Der andere Blick auf Boom und Krisen

 In der Ausgabe der FTD vom morgigen Dienstag finden sich einige Reaktionen ausländischer Ökonomen auf die deutsche Ökonomendebatte.  Hier sind noch weitere Reaktionen  in Originalsprache und -länge: 

 Paolo Manasse, Professor an der Uni Bologna:

 „The point they make is not new: surely saving Lehman was not desirable ex-ante, beause of moral hazard and because tax payers should not pay for banks folly. Yet ex-post letting Lehman go produced a disaster. So I agree that Spaniard shoud pay for their Banks in normal times, but we do not live in normal times, and unless we have a full EU guarantee on deposits, a EU bank supervision and a EU rescue fund (sort of EU TARP) a crash of Spanish banks will lead straight to a default of Spain and Italy , runs to banks there and in many other EU countries. In short it will lead to a messy EZ break up.“

 Edmund Phelps, Nobelpreisträger der Columbia University:

 „Interesting letter. I didn’t see how a bank union would keep a lid on the banks‘  leverage. My larger theme is that the government and the banks are in an alliance:  the government wants the banks to avert defaults so they can go on lending to the governments;  and the banks want the  government to avert default on their sovereign debt so it can go on paying interest and borrowing from the banks. The idea of a bank union aims to mutualize bank indebtedness so as to remove the specter of some bank defaults.“

 Alan Manning, Dekan der Wirtschaftsfakultät der London School of Economics, sagte unter anderem:

 “This reminds me somewhat of Mervyn King’s warning in the summer of 2007 that we should be very wary of bailing out banks because of the moral hazard caused by this.  But shortly afterwards there was indeed a bail out (first of Northern Rock) not because moral hazard problems are not serious (they are) but because the consequences of a non bail-out are so much worse – a Mervyn King speech later in 2007 http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2007/speech324.pdf puts i all quite well .  The letter seems to claim that “only [the creditors] have the necessary funds at their disposal.” When the whole problem is that they don’t.

The Eurozone has to establish (like all other monetary systems have) an effective lender of last resort as it will otherwise always be prone to confidence crises though such crises are made more likely and worse if there is irresponsibility around, whether public or private sector.

And one would expect some acknowledgment that the German and some other northern European economies are in part robust because they are in a monetary union with some poorly-run economies.  Absent monetary union, the DM would have appreciated massively, delivering higher living standards for German workers but reducing German competitiveness.  In a monetary union there needs to be faster wage inflation inGermanythan there currently is.”