P makes a different argument. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Fiscal policy |

Leaked EU economic analyses: have a read

April 2, 2012 4:24 pm by Peter Spiegel

Denmark's Margrethe Vestager, center, with her counterparts in Copenhagen this weekend.

Following our story Saturday and subsequent blog post on two confidential economic analyses prepared for European finance ministers in Copenhagen which paint a less-than-confident picture of the eurozone crisis, we here at Brussels Blog have received multiple requests for more on their contents. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, EU Commission, Fiscal policy |

Geithner to EU: Increase your bailout fund

March 20, 2012 10:49 am by Peter Spiegel

US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner

Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, has occasionally irked his European counterparts with attempts to influence the eurozone’s crisis policymaking, but European officials will be closely listening to him as the clock ticks down to next month’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund.

European Union leaders hope to get non-eurozone backing to double the IMF’s funding to $1tn at the gathering. Although the US won’t contribute, Washington is the IMF’s largest shareholder and is widely believed to be behind the insistence of Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief, that no increase will be forthcoming unless the eurozone increases the size of its own €500bn rescue system.

Those interested in tea leaf reading will get their chance today, when Geithner testifies on Capital Hill on the eurozone crisis. The House financial services committee, where Geithner will appear, helpfully released his testimony last night, and it makes clear Geithner is in no mood to back down. Read more

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Posted in Economic governance, Economic growth, EU, Euro |

Is Portugal really the next Greece?

February 1, 2012 12:39 pm by Peter Spiegel

Portuguese prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho arriving at Monday's EU summit in Brussels

As financial markets watch with nervous anticipation the outcome of the tense negotiations over Greece’s debt restructuring, there is clear evidence that bond investors believe Portugal could be next, despite repeated insistence by European leaders that Greece is “an exceptional and unique case” – a stance reiterated at Monday’s summit.

Portugal’s benchmark 10-year bonds were over 17.3 per cent this week, though things have eased off a bit today. Those are levels seen only by Greece and are a sign the markets don’t believe Lisbon will be able to return to the private markets when its bailout ends next year. Default, the thinking goes, then becomes inevitable.

But are Greece and Portugal really comparable? Portugal certainly shares more problems with Greece (slow growth, uncompetitive economy) than with Ireland and Spain (housing bubbles, bank collapses). But unlike Greece, where talk of an inevitable default was the topic of whispered gossip in Brussels’ corridors from almost the moment of its first €110bn bailout, there is no such buzz about Portugal.

More concretely, the latest report by the European Commission on the €78bn Portuguese bail-out, published just a couple weeks ago, paints a much different picture for Lisbon than for Athens. An in-depth look at the largely overlooked report after the jump… Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, EU Commission, Fiscal policy |

EU summit: Leaked draft conclusions

October 23, 2011 9:08 am by Peter Spiegel

French president Nicolas Sarkozy arrives at the summit this morning.

The big European Union summit will be divided in two parts today, with all 27 EU leaders meeting in the morning before the session is narrowed to the 17 members of the eurozone in the afternoon.

The Brussels Blog has obtained a copy of the 12-page draft of the morning gathering’s communiqué, circulated to summiteers this morning, and unless things change at the meeting, it looks like there will be no final decision on the one thing the 27 had hoped to finish today – a plan to recapitalise Europe’s banks.

The draft “welcomes progress made” by EU finance ministers during their 10-hour meeting on Saturday, but says the work will not be officially signed off until another meeting on Wednesday – the first official acknowledgement that leaders from all 27 EU countries (and not just the eurozone) will have to meet again next week. Whether that meeting will be the heads of all 27 governments or just their finance ministers remains to be seen. Read more

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Posted in Economic growth, EU, Fiscal policy |
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