Europe’s Clueless Politicians Are So Incompetent that They Can’t Even Figure Out How to Do the Wrong Thing

There’s always been a simple and desirable solution to Europe’s fiscal crisis, but nobody in Europe wants to do the right thing because it means admitting the failure of big government and it would result in less power for the political elite.

So we get the spectacle of never-ending emergency summits as the political class blindly searches for some magical solution. Not surprisingly, the “solution” concocted by the latest gathering is not getting good reviews.

Here’s what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

What remarkable petulance and stupidity. The leaders of France and Germany have more or less bulldozed Britain out of the European Union for the sake of a treaty that offers absolutely no solution to the crisis at hand, or indeed any future crisis. It is EU institutional chair shuffling at its worst, with venom for good measure. …There is no shared debt issuance, no fiscal transfers, no move to an EU Treasury, no banking licence for the ESM rescue fund, and no change in the mandate of the European Central Bank.

And here’s what Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters.

It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. …Europe’s leaders have set a course which leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.

So why is everybody upset? For the simple reason that the supposed “solution” doesn’t address the immediate problem.

Europe’s short-run crisis is that the fear of default. Simply stated, governments have squandered so much money that they are now deeply in debt. As a result, investors no longer trust that they will get paid back (either on time or in full) if they buy bonds from various governments.

This is why interest rates on government debt are climbing and nations such as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal already have received direct bailouts. Moreover, the European Central Bank has been engaging in indirect bailouts of other welfare states such as Spain and Italy.

But these direct and indirect bailouts have simply made the debt bubble bigger.

Yet the new agreement from Europe’s political elite doesn’t deal with this crisis. Simply stated, there is no short-run bailout strategy, not even one that kicks the can down the road.

There are only four ways of dealing with the mess in Europe, one good and three bad.

1. No bailouts, thus forcing nations to do the right thing (like the Baltics) or letting them default. This imposes the costs on the people who created the mess, addresses the short-run crisis, and promotes good long-run policy.

2. Crank up the proverbial printing presses and have the European Central Bank buy up most of Europe’s dodgy debt. This imposes the costs on all consumers, addresses the short-run crisis, and promotes bad long-run policy.

3. Have the Germans (and some other northern Europeans) guarantee the debt of the less-stable welfare states, either through Euro-bonds or some other mechanism. This imposes the costs on taxpayers in Germany and other nations that have been more prudent, addresses the short-run crisis, and promotes bad long-run policy.

4. Have the Americans and the rest of the world bail out Europe’s welfare states via the International Monetary Fund. This imposes the costs on the entire world (with U.S. taxpayers picking up the biggest part of the tab), addresses the short-run crisis, and promotes bad long-run policy.

In a remarkable display of ignoring the elephant in the middle of the room, none of these options was selected.

Some people claim that the third option was used, but that’s whistling past the graveyard. Yes, there will be a €500 billion bail-out fund called the European Stability Mechanism at some point next year, but that simply replaces the current €440 billion European Financial Stability Facility. And nobody thinks the third option will be successful unless there is a multi-trillion euro bailout fund.

So if Europe’s politicians didn’t agree to deal with the problem, either with good policy or bad policy, what exactly did they do?

The agreement uses the short-run fiscal crisis as an excuse to propose permanent changes that will erode national sovereignty and impose more centralization, more harmonization, and more bureaucratization.

One can argue, though not very persuasively, that these changes will reduce the likelihood of fiscal crises in the future. But that’s not the same thing as coming up with a policy – good or bad – to deal with the immediate problem.

I’m not an expert on investing money, but I definitely won’t be surprised if financial markets (including the investors who want bad policy so they can be bailed out) react negatively to this latest faux agreement.