By Anatole Kaletsky

LONDON – The good news is that a Greek default, which has become more likely after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ provocative rejection of what he described as the “absurd” bailout offer by Greece’s creditors, no longer poses a serious threat to the rest of Europe. The bad news is that Tsipras does not seem to understand this.

To judge by Tsipras’s belligerence, he firmly believes that Europe needs Greece as desperately as Greece needs Europe. This is the true “absurdity” in the present negotiations, and Tsipras’ misapprehension of his bargaining power now risks catastrophe for his country, humiliation for his Syriza party, or both.

The most likely outcome is that Tsipras will eat his words and submit to the conditions set by the “troika” (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) before the end of June. If not, the ECB will stop supporting the Greek banking system, and the government will run out of money to service foreign debts and, more dramatically, to pay Greek citizens their pensions and wages. Cut off from all external finance, Greece will become an economic pariah – the Argentina of Europe – and public pressure will presumably oust Syriza from power.

This outcome is all the more tragic, given that the economic analysis underlying Syriza’s demand for an easing of austerity was broadly right. Instead of seeking a face-saving compromise on softening the troika program, Tsipras wasted six months on symbolic battles over economically irrelevant issues such as labor laws, privatizations, even the name of the troika.

This provocative behavior lost Greece all potential allies in France and Italy. Worse still, the time wasted on political grandstanding destroyed the primary budget surplus, which was Tsipras’s trump card in the early negotiations.

Now Tsipras thinks he holds another trump card: Europe’s fear of a Greek default. But this is a delusion promoted by his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. A professor of game theory, Varoufakis recently boasted to the New York Times that “little Greece, in order to survive, [could] bring down the financial world,” and that his media image “as an irrational fool… is doing my work for me” by frightening other EU finance ministers.

Apparently, Varoufakis believes that his “sophisticated grasp of game theory” gives Greece a crucial advantage in “the complicated dynamics” of the negotiations. In fact, the game being played out in Europe is less like chess than like tic-tac-toe, where a draw is the normal outcome, but a wrong move means certain defeat.

The rules of this game are much simpler than Varoufakis expected because of a momentous event that occurred in the same week as the Greek election. On January 22, the ECB took decisive action to protect the eurozone from a possible Greek default. By announcing a huge program of bond purchases, much bigger relative to the eurozone bond market than the quantitative easing implemented in the United States, Britain, or Japan, ECB President Mario Draghi erected the impenetrable firewall that had long been needed to protect the monetary Union from a Lehman-style financial meltdown.

The ECB’s newfound ability to print money, essentially without limit, to support both banks and governments has reduced Greek contagion to insignificance. That represents a profound change in Europe’s financial environment, which Greek politicians, along with many economic analysts, still fail to understand.

Before the ECB’s decision, contagion from Greece was a genuine threat. If the Greek government defaulted or tried to abandon the euro, Greece’s banks would collapse, and Greeks who failed to get their money out of the country would lose their savings, as occurred in Cyprus in 2013. When savers in other indebted euro countries such as Portugal and Spain observed this, they would fear similar losses and move their money to banks in Germany or Austria, as well as sell their holdings of Portuguese or Spanish government bonds.

As a result, the debtor countries’ bond prices would collapse, interest rates would soar, and banks would be threatened with collapse. If the contagion from Greece intensified, the next-weakest country, probably Portugal, would find itself unable to support its banking system or pay its debts. In extremis, it would abandon the euro, following the Greek example.

Before January, this sequence of events was quite likely, but the ECB’s bond-buying program put a firebreak at each point of the contagion process. If holders of Portuguese bonds are alarmed by a future Greek default, the ECB will simply increase its bond buying; with no limit to its buying power, it will easily overwhelm any selling pressure.

If savers in Portuguese banks start moving their money to Germany, the ECB will recycle these euros back to Portugal through interbank deposits. Again, there is no limit to how much money the ECB can recycle, provided Portuguese banks remain solvent – which they will, so long as the ECB continues to buy Portuguese government bonds.

In short, the ECB bond-buying program has transformed the ECB from a passive observer of the euro crisis, paralyzed by the outdated legalistic constraints of the Maastricht Treaty, into a proper lender of last resort. With powers to monetize government debts similar to those exercised by the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England, the ECB can now guarantee the eurozone against financial contagion.

Unfortunately for Greece, this has been lost on the Tsipras government. Greek politicians who still see the threat of financial contagion as their trump card should note the coincidence of the Greek election and the ECB’s bond-buying program and draw the obvious conclusion. The ECB’s new policy was designed to protect the euro from the consequences of a Greek exit or default.

The latest Greek negotiating strategy is to demand a ransom to desist threatening suicide. Such blackmail might work for a suicide bomber. But Greece is just holding a gun to its own head – and Europe does not need to care very much if it pulls the trigger.

Anatole Kaletsky is Chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the author of Capitalism 4.0, The Birth of a New Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015.
www.project-syndicate.org

By Yu Yongding

BEIJING – At a time of slowing economic growth and massive corporate debts, a deflationary spiral would be China’s worst nightmare. And the risk is mounting. The producer price index (PPI) has been in negative territory for 39 consecutive months, since February 2012. The growth of China’s consumer price index (CPI), though still positive, has also been falling steadily, from 6.5% in July 2011 to 1.2% in May. If past experience is any indication, China’s CPI will turn negative very soon.

In China’s last protracted bout of deflation, from 1998 to 2002, persistent declines in prices were the result of monetary and fiscal tightening that began in 1993, compounded by the lack of exit mechanisms for failed enterprises. After peaking at 24% in 1994, inflation began to decline in 1995. But GDP growth soon began deteriorating rapidly. In an effort to revive growth in a difficult global environment and buffer exports against the impact of the Asian financial crisis, the Chinese government loosened monetary and fiscal policy beginning in November 1997.

But it was too little too late. By 1998, when CPI inflation began to fall, producer prices had already been declining for eight months, and remained negative for a total of 51 months, with CPI growth beginning to recover after 39 months.

An obvious lesson is that the government should have switched to loosening earlier, and more forcefully. But this experience also underscores the impotence of monetary policy in a deflationary environment, owing to the unwillingness of banks to lend and of enterprises to borrow. The fact that loss-making enterprises were allowed to churn out cheap products, eroding the profitability of high-quality enterprises (and thus their incentive to invest), prolonged the deflation.

Nonetheless, China eventually managed to rid itself of deflation and return to rapid economic growth. For starters, a decline in investment during the deflationary period – together with firm closures, mergers, and acquisitions – reduced overcapacity, clearing the way for investment to rebound strongly in 2002. At the same time, expansionary fiscal policy increased effective demand, while the government, backed by its strong public-finance position, was able to tackle nonperforming loans effectively, thereby increasing commercial banks’ willingness to lend and firms’ ability to borrow.

Moreover, housing-market reforms and the development of a mortgage-loan market in the late 1990s fueled rapid growth in real-estate investment, which reached an annual rate of over 20% in 2000. As a result, real-estate development became the most important contributor to economic growth, even as exports boomed following China’s accession to the World Trade Organization.

The problem with the emergence of these new growth engines is that it enabled China’s leaders to delay important structural reforms. As a result, China now faces many of the same challenges it faced in the late 1990s – beginning with overcapacity.

After 15 years of rapid growth in real-estate development, this is not surprising. But that does not make it any less risky. In fact, if overcapacity is allowed to continue putting downward pressure on prices, China’s economic growth will not stabilize at a rate consistent with its potential; instead, the economy will be pushed into a vicious spiral of debt deflation.

At this point, the authorities could eliminate overcapacity through firm closures, mergers and acquisitions, and other structural measures. They could also seek to eliminate excess capacity by using expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to stimulate effective demand. In theory, the long-term solution would be to pursue structural adjustments that would improve the allocation of resources. But that would be painful and slow. Striking a balance between the short- and long-term approaches will prove to be a major challenge for China’s leadership.

Complicating this effort is the fact that, unlike in 1997-2002, China cannot absorb overcapacity by stimulating real-estate investment and exports. And no one knows whether the much-discussed “innovative industries” can have the impact that real-estate investment and exports did – not least because there is so much excess capacity in the traditional industries.

China must do what it takes to avoid falling into the debt-deflation trap. Fortunately, China still has room to invest in growth-enhancing infrastructure and innovative industries. Policies to expand social security and improve the provision of public goods could support these efforts, boosting domestic consumption by allowing households to reduce their precautionary savings.

At the same time, however, China’s leadership must continue to pursue its agenda of structural reform and adjustment, even if it may have an adverse impact on growth in the short run. China simply cannot afford to continue to kick the reform can down the road.

As Mark Twain once purportedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” China should brace itself for a period of deflation, which may be even more protracted than the last one. But, with the right approach – and a bit of good luck – it can make sure that, this time, it recovers more sustainably than in the past.

Yu Yongding, a former president of the China Society of World Economics and director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, served on the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2004 to 2006.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015.
www.project-syndicate.org