If Ireland Represents a Success then the Model is Broken

Whatever your position on the Eurozone crisis it is an important day for Ireland. Today the country returns to being a democratic sovereign state after three years during which power was held by unaccountable technocrats working in the interests of global finance. The fact that Ireland can once again borrow in the finance markets is being heralded as a success for austerity, but that rather depends on your perspective.

If Ireland's problem was that it had borrowed excessively then this has certainly not been solved. The country's debt represents 124% of its GDP, meaning that its people are working harder to pay money to absent shareholders of foreign banks. The unemployment rate of 13.5% (see the graphic, left) is an artificially low figure because of the high rate of outward migration, a process that threatens the country's future by removing the most talented young people. Meanwhile cuts in a range of social benefits and government programmes will deepen and continue.

We should also be questioning how Ireland found itself holding unpayable debts: what is its story as one victim of the msiguided Eurozone project. Because the single currency area required a uniform interest rate for countries in vastly different economic situations it was bound to destabilise particularly the smaller economies. In Ireland's case the low Euro interest rates provoked an absurdly euphoric boom in construction. The later bailout of the corrupt and disreputable Anglo-Irish Bank at a cost of  €440bn was the final straw for the Irish economy, which became effectively bankrupt.

Ireland's political establishment chose to repay the country's debts and to win the favour of financial elites, rejecting routes such as default, deflation, or the repudiation of the debts as odious. This decision has come at a truly hideous price for the people of Ireland. At the time of Ireland's latest budget in September, the EU troika that was then effectively running the country required Joan Burton, minister for social protection, to cut €440m or just over 2% from the 2014 budget. Seamus Coffey of University College Cork points out the impact that the debt restructuring will have on future generations as 'excluding interest costs and sovereign bank support, the total deficit in the six-year period 2008-2013, will put debt of nearly €60bn more on us in services and transfers than is [collected] from us in taxes and charges.'

The European authorities have decided to allow Ireland to keep its extremely low corporate tax rate, allowing it to generate cash to pay to its creditors. This means that we, as Ireland's economic neighbour, are also suffering as a result of the deal. US corporations, particularly those in the high-tech sector including Apple and Google, set up in Ireland where they are only required to pay 12.5% tax rather than in the UK. This also justifies George Osborne's decision to cut corporate tax rates here on the basis of the need for us to be competitive. While Ireland's time with the bailout programme has turned it into a beggar its route out of the crisis is also beggaring its neighbour.

This sort of competition between countries should be cooperating for mutual benefit is an inevitable consequence of globalisation. It is the very system itself, with the free movement of capital and lax regulation of corporate activity, that is enabling capitalists and particularly financiers to benefit at the expense of the citizens of the world.

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What is Going on in Cyprus?

Why is the banktruptcy of a tiny economy in the Mediterranean making headlines across Europe? The answer is that the Cyprus solution is what every saver across Europe fears might be coming their way soon. The awareness that money is not real and that countries are not good for the amounts of money they have guaranteed has been creeping into people's consciousness over the past five years. I know this because I speak to large groups of people about money and this fear is lurking behind their questions about gold and their decisions to put money into renewable energy schemes or socks under the mattress.

It was this fear that drove Alastair Darling to increase the savings guarantee in Britain at the start of the financial crisis: nothing is worse for a banking system than people feeling that their deposits are not safe and withdrawing their money. And nothing spreads this fear as rapidly as governments taking money out of their citizens' bank accounts as the Cypriot government has threatend to do. When the Argentinian government made a similar move in 2001 it precipitated a massive withdrawl of capital and the collapse of the national economy.

I am pleased to see that, although the levy on Cypriots' bank accounts is a policy made in Germany and to please German tax-payers, the Green Group in the European parliament, alhough it is dominated by German MEPs has made its opposition clear. Greens/EFA co-president Dany Cohn-Bendit is quoted stating that:

'The attack on ordinary depositors in the context of Cyprus' bail-out is outrageous and must be urgently corrected. Small depositors should be last in the line of fire in any bank restructuring. This is the guiding logic behind EU legislation providing for national deposit guarantee schemes, as well as draft legislation currently under consideration on an EU deposit guarantee scheme. While the proposed depositors' levy may be legally consistent with the existing legislation, it is a cynical ploy, which totally defies the spirit of the rules and their raison d'être.'

Merkel's decision to crush a tiny and vulnerable economy comes less than a month after the 60th anniversary of the cancellation of Germany's own war debt. By 1953 Germany was still carrying pre-war debts which had been massively increased by the costs of borrowing to fund the war itself. The country was in ruins and was incapable of borrowing to rebuild. Germany's former enemies agreed that for the sake of peace and humanity a significant portion of its huge debts should be written off, sums amounting to a value equivalent to 75% of Germany's exports in 1950. The remaining debt was restructured and interest rates reduced.

The Dublin based Ango: Not Our Debt campaign celebrated the anniversary, which is passing unmentioned in Germany. Its spokesman Andy Storey commented:‘The 53 Accord was signed initially by 22 creditor countries, including by Ireland and Greece.' Anglo: Not Our Debt point out that the amount of debt cancellation received by Germany in 1953 in today’s terms is worth nearly €37bn., similar to the amount of the principal of Anglo debt being paid by people in Ireland over the next 40 years. Indeed, the amount of debt cancellation received by Germany is all the more impressive, as Germany’s economy was far smaller then than today

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Life Beyond Growth: Join the Evolution

I have been puzzling over why the Office for Budget Responsibility, which was only established to give prudent and honest advice about what is happening in our economy, has failed so resolutely to either predict or interpret the current economic position. It hasn't helped that the man chosen to head up the organisation was qualified in communications more than in economic analysis, but perhaps there are deeper answers to the questions about why it keeps predicting more growth than we are likely to achieve.

If you were on the edge of a paradigm shift, would you honestly be able to look across the gulf and believe what you were seeing on the other side? Or, rephrasing that question with relevance to the purpose of this blog, would you be able to believe that growth will never return and that your job as an economist should be not predicting its returning, or even trying to bring about its return, but rather encouraging the evolution of the economy towards a structure that does not rely on growth?

Let's spend a while looking at the figures. Osborne's disastrous revisions to his growth figures, which lead him to conclude that we must face at least another six years of grinding austerity, are based on more OBR predictions. The OBR now suggests that the 0.8% growth they predicted just eight months ago has been transformed into 0.1% of contraction. Next year's growth, they suggest, while less than their March prediction of 2%, will still be a determinedly positive 1.2%. The fantastical nature of these predictions arises from the fact that the past always looks worse than in OBR-land, but the future continues to look rosier. This suggests a failure of judgement and the need for a reality check. The OBR economists appear to be psychologically incapable of responding to a world beyond growth: being incapable of imaging such a world they gaily predict it away.

What is the view from Euroland? Even the German economy, the final functional growth engine, is beginning to sputter. In spite of our view of Germans as sober and rational, the disease of fantastical prediction appears to be spreading their way. The Bundesbank is making even more rapid adjustments to its predictions, suggesting the German economy will grow by just 0.4% next year compared with its June forecast of 1.6%. When a key economic variable can be reduced so drastically in just five months you realise that you are dealing with psychological rather than statistical error.

So what does the economy beyond growth look like? At present, without any evolution in our expectations and basic parameters, it looks very grim indeed: desperate pressure on the planet, growing inequality as the fight over the shrinking pie continues, and increasing social tensions as the elites refuse to accept that a future without growth means they cannot continue to extract disproportionate amounts of wealth as they have in the past.

Yet as a green economist I can see the end of growth as part of a story with a decidedly happy ending. Economic growth, and the inequality and ecological pressure it brings with it, could be replaced by an economy where the objective was balance and harmony between people, other species, and the planet we share. How can we move towards such an economy? What might its social and political institutions look like? How can we begin to create a culture that makes this not just a possible but a desirable future. It is to answer these questions that Green House is hosting a seminar in London on 19 December in partnership with the Green European Foundation. Please join us - and join the evolution.

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We Are All Greeks

Over the weekend I was able to engage in some discussions about events in Greece. It is an increasingly desperate situation akin to similar situations in democratic countries put under pressure by finance capitalism. Political views are polarising between the extremes. Syriza, the coalition of left parties, is building towards a majority, but the fascists Golden Dawn are handing out bread and simple slogans - and they are also infiltrating the police. When people are hungry enough they may vote for a socialist party; whether that party is allowed to take control of the country is another matter.

Our comrades from Greece spoke movingly about how supported they felt by the use of the slogan 'We are all Greeks', that has been seen increasingly in recent months. It goes beyond the need for solidarity; it goes beyond the need to attack racism, however subtle; it goes to a deep understanding that the nature of capitalism as a system that requires co-operation if it is to serve human needs without leading to war. The rules of the global system need to be focused on balance and prosperity for all, rather than enabling the stronger, larger economies to profit at the expense of the rest.

This was the argument made by Keynes at Bretton Woods, in his desperate and failed bid to create a global financial and trade system that would not set us on the path to future wars. It is simple: in a system of exchange one country's success will inevitably lead to another country's failure and so rules have to be introduced to enable the weak to gain as well as the strong. Economic policy should be based on the principle of circulation rather than accumulation. While Germany refuses to recirculate its accumulated wealth in Greece it will not only damage the Greeks and increase tensions, but ultimately damage itself.

Keynes argued for the bancor, a neutral trading currency, and for countries to be fined for holding trade surpluses as well as trade deficits. What was agreed was the dollar as the trading currency and no rules to achieve trade balance. The euro was created to enable Europe to compete against the dollar, but it created its own imbalances which are the responsibility of the system designers, not the Greek people.
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Fiat Luxemburg

I am spending the weekend in Berlin as part of an expert group exploring creative and just responses to the financial crisis, funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. As a Green, this is an interesting experience for me: finding out where the radical left are on the issues of the day. Most encouragingly many amongst their number are recognising the ecological crisis as the defining issue of our times and considering how this might be taken into their worldview and political platform.

The most stimulating contributions have been from the Greek delegates, two of whom are contributing to the policy of the Greek left coalition Syriza. Greece is portrayed as a laboratory for the next phase of rapacious neoliberalism, with the debt crisis being used to facilitate the fire sale of valuable national assets, including the large amounts of land that is owned by the state in Greece. In such a situation default can seem like a liberation. As charmingly argued by Sergio Tzotzes from the University of Crete, 'The sinking of the titanic was an unexpected liberation for the lobsters in the kitchen of the luxury liner.'

As the first default under EU rules, it is important that we study the conditions that were placed on Greece, which were notoriously draconian. Greece defaulted to the extent of €105bn on an original debt of €360, but new loans of €130bn were taken on, meaning that Greece was immediately in trouble again. Worryingly, these agreements have not been passed democratically by parliament but rather signed off by ministers. As the price of this restructuring there was a devaluation of pensions and savings of 90%. This was a default on the private debt, leaving the public debt unaffected. The default was governed by British and Luxemburg law, which is creditor friendly, and the terms imposed by the EU were more savage than have traditionally been imposed by the IMF in similar situations.

My own contribution to the seminar was about moving towards a diversity of forms of money operating at different levels with different objectives and under different forms of control. I think it fair to say that my proposal was roundly condemned. Marxist theory says that money is a commodity like any other and that it is the productive economic that is primary: money will follow decisions made about production. To me this directly contradicts the evidence of recent years and undermines attempts to tackle the way money enables the tiny minority who control money to use this power to also control the key productive and consumption resources.

The Left feels like a rump of something that was once exciting and dynamic. I am surprised by their friendliness to somebody who is basically an interloper but I do find them labouring with some dogmatic ideas that hold back creative thought, especially in terms of solutions. It is important to remember, though, that while it is the machinations of the neoliberals that have brought us to this mess, it is the weakness of the organised left that has allowed them to get away with it. I am not nostalgic for the 1970s but I do recognise that it was the withering of the Left since those years that has permitted the downgrading of my job and attacks on our public sector.
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More Links to Germany

As the parallels with the 1930s grow stronger, another commentator has written an article drawing attention to the way Germany was treated in the 1950s and the way the Eurozone, at Germany's behest, is treating the debtor nations of Europe's periphery. As Eric Toussaint notes, the 1953 London Agreement acknowledged that Germany was simply unable to pay its debts, and that failure to recognise this could cause social and political tensions within and between countries. With the second great European war still a vivid and personal memory for many this argument was heeded. Amongst our generation of politicians, sadly, the focus on punitive measures and judgemental attitudes is outweighing the good sense that says when countries can't bear, forcing them to do so will only break them and their populations.
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Financial Ignorance a Sinn

The next step on the rocky road of the Eurozone crisis is the financial union, proposed by Barroso last weekend. The proposal for a banking union is suggested as a way of saving the euro and the European financial system. If we will not take this step then the finance houses will not trust us and will destroy us. But just a minute. If the financiers are so all powerful how come they needed us to bail them out? This is one basic logical flaw. Another is why a system that failed because it was too consolidated and too centralised is to be saved by becoming entirely centralised, with just one regulator overseeing all of Europe's 6000 banks.

The answer is that German money is needed to make the banking union work, and the German monetary authorities will not agree to this unless they have control of what those banks are able to do. A proposal so draconian and disempowering will never be acceptable to banks in the countries of the European periphery that still have the economic strength to resist, which will make withdrawal from the EU much more likely, and especially in the UK. The proposal is the opposite of a real solution to the crisis, which would rely on more diversity, the breaking up of the larger banks into smaller banks more responsive to their local communities, and the creation of many currencies rather than the monopoly of the Euro.

The public debate about the Eurozone crisis has been lamentably shallow. A recent exception was an interview with Hans-Werner Sinn on Hardtalk. He was responding to George Soros's recent call that Germany should either 'lead or leave' the euro, which Sinn portrayed as a veiled demand for Germany to pay more. As a financier it is unsurprising that Soros should call for the German government to create more money that, as previously identified on a guest post on this blog, will mostly end up in the hands of financiers.

The most interesting parts of the interview have been cut from this video, although Sinn does identify how the 'policy of making private debt contracts public debt contracts is dangerous to Europe'. By increasing tensions between national governments, as the northern countries become the creditors of the southern European countries. This will raise tensions between the nations of Europe, the very tensions that the EU was set up to diminish. The whole interview, available as a podcast, is well worth listening to, as a heterodox view of the Eurozone crisis that also exposes the ignorance and lack of understanding of BBC staff.
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Obols or No Balls

While policy-makers struggle to increase the flow of money in stagnant national economies they fail to see that it is not the quantity of the money that is the problem but its quality. The imperialist currencies of dollar and euro were designed to serve the interests of elites, so we should not be surprised that they do nothing to support the livelihoods of citizens of countries the world over. In The Ecology of Money, Richard Douthwaite suggested a sophisticated multi-layered currency world, where different types of money played different roles. Although ignored at the time, this may be just the sort of proposal we need now to resolve the crisis in the global economy, and particularly the crisis in the Eurozone.

The structural flaw with the Euro was always clear to economists: a single currency means a single interest rate, a single price for money across a number of diverse econonomies. The overheating, subsequent bust and unpayable debts in Greeece, Spain and Ireland were bound to result from such a system from the start. For this reason the UK Greens campaigned hard against the Euro proposal as soon as its design and inevitable consequences became clear. Our policy was to support the Euro as a common currency rather than a single currency, and a shift to such a policy remains a viable option for the Eurocrats now, enabling them to save face by claiming that the Euro can survive with its membership intact, while allowing the countries of the periphery to escape ongoing suffocation.

So Greeks would still be able to spend Euros, and the tourism industry, for example, might continue to accept them. But the Greek government would initiate a new currency for the purposes of running its national economy (I would suggest that they not call it the Drachma). Governments need a currency in which they accept taxes, and they need to have control over this currency, Greece could issue Obols to pay the salaries of public-sector workers, and accept the same for payment of taxes. This would immediately liberate the country from the death spiral it is currently enduring. Traders would prefer to have Euros, but a currency which you can use to pay your taxes always has an intrinsic value and would be accepted faute de mieux.

Meanwhile Greek citizens are already finding creative solutions to the desperate shortage of currency: they are creating their own.  The best known example is the TEM (an acronym from the initials of the Greek phrase 'local alternative unit') which circulates widely in the Greek town of Volos.  The currency is a typical example of a community or complementary currency, circulating within a defined local economy. This system, like many LETS schemes in the UK today is run entirely electronically. It has provided a lifeline to many Greeks for whom the Euro is now unattainable. Its success provides evidence of the need to end the national and now international monopoloy over money and shift to a pragmatic policy of creating a number of moneys appropriate to the role that money should play in the economy: facilitation rather than strangulation.
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Not Waiving but Drowning

'There's not much to a bank except its licence, its computer system and its reputation.' Thus spake Martin Taylor on this morning's Today programme, the same programme that, with its recent behaviour as lackey of the elites, invited Bob Diamond to give its inaugural lecture in 2011. A member of the 'independent' commission on banking, Martin Taylor was Chief Executive of Barclays between 1994 and 1998. The extraordinary breakdown of retail banking services at RBS and its subsidiaries this week - the result, it appears, of offshoring vital services to under-qualified and under-priced programmers who could not be properly monitored - has seriously eroded confidence in one of those pillars. The fraud revealed by the IFS yesterday further undermines the reputation of Barclays, with other banks set to follow the same route to opporobrium. It only remains for the government to take from Barclays the licence of which bank executives have proved themselves utterly unworthy.

Although the Barclays scandal has pushed the Eurozone crisis off the front pages this morning, the two are intimately related. As the previous post on this blog indicated, the sovereign debt crises have also arisen as a result of banks bidding up the rates of interest paid by nations on the money they borrow from those banks, increasing bank profits while bankrupting countries and destroying their societies. As in their mainpulation of the LIBOR rate they have controlled what is supposed to be a free market to benefit their narrow interests, and the whole economy and wider society have suffered as a result.

What has not been mentioned in this recent round of scandals is that, in a capitalist economy, the banks' most important function is to provide the liquidity that brings into play the factors of production that enable economies to be productive. For years, our banks have failed to do that effectively, preferring to suck money out of productive sectors and local economies to feed it into speculative circuits and lucrative rewards to bank employees.

This situation has gone beyond discussion about regulation, of whatever degree of touch, and into the realms of serious political action. The government already holds controlling stakes in RBS and Lloyds on behalf of the citizenry. The withdrawal of Barclays' banking licence would leave the vast majority of UK banking in public hands. The government therefore has the active power to operate a proportion as public interest banking, keeping the value of money creation to invest in public projects, while the remainder are broken up and made available to be operated as a system of locally based community banks.

Please sign the e-petition calling on the government to withdraw Barclays banking licence.
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Lending for Spending?

At first sight the 'new' policy announced at the Mansion House last night is incomprehensible. Banks, whose job is to create money to lend to companies, are to be loaned money at low rates of interest to lend money to companies. This bizarre and pointless piece of choreography appears to ignore the fact that banks have the ability to create their own money without the Bank of England's involvement, and that what limits their lending is the absence of companies seeking loans which they, as profit-making institutions, consider worth the risk. Following the previous policies of quantitative easing, Project Merlin and the Loan Guarantee Scheme, this new policy indicates not only the continuing desperation of Chancellor and Governor but their stubborn insistence that private-sector solutions growing out of monetary policy will solve our problems.

The reason for the impasse is more ideological than economic. Those with power are just refusing to accept that monetary policy is not, and never was, a private affair. The 2008 crisis made clear that the citizens of a country stand behind their banks and that a banking crisis, unless dealt with early and in a way that allows banks to make losses, will become a sovereign debt crisis. In the UK case, we went even further than this, taking control of some of our largest banks, which have in reality been transferred to the public sector. As such, they could be used to send money directly into the economy, not via banks that are too nervous to lend, but directly to fund green infrastructure projects or other transitional public investment. What stops this from happening is the destructive ideological mantra that says the private sector should grow while the public sector shrinks. This is maintained not because it is working, or because it would make our country a better place, but rather because it is an article of faith for free-market believers.

This foundation of economic policy on inappropriate ideology also prevents the Chancellor from insulating us against the problems of the Eurozone. While little can be done to reduce the impact of Euroland recession on our exports, this could be compensated by increased effective demand at home if the Chancellor used his control of our national currency to intervene positively in the economy. This is why economists across the political spectrum fought to maintain our national currency. Similarly, because we own some of our largest banks we can also insulate national monetary policy from the turbulence in the European banking system, at least to the extent that it derives from the internal contradictions of a currency area of which we are not a part.

We do not need to be suffering from the death spiral, which is largely of the Chancellor's making. We could be using the opportunity of the bursting of the credit bubble to acknowledge the role of the government in monetary policy and to use that to shift the economic energy in our country away from finance and speculation and towards investment in a transition to a real green economy. The opportunity is there; it is only the ideological blinkers worn by our politicians that prevent it from being grasped.
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It's the System, Stupid!

So the Eurozone is on the brink of slipping back into Recession. The latest growth figures indicate the growing inequality that the single currency is causing between Europe's countries. The quaterly rates of growth range from -1.3% in Hungary to +1.3% in Finland.Meanwhile, annual rates of growth in 2012 compared with the same quarter in 2011 are truly shocking. Greece is showing a contraction of 6.2%, while the Portuguese economy contracted by 2.2%. The Netherlands shrank by 1.3%, while the UK is registering at zero. In the case of Greece, Spain and the countries that are showing disturbing rates of contraction, the austerity measures are the key cause of this. The failure to understand this appears to be wilful stupidity.

The first graphic indicates the relationship between government withdrawal of investment and the failure of growth. We can clearly see the economy take a nose-dive in 2008, then return to stability and slow growth as a result of Labour's stimulus policies, before nose-diving again once the Tories were elected. Do these politicians really not understand, or refuse to understand, the nature of economies as complex system, and the importance of multiplier effects? This refusal is a type of ideological blindness which is devastating all sectors of the UK economy and destroying jobs and livelihoods.

Why is it so easy for politicians to convince voters of this mistaken view of how an economy works? I think the answer lies partly in people's unwillingess to think systemically, and in this it is related to the problem we face as Greens of persuading people to think about ecological systems. As far as the economy is concerned, I have produced two graphics, which I hope help to explain how Osborne and his ilk have the economy completely wrong. We need to encourage people to stretch their minds to seeing the economy as a system, not as a linear series of transactions.

The first graphic represents the Osborne view of economics: a view that was, until recently, accepted as hegemonic by most media outlets. The first assumption of this model is that wealth is only created in the private sector. Tax then removes this wealth and feeds it to the greedy public sector, which destroys it. What remains stimulates consumption-based economic activity. If the money paid via tax to the public sector could be shrunk, as in the right-hand panel, then the private sector would expand and the economy would be more successful.

The second graphic represents the economy as a dynamic system, with public, private and third sectors all interacting. Wealth is generated in private, public and third sectors. Taxation is paid on all economic interactions, and that taxation becomes investment in further activity in all three of the sectors. Conclusion: the way to revive the economy is to increase the circulation of wealth and stimulate greater activity.

This is not a complicated argument, and it requires only a short application of mental effort to realise that the first model is simplistic and wrong. It is some combination of mental laziness and ideological perversion that prevents the majority of European citizens from grasping this - and demanding economic policies that respond to it.

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Greek People Take on Financiers

The situation in Greece is giving clear evidence that economics never could be separated from politics, and that the subject should have retained its original title of ‘political economy’. It is also demonstrating the terror that strikes the heart of the elites when people begin to act like democratic citizens and try to influence the policies of their country, particularly policies in the crucial areas of currency, taxation and wealth.

The following summary of the outcome of the Greek elections is based on information supplied by Christina Laskaridis of the Greek Debt Audit Campaign.

The most striking outcome of the elections is the collapse in credibility of the conventional parties, what would be called in the UK the ‘mainstream parties’, i.e. those that support the neoliberal hegemony. In an exceptional situation since the retreat of the generals in 1974, neither of these parties has managed to gain a majority. Prior to the crisis they received around 70-90% of the popular vote; this has fallen to 33%. New Democracy’s vote has fallen from 33% in 2009 to 19% and from 2.3 million votes to 1.2 million. Pasok’s vote has fallen from 44% to 13% and from from 3 million votes to 800,000.

In desperation Greeks have voted for a whole range of other parties, some old and some new, but through this messy situation one thing becomes clear: it is the parties that have resisted the crippling requirements of the EU central authorities that have gained. So the far right party Laos, which supported the Eurozone agreement, saw its support fall from 5.6% to 2.9%, whereas the fascist party Golden Dawn, which resisted the deal, saw a huge increase in its vote (to 7% from nowhere). In total the vote for the far right has risen from 6% in 2009 to 21%.

The real winner from the elections was the Syriza: its vote increasing from 4.6% to 17%. Their support was especially strong in all the big cities (Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras) and in working-class neighbourhoods. Its platform was for an end to the impossible and destructive ‘austerity’ agreement, called ‘memorandums’ by Greek commentators, but a continuation of membership of both the EU and the euro. While this position seems impossible, it is precisely the right position to challenge elite domination of European financial and economic institutions. The other parties of the left, the Communists (KKE: 8.5%) and Antarsya (1.2%) both campaign for Greece to leave the EU.

Again, as in the UK, a growing number of electors are voting for parties that are prevented from entering the parliament. Greece has a PR system (with a twist) but the 3% threshold is now keeping the chosen representatives of 18% of electors outside the parliament. The twist is that the party that garners the most votes in the election is then gifted an additional 50 seats. This means that New Democracy, the party that formerly governed and was roundly rejected now has by far the largest number of seats: 108.

An important lesson from the Greek political situation seems to me to be one about engagement and representation, and it links directly to the nature of the electoral system. The free-gift-of-50-seats rule was presumably instituted to avoid the weak governments that a widely allocated vote can result in, since it creates an in-built majority. Its consequence has been to guarantee that absolute power has shifted between the largest parties of centre-right and centre-left — New Democracy and PASOK — for the past 40 years. This has left many Greek citizens’s views unrepresented and has surely encouraged the corrupt and self-serving nature of Greek politics. Our first past the post system is also partly used to create a pressure towards majority governments, and the corruption and failure to respond to electors here arises from a similar source.
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Is it the Economy, or is Osborne Stupid?

Now George Osborne has me really worried. We are all used to him misrepresenting how the economy works to score political points: there is no alternative to austerity, no wealth is created in the public sector, and so on. But this morning on the Andrew Marr show he seemed to just plain misunderstand something.

If you watch the beginning of the interview you will hear him make a familiar point about how we are benefiting from low rates of yield on our national debt because of market confidence in the savagery of the austerity policies being imposed. He then seeks to imply that this has a direct link to household finances via the interest rates they pay mortgages, and to growth via the interest businesses pay on loans. But in reality these are connected only indirectly if at all. The Bank of England has set the interest rate at 0.5%, which explains the comparatively low interest rates faced by households and businesses. If there is a connection between this and the yields financiers demand for gilts then I would be glad for a commentator to explain it.

This is precisely why the eurozone countries are in the hole they are in. They can control neither the rate they are charged for their debt, nor the rate at which money is priced, since they have abandond their central Banks and are now subject to the interest rate set by the European Central Bank. In fact, that rate has remained resolutely low as rates charged on Spanish or Greek debt has swung wildly, again illustrating Osborne's error.

The main advantage we have over the countries of the Eurozone is that we can print our own money and set our own interest rates. That gives us considerably more room for manoeuvre and scope for fiscal stimulus like that undertaken in the US, but which the European economies do not have the power to implement. Osborne should gain credit for helping to keep us out of the euro but, if he agrees with the independence of the Bank of England then the he cannot claim credit for low domestic interest rates.

Osborne's is, at best, a high-risk strategy. What if the markets turn? The rate they charge us for debt is entirely within their control and is the result of a calculation about how they can extract the most value from their various holdings of peonage and bonded labour across the world. If the countries of southern Europe cease to yield such healthy returns then they will turn their greedy eyes in our direction. We could find ourselves in the of a sterling crisis sooner than we think.
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Greek Chorus

I've thought about calling this blog 'thinking the unthinkable' but I decided to use such a cliched strapline was probably itself unthinkable. Perhaps 'explaining the inexplicable' would be more appropriate. But what I am not prepared to do is repeating the unrepeatable and so, in response to a request from a friend and colleague for some guidance on the Greek situation, I am offering a tidying up and pulling together of various previous posts.

We need to begin with an understanding of the misguided euro project, which was driven by corporate interests and political ambitions and was unpopular with economists from the start. The sort of strait-jacket it imposed on countries' interest rates assumed a uniformity of economic development and social values that simply did not exist. The strictures that were entered into and are now being enforced are similar to those imposed by the gold standard in the 1930s, and so brilliantly explained by Karl Polanyi in his Great Transformation. For a more radical view of the purpose of the Euro project you might enjoy a paper by Ramón Fernández Durán called 'Mars Vs Venus, or Dollar vs Euro?'

This helps us to answer the question of whose fault it is - the financiers and corporate power-brokers who sought to increase their power and ease their extraction of surplus value. It was the poor design and inadequate debate that resulted in the tragedies now playing themselves out in Greece, for which the Greek people cannot be held accountable and should not be made to suffer. Similar arguments were made by Mary Mellor, and were posted to the blog in May 2010.

This brings us to what is to be done. Here I point to the lessons from Argentina, where a country's leaders refused to see their society destroyed and forced their creditors to the negotiating table. Politically this is the only acceptable option: a democratic decision about who gains and who loses value. In the free-for-all that is now threatened in Greece the financiers will flex their muscle while pensioners and the soon-to-be unemployed will be the losers. The tragedy not just for Greece but for the world is that similar negotiations at the global level have not been taking place and are desperately overdue if we are to preserve our democratic right to decide how our economies function.
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All Quiet on the Euro Front

Am I the only person who is so cynical as to think that 'no news' rather than being 'good news' is actually an indication that the news hasn't quite been prepared for public consumption yet? It was probably the 20 years I spent campaigning about climate change, which only became a news story once it had been turned into a profitable business opportunity, that first put me onto this. But can we assume that something similar is now happening with the euro story, of which we have heard precious little since Christmas? Post-festive queasiness aside, how can the most serious financial crisis in 70 years have disappeared like so many unnecessary mince pies?

A while back I floated the idea that the reason the finance markets were speculating against the euro was that, unlike its counterparts in the US and UK, the European Central Bank had not engaged in a policy of creating money to be hoovered up by the financial institutions and transformed into bonuses. The news now is that they are doing just that, making 'cheap' money available to financial institutions, who are then depositing it right back with them, but in their own accounts. This is the outcome of the silent coup - the transfer of power to unelected bankers in Italy and Greece, backed up by Mario Draghi at the ECB. The last vestige of politicians protecting the people of Europe was removed, with nothing now constraining the power of the financiers to extract obscene amounts of value from the European economy, destroying public services and undermining investment in the real economy.

How else are we to interpret the shift in policy towards the making available of cheap money? The ECB money has a limited life of three years, presumably to keep the inflation-averse Germans happy, but it is free money none the less. In similar vein, Merkel's insistence that the pain of the Greek default should be shared by the creditors as well as the debtors, the so-called 'hair cut', has been removed from phase two of Greek refinancing - another indication that financiers have beaten back even minimum political demands, and in response are reducing the pressure they are putting on European finance ministers.

This is, of course, a self-limiting and ultimately self-defeating response to financial pressure. Once the banks have hoovered up the latest round of newly minted money they must, like the debt addicts they are, find ways of exercising their power to extract more. Meanwhile the public and private sectors alike, which actually circulate money and thus energise rather than stifling economic activity, are starved of funds.
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Unified Continent not Single Currency

The first time that I was in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Conservatives was some ten years ago when, on behalf of the Green Party, I joined the national campaign against Britain joining the Euro. The pro-finance and little Englander Tories felt the need for a bit of breadth and so invited Euro-sceptic former foreign minister David Owen, a couple of anti-European Labour MPs and a representative from the Green Party to join them.

Around the same time I published a chapter in a book called Implications of the Euro: A Critical Perspective from the Left. In my chapter I discussed the ways that a single currency would force the pace of political change in a way that the institutions could not follow and would alienate the peoples of the countries involved. This, and the growing tensions between nations that would be created, could threaten the future of the European project as a whole. The self-interest of finance could overwhelm the common interest of peace.

This morning I believe we have seen these predictions come to pass. This is why I believe that David Cameron was right not to join the treaty although, just like the Tories on the anti-Euro committee a decade ago, we could not be further apart in terms of the economic route Britain should follow. Cameron's interest is almost entirely to protect the City and to avoid its spivs and speculators from being forced to consider the social consequences of their actions. However, some in his party are articulating concerns about democracy that I still believe have merit.

It is tempting to believe that the European institutions might impose acceptable standards on the City, just as they have forced us to improve our environmental standards and reduced exploitation at work. But the problem every time has been that we have not had the power to make these decisions democratically. We do not elect people with sufficient power to make decisions at the European level and so these decisions have no more political authority than the current unelected prime ministers of Italy and Greece.

The democratic deficit is more threatening to the aims of the EU than the collapse of the euro. For many years the single market and then the single currency were ambitions driven by business to serve its interests. They have utterly distorted the institutions of Europe and have alienated many of the people of Europe from this organisation that was designed to protect their peace and prosperity. How else can we interpret the huge votes in many of Europe's most loyal members for parties of the nationalist right?

Although the details of the new treaty are as yet unclear we do know that it will involve allowing unelected European officials to set levels of spending and rates of taxation in countries over which they have no democratic mandate. The Euro always constrained monetary policy and therefore reduced the room for manoeuvre in terms of fiscal policy. But as the fiscal straitjacket is imposed, and austerity follows, it is Europe and the other nations that make up the continent that will be blamed by the citizens of the countries who suffer.
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Poor Standard of Credit Rating

The delight about the rapprochement between Merkel and Sarkozy was short-lived, being undermined almost immediately by a threat from the credit-rating agency Standard and Poors. How are we to interpret these events?

The estrangement in the Franco-German affair was the result of Merkel taking a hard line on monetary policy and refusing to sanction the direct creation of money by the European Central Bank to ease the debt problems of the 16 other Euro members. Apparently yesterday she relented on this, allowing a relaxation of monetary policy in return for a new treaty imposing debt restraint on the Eurozone members.

In response to this a downgrading of the quality of the debt of most Eurozone countries might seem reasonable. But why Germany, which is clearly capable of paying its debts? It appears that this may be more an act of revenge for Merkel's previous insistence that bond-holders must bear some of the cost of their risky investment decisions. The Greek hair-cut was the last stand of a politician who would not accept that the innocent would bear all the pain. Germany will now be punished for the losses this brought to financiers, its own national debt now attracting higher interest rates than the state of its economy demands.

More fundamentally we might question why the US and UK, who are far more debt-ridden and whose economies are struggling much more than that of Germany, are not being threatened in the same way by the markets. The huge money-printing operations of both the Fed and the Bank of England makes investment in these countries far more risky, as does their lack of real production and their low rates of growth, and yet they are not the target of the credit raters. The conclusion is clear: the credit-rating agencies are rating finance-friendly policies, not the strength of national economies and the debt they issue.

More fundamentally the explicit evidence of economic policy being negotiated between politicians and rating agencies makes more urgent the need for politicians to have the courage to articulate an alternative and to co-operate to reclaim the democratic power to determine the direction of their own economies. We need to find a way through this present crisis that is compatible with democracy, not just compatible with the wishes of market investors. If alternative views are not articulated then we will be heading for a political rupture rather than the evolution to a more stable and equitable economic model that our happiness and well-being requires.
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Argentina Learns not to Pampa Financiers

As the credit noose tightens, it is not surprising that commentators are seeking examples of countries who found their way out of unrepayable debts - and lived to tell the tale. In the case of Argentina, whose debts at the time of its default in 2001 were $81bn. - a record for the time although dwarfed by current debts - life after debt has proved to be a very positive experience.

The story is told in a couple of podcasts made by Peter Day for his World of Business series on Radio 4. A paper I wrote about Argentina's barter networks introduces this story. Caught in the orbit of the US dollar, Argentina was unable to allow its currency to adjust to the needs of its own economy, much as the smaller economies of the Eurozone are today. This culminated in a financial collapse in 2001, with the loss of huge amounts of savings by the members of Argentina's middle class.

What becomes clear from the podcast is that clever young economists within the Argentinian finance depart and/or central bank were alive to the causes of their crisis and took political control. As a recent report (pp. 58-62) indicates, refusing to pay socially impossible debts was a positive decision both in Argentina and in Russia. Default was the first step, followed by a decision not to become involved in debt again. Similar decisions by other Latin American countries actually threatened the future of the IMF - since without debtors a bank is defunct - until the credit crunch in Europe gave it a new lease of life.

With no possibility of receiving credit Argentina had to live from its own resources, which turned out to be a blessing rather than a handicap. With a massive and fertile land mass, and a popuation of only 40 million well-educated people, Argentina had nothing to fear in its debt-free future. As food and fodder prices have boomed, so has Argentina, with its government benefiting from a 35% export tax on soya production.

Another interesting lesson is the rapid growth in the 'informal' sector, which is a typical feature of many poor economies but less typical of a highly sophisticated economy like Argentina. This may also be a feature of the future of European economies. On the positive side it can be interpreted as self-provisioning and self-reliance, but its shadow side is exploitation and precarity.

The sting in the tale of the story of Argentina is that its economic success has enabled it to seek foreign finance. The credit vultures are circling and seeking their share of the natural wealth of the country. How far will Argentina's politicians remember their lesson and keep control of their national wealth?
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Why is the Euro so Strong?

With chaos in the negotiations with Greece, rumours of potential bankruptcy in Italy, and real concerns about the economies of Portugal and Spain, you would expect the currency that binds all these countries together to be falling through the floor. The graphic indicates that, over the past calamitous year, the range of movement has been between 1.48 and 1.28, and that at the value of the euro is hardly any lower than it was a year ago.

I was stung by a comment on one of my blogs from last week, complaining that I was being incomprehensible and jargonistic, so here I am going to explain simply why I think this is the case. This comes down to a discussion about what I have been calling for several years the 'currency wars'. When faced with hard times countries seek to return to growth and one means of doing this is to increase the volume of exports. Having a weaker currency makes your exports cheaper to the countries who buy them. So countries have been deliberately reducing the value of their currencies.

There are various ways of doing this. Some commentators claim that the US policy of quantitative easing is deliberately designed to achieve this end. Certainly, putting a lot of extra currency into circulation should reduce the inherent value of that currency. A more obvious way is just to lower your interest rates: since interest rates are effectively the price of money, this is an automatic means of making your money cheaper and causing its value relative to other currencies to fall.

To keep some sort of idea of the relative value of different currencies we need a standard, sometimes called the numeraire. In the 19th century gold was used as this standard, but this had all sorts of distorting effects on economic activity - primarily the fact that you couldn't increase economic activity unless bare-chested chaps deep in the bowels of the earth were digging up enough of a golden metal, which was frankly completely irrational, although emotionally appealing.

At Bretton Woods, the conference where the victors in the Second World War negotiated the shape of the world economy in the decades to follow, it was agreed, reluctanctly, to allow the dollar to take this role and to become the world's reserve currency. The consequences were hugely beneficial to the US in terms of imports, but ultimately destroyed its productive economy.

As the power of the dollar wanes, the other currencies that traders consider strong enough to take the role of a global reserve currency - the Japanese Yen, the Swiss Franc, the euro, and even sterling itself - have all become more attractive. This explains why we are not facing the speculative attacks that Greece is, not the performance of George Osborne at international conferences. As each currency becomes attractive to traders seeking a safe haven, the authorities that control its value seek to undermine it, since they do not want to suffer the export problems that result from having a highly valued currency.

In this form of reserve currency, the euro is still an attractive option and its interest rate of 1.5% now seems high by comparison with just 0.5% in the UK and 0.25% in the US. In addition, its competitors in terms of being the currency of last resort would resist its value falling too far, since that would require them to take more of the strain. This has led to the currency wars, which are a form of trade war in disguise. Because such wars cause international tensions, a solution that involves the creation of a neutralreserve currency, run for the benefit of the world's people and not an individual state, has long been my preferred option.
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The Eurozone Crisis: A Warning from History

I am thinking of creating my own derivative, called a political default swap. This is how it works. We each choose a country and bet against the length of survival of its government as it tries to introduce enough austerity measures to keep the markets happy. It works like a sort of insurance policy, where the riskier the country, in this case the less able its politicians are to bear down on its people and extort their work to pay bankers' debts, the higher the cost of betting on it.

The manoeuvres by EU finance ministers in Brussels today conceal as much as they reveal and demonstrate that power is balanced between politicians and financiers. This is seen most clearly in the negotiation over the extent to which those who made risky investments in Greek debt will lose their shirts (or their hair). The risk seems to be approaching 50:50.

Harder to agree is how the effects of this on Europe's banks will be accommodated. If the banks take the full hit, the financiers argue, they will become bankrupt, leading to Credit Crunch II: Return of Debtonator. So the bank welfare fund has to be massively increased. We have grown tired of billions, yawn the financiers, we need to move into the zone of trillions.

But where is this money to be found? The devastated citizens of Europe, their bodies already straining beyond breaking point to keep the capitalist wheels turning, can offer no more. Eyes turn to the European Central Bank - can it be asked to create money from thin air, the sort of money bankers like best - power without responsibility? The Germans, with their historical fear of inflation, will not accept this option. The most likely outcome is a solution dreamed up by the very 'quants' who created this disastrous situation: a solution that uses a combination of mathematics and conjuring to make the money disappear through time, emerging at some future date enormously swollen in value.

In his masterpiece The Great Transformation, written in 1944 and reflecting on the last great capitalist disaster, Karl Polanyi describes the contortions that Europe's politicians went through in the 1930s to save the Gold Standard. They seem eerily similar to what we are witnessing today. The system must be saved, no matter what the sacrifice in terms of human lives and political stability.

In the 1920s financiers inflated a bubble which burst in 1929, but through the 1930s the economists defended the position of laissez-faire capitalism whose social costs were unacceptable to the people of Europe. The result was political polarisation, economic chaos and the rise of fascism. This crisis has already provoked the collapse of the Slovakian government, the government of Iceland, and the government in Ireland, and the Italian government could soon follow. Somehow the political system is still holding in Greece, but the massive civil unrest leaves it vulnerable. So, will you take my offer of a punt? Which country's political system would you bet on surviving this financial turmoil intact?
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