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The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe, by Joseph E. Stiglitz
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The Nobel Prize–winning economist and best-selling author explains why saving Europe may mean abandoning the euro.
In 2010, the 2008 global financial crisis morphed into the “eurocrisis.” It has not abated. The 19 countries of Europe that share the euro currency―the eurozone―have been rocked by economic stagnation and debt crises. Some countries have been in depression for years while the governing powers of the eurozone have careened from emergency to emergency, most notably in Greece.
In The Euro, Nobel Prize–winning economist and best-selling author Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent―and the world―from further devastation.
Hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, the euro has done the opposite. As Stiglitz persuasively argues, the crises revealed the shortcomings of the euro. Europe’s stagnation and bleak outlook are a direct result of the fundamental challenges in having a diverse group of countries share a common currency―the euro was flawed at birth, with economic integration outpacing political integration. Stiglitz shows how the current structure promotes divergence rather than convergence. The question then is: Can the euro be saved?
After laying bare the European Central Bank’s misguided inflation-only mandate and explaining how eurozone policies, especially toward the crisis countries, have further exposed the zone’s flawed design, Stiglitz outlines three possible ways forward: fundamental reforms in the structure of the eurozone and the policies imposed on the member countries; a well-managed end to the single-currency euro experiment; or a bold, new system dubbed the “flexible euro.”
With its lessons for globalization in a world economy ever more deeply connected, The Euro is urgent and essential reading.
- Sales Rank: #2950491 in Books
- Published on: 2017-08-08
- Released on: 2017-08-08
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
Review
“Much more than a demolition job. These chapters are full of constructive proposals - a glimpse of what the ‘rescues’ would have looked like had the troika, perish the thought, hired their critic Stiglitz to design them.” (Marin Sandbu - Financial Times)
“[Stiglitz] is surely right. Without a radical overhaul of its workings, the euro seems all but certain to fail.” (The Economist)
“Terrific and clarifying.” (Peter Goodman - The New York Times)
“Many of Mr. Stiglitz’s most damning observations are on target.” (Wall Street Journal)
“The euro is a modern tragedy.…As its embarrassments have mounted, its supporters club has teemed with political romantics and Europhile journalists. Stiglitz’s message to such people is that they are inadvertently destroying what they most cherish.” (Paul Collier - Times Literary Supplement)
“A cogent and urgent argument of compelling interest to economists and policymakers.” (Kirkus Reviews)
About the Author
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of The Great Divide, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, The Price of Inequality, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, and Globalization and Its Discontents. He is a columnist for the New York Times and Project Syndicate and has written for Vanity Fair, Politico, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
50 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
The Euro is Europe's Major Problem -
By Loyd Eskildson
Today, many of the countries of Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Spain, U.K.) have an output/capita (adjusted for inflation) well below that prior to the 'Great Recession of 2008.'The Euro was supposed to enhance commercial ties, erode borders and foster a spirit of collective interest - partly through economies of scale and comparative advantage. But in the 17 years since that currency came into existence, it has instead reinvigorated conflicts and a spirit of distrust while making economic inequality worse and dividing Europe into adversarial debtor and creditor camps. Interest rates on Greek bonds and several other Eurozone countries has soared, peaking at 22.5% for Greece in 2012. The migrant crisis and terrorist threats have taken front stage - despite the euro supposedly bring about closer integration.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas declared in 2003 that the 'central problem of depression prevention has been solved.' Market fundamentalists believe that if the government would simply ensure that inflation was low and stable, markets would ensure growth and prosperity for all - this is especially true within the Eurozone's dominant power, Germany. Greece is now in a depression, with half its youth unemployed, the extreme right has made large gains in France, a majority of those elected to Barcelona's regional parliament support independence from Spain, and large parts of Europe have a lower GDP/capita lower than before the 2008 global financial crisis. Even what Europe celebrates as a success is actually a failure - eg. Spain's unemployment rate has fallen from 26% in 2013 to 20% at the beginning of 2016 - but nearly half of young people remain unemployed and that would be even higher if so many young workers hadn't left to look elsewhere for jobs. Why?
Stiglitz's answer is that the 1992 Euro adoption failed provide support for the institutions that would make it work - specifically, the fault lies in currency pegs,' where the value of one country's currency is fixed relative to another or relative to a 'commodity.
Continuing, Stiglitz contends that our depression at the end of the 19th century was linked to the gold standard - with no new large discoveries of gold, its scarcity led to a fall in the prices of ordinary goods in terms of gold. This made it increasingly difficult for farmers in America to pay back their debts. The gold standard is also widely blamed for deepening and prolonging the Great Depression - those that abandoned the gold standard early recovered more quickly.
In spite of this, Europe decided to tie itself together with a single currency, creating within Europe the same kind of rigidity that the gold standard had inflicted on the world. Worse yet, the structure of the Eurozone built in certain ideas about what was required for economic success - that the central bank should focus on inflation, ignoring unemployment, growth, and stability as well, as does the Federal Reserve.
Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus were also importing more than they were exporting, with the resulting insufficiency of domestic demand depressing the economy. One needed to make import-substituting activities more productive and encourage consumption of local goods. In Greece, for example, the opposite - Greece was ordered to change milk labeling so that 11-day-old milk from northern Europe could still be called 'fresh' and undercut Greek producers.
Why were Europe's leaders even focusing on milk, the size of loaves of bread, and what OTC drugs could be sold outside of pharmacies as Greece's GDP plummeted about 25%? Stiglitz observes that special interests, eg. big dairy companies of Holland, appear to be behind the reforms, and the chairman of the Eurogroup is the Dutch Finance minister. Stiglitz also notes that hardly any of the money loaned Greece went to help the Greeks, but rather private-sector creditors - German and French banks.
Germany holds itself out as a success - an example of what other countries should do. Its economy has grown by 6.8% since 2007 - just 0.8%/year, a number that normally would be considered close to failing. (The U.S. growth rate in the same period averaged 1.2%.) Stiglitz also points that prior to the crisis (early 2000s), Germany adopted reforms that aggressively cut into ordinary workers' safety net, especially those at the bottom. Inequality increased, and real wages stagnated. Germany is a 'success' only by comparison with other nations in the Eurozone. Regardless, its strategy cannot be universally followed - based in part on strong trade surpluses.
Stiglitz also contends that the European Central Bank's monetary policy and the macroeconomic policies imposed by the official creditors on crisis countries have been largely responsible for the economic damages done. Tightening monetary policy during the credit crunch following the 2008 crisis, along with the imposition of sharp fiscal deficit cuts threw the Eurozone into a self-inflected second recession in 2011-12. In Greece, for example, measures intended to lower the debt burden have left it more burdened than in 2010 - the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased from 117% when the crisis began to 177% today. Many Germans insist it was hyperinflation that led to Hitler, and so tend to support central bank policies that guard against that problem rather than the more worrisome spector of joblessness - thus, Germany is the problem, not Greece.
Sitglitz endorses significant debt write-downs, raising both taxes and spending by the same amount (Stiglitz blames a hidden agenda of downsizing government for the latter), and banning excessive trade deficits. Instead, he believes the Eurozone will further unravel. He also criticizes the European Common Bank for 'resisting quantative easing,' yet argues that the most important effect of QE has been contributing to 'growing inequality,' which he says hurts growth
Bottom-Line, per Stiglitz: The Euro has failed to achieve either of its two principal goals of prosperity and political integration. European countries now view each other with distrust and anger.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Broad clear and thoughtful, but biased
By Athan
There are two Joseph Stiglitzes: the brilliant economist and the repetitive polemicist.
Unlike “The Price of Inequality,” a book wrapped by Stiglitz the rambling, Nobel-flashing celebrity blogger around the nucleus of a very incisive article written by Stiglitz the brilliant economist, this forward-planned, structured book is 100% the work of the brilliant economist. To be sure, he is starting to sound a lot like his alter ego, but the transformation is far from complete and what we have here is a genuinely exhaustive, if not amazingly deep, treatise that has a beginning, a middle and an end.
The book is divided in five sections (that are however grouped in four parts):
• First a “you are here” section that lays out the author’s views of where we stand and how we got here
• Second, a three-part expo on (i) how currency unions are meant to work, (ii) where the Euro diverges from this ideal and (iii) the (negative) role of the ECB
• Third, a long whine against the Troika’s work in Greece and (less so) Ireland
• Fourth, the Stiglitz manifesto of how to (semi-centrally, you have been warned!) run an economy, mischievously mis-branded “Creating a Eurozone that works”
• Fifth, a daring and provocative “what next” section
A quick read through chapter 9 (the manifesto) may be the best starting point for the reader. Read that and you will calibrate how much to the right you are of the author (or to the left for the 5% of the human population who are thus inclined). Agree or disagree, you are now reading the book with the author’s ideal world in mind and that’s how you will get the most out of it.
The bits I thought were unparalleled in the literature were the section entitled “Internal devaluations and external imbalances” (pp. 97 to 110) that nestles inside the already very strong chapter on “When can a single currency ever work,” the entire chapter on how the ECB was conceived, how it thinks and whom it serves (brilliant, brilliant) and the final section of the book that takes you through how we can go about executing on “more Europe” or “less Europe,” as opposed to muddling through to assured destruction.
That said, the final section will make your stomach turn if you are German, and you will be right to object. If Europe was the only economy on earth, I can see how perhaps Germany could pay its workers more / restrict its trade surplus / whatever. I’m not saying I buy it, I’m just saying I can see it. But it’s competing with Japan, China and South Korea, to say nothing of the US. Not Italy. Not Spain. Not even France any more. Most certainly not Greece. I’d say it has the most luxurious setup for its workers from all of its competitors. Hell, Angie picked up 20% of workers’ wage bills at the depths of the crisis to keep them employed. And the unions have board seats in most major employers, as often does the state. Stiglitz knows all this (and it bothers him when it comes to German companies buying Greek state assets, for example) but is selective about when he remembers it.
Also, the book sets the ambitious goal of explaining that Europe is suffering from poor policy design rather than from having muddled through too long without engaging in structural reform. This the author fails to do, entirely. The treatment of structural reforms is not worthy of a high-school essay.
I won’t even bother going into the arguments, just count the number of pages dedicated to looking at structural reforms and draw your conclusions.
But I’ll cite two examples where the author’s judgement on specifics is almost as awful as his judgement on macroeconomics is brilliant:
1. The author sides with the pharmacists in my country (full disclosure, my mom’s a Greek pharmacist) who are plainly one of many extractive agents in an economy that is full of extractive agents. Suffice it to say Greek pharmacists went on strike, citing the Hipporcratic oath, when the troika threatened to break their stranglehold on baby formula. You heard that right, it was (and may still be, I’ve stopped following) illegal for a supermarket in Greece to sell baby formula. You’ve got to pay up and buy it at the pharmacist. Just an example.
2. The author mentions more than once that George Papandreou was crusading against the press-owning oligarchs. Point of information: George Papandreou was a third-generation prime minister. Both his grandfather George and his father Andreas have served as prime minister, multiple times. Look it up on Wikipedia, some crazy percentage of the time since WWII the prime minister or the head of the opposition in my country was called Papandreou. If you think a political clan can maintain that position and not be in cahoots with the oligarchs you know nothing about Greece. You probably know nothing about planet earth. Or you are blinded a bit by your views, perhaps…
So this book is not without its foibles. Overall, however, it does a tremendous job of laying out a view and it is the only book currently in print that covers so many facets. And it is not afraid to shout from the rooftops that the emperor has no clothes.
It makes excellent background reading for my favorite book on the Euro, the one by the FT’s Martin Sandbu. Sandbu goes deep, and if you want the skinny on his “straw man” you’ve got it right here!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Stiglitz once again nails the conventional wisdom to the cross and shows how Europe can be resurrected.
By Amazon Customer
Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz successfully dismantles the conventional consensus about what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a cure that can rescue the continent--and perhaps the world--from the next crisis. It is recommended reading for the next President of the United States and for the European Central Bank.
E. Ray Canterbery, author of The Rise and Fall of Global Austerity
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