The UK and the Eurozone: Sovereign Debt Management and Monetary Policy

Events in the wake of the ‘credit crunch’ can be understood only against institutional structures within which interdependent monetary and fiscal policy are administered. In the Eurozone, the attempt to keep a central monetary authority (together with its associated national central banks) independent from 17 diverse fiscal authorities was flawed. When sovereign debt approaches unmanageable levels, the Maastricht Treaty presents austerity as the single option. In the UK, the electorate has an opportunity to choose between monetary financing (inflation) and fiscal consolidation (austerity). Policy choices within the Eurozone and the UK are set against Keynes's focus on unemployment and more recent concerns to retain (or restore) price and/or financial stability.     

Wilhelm Röpke and Richard C. Koo On Secondary Deflations and Balance Sheet Recessions

The concept of a ‘secondary deflation’ was developed in the 1930s by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who saw it as something different from a normal depression. While a primary deflation is a necessary reaction to the inflation from a boom period, a secondary deflation is independent and economically purposeless. Röpke argued that secondary depressions occurred in the US, Germany, France and Switzerland during the 1930s, but was vague on what made them follow primary depressions. Recently, the Taiwanese–American economist Richard C. Koo has claimed to have discovered the ‘Holy Grail of macroeconomics’, that is, what made the Great Depression so deep and long. During the Great Depression, the bursting of the asset price bubble resulted in private sectors having more debt than assets; as they shifted from maximising profits to minimising debt, the consequent debt deflation shrank the economy. According to Koo, Western economies today are suffering from a similar ‘balance sheet recession’. Strengthened by the notion of a balance sheet recession, Röpke's long‐lost insights might advance our understanding of the business cycle in general and the present crisis in the US and the Eurozone in particular.     

The Road Not Taken: A Comparison Between the Hard ECU and the Euro

In the context of the Eurozone crisis this paper re‐examines the Hard ECU using the concepts of the macroeconomic trilemma and the political trilemma. We find that the Hard ECU would have been less economically and politically damaging than the euro. We conclude that it was a superior approach to monetary union.