koganbot: (Default)
Frank Kogan ([personal profile] koganbot) wrote 2012-01-31 09:46 pm (UTC)

And here's Krugman today on Eurozone problems, with a real basic summary of his argument, plus graphs:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/eurozone-problems

Without graphs:

(1) "the overall economic crisis is driven by private debt, not public debt"

(2) "huge swing of the private sector into financial surplus, which necessitated large public deficits to avoid a much deeper slump"

(3) "Europe... has the additional problem of a capital flow bubble from north to south induced by the euro, which has to be reversed"

(4) "The counterpart of these current account imbalances was a large divergence in relative price levels"

(5) "Implicitly, Europe is relying on 'internal devaluation' to reverse this divergence. But the reality is that this is very hard given nominal rigidity, even in Ireland, which is wrongly held up as an example of successful adjustment"

(6) "Europe has bought into the notion that fiscal irresponsibility is at the heart of the crisis, which is true only of Greece and not true of the troubled countries as a group"

(7) "even on the IMF's reckoning, none of the austerity countries is plausibly on the road to a tolerable fiscal situation"

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting