Do you want
a quick and concise summary of the Eurozone problem in about four hundred words,
or tens of thousands of words that fail to identify the central problem? If the
former, I recommend this article by Samuel Brittan.
As he
rightly says, it’s all about competitiveness. I.e. when the periphery becomes
competitive with the core, that solves just
about everything. For example the periphery’s balance of payments
deficit ceases.
Plus lenders
are always happy to lend at reasonable rates to any entity that is competitive.
So those elevated rates that periphery countries have to pay for borrowing
money would no longer obtain.
There is of
course the banking problem to solve, but that’s a problem that plagues the US,
and UK and other countries. So that’s not the central EZ problem.
Alternatively
if you want hundreds of thousands of words that fail to identify the central
competitiveness problem, I recommend this or this produced by sundry academics.
It may of course be that somewhere in all that verbiage the central problem IS
IDENTIFIED. But I just don’t have time to wade through the first link above to
find out, though I have done a bit of skimming and word searching. As to the
second, I’ve been through that and confirmed that it doesn’t identify the
central problem.
So why this
voluminous and impenetrable output from academics? Well Samuel Brittan put his
finger on it. He said, “Meanwhile, it is in the interests of the eurocrats to
make the problems seem as complicated as possible that only a small number of
so-called financial experts can even discuss them.....”
Same goes
for academics. It is in the interests of every profession to make their subject
look more complicated than it is.
Or as Adam
Smith put it: “People of the same trade seldom meet together . . . . but the
conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..”
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