Het uur van Ab Klink

Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, haalt uit naar Nederlandse en Duitse politici. De EU houdt wel erg weinig middelen over om de crisis te bestrijden.

Eurozone policy-makers, especially German and Dutch ones, have been unable to rise above hubris and moral posturing, leaving the eurozone with very little ammunition to confront the coming financial storm. They have stubbornly dug in their feet, preferring to deepen the crisis than to admit their mistakes. This makes a fracturing of the eurozone almost inevitable. And it will not simply be Greece (and possibly Portugal) leaving, as some German and Dutch policy-makers appear to think. This is wilfully naive. This threat goes right up to and includes France. A ‘core’ could be very small indeed, comprising just Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Luxembourg. France and Germany would no longer share a currency.
The eurozone has opted to deny itself the policy tools to deal with the crisis: there will be no debt mutualisation, even one accompanied by tight fiscal rules; the European Central Bank (ECB) will not be permitted to exercise the full range of lender of last resort functions (for example, to buy unlimited volumes of sovereign debt or other financial assets); there will be no co-ordinated recapitalisation of eurozone banks; and economic policy will be driven by faith, not reason (leading eurozone policy-makers believe that uncoordinated, simultaneous cuts in public spending allied to tax increases, will boost household and business confidence). This is the kind of thinking that caused economic slump in the 1930s, and with it the rise of political extremism.