“If Europe insists on a hard Brexit, so be it”
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard zu den Überlegungen der EU, den Brexit als Strafaktion zu gestalten:
- “The exact contours of Brexit were never defined. There was no Manifesto. The binary ballot presented to us on June 23 – nolens volens – contained not a single word about immigration. Many who voted to leave the EU want a liberal, amicable, open settlement with Europe.”
- “That said, one must guard against certain vested interests in the City that are actively seeking to whip up hysteria in financial markets. There is an attempt underway to create a bad Brexit narrative in the hope of overturning it, or at least to frighten the country into a minimalist outcome that achieves much the same thing.”
- “The interests of the financial elites should not be conflated with the national interest. A legitimate case can be made that they are in conflict.”
- “Paul Krugman says the UK has been suffering from a variant of the “Dutch Disease”, an over-reliance on finance that drove up pound and hollowed out manufacturing industries. This economic deformation has greatly enriched London’s financial set and those who service its wealth, if non-one else.”
- “The devaluation is necessary and desirable. The pound is now near ‘fair value’ based on the real effective exchange rate used by the IMF.”
- “All that has happened is a correction of the extreme over-valuation of sterling before Brexit, caused by capital inflows. This left the country with the worst current account deficit in peace-time since records began in the 18th Century.”
- “The fall is roughly comparable to the devaluation from 2007 to 2008 – though the same financial elites who talk so much of Armageddon today played it down on that occasion, mindful that their own banking crisis was the trigger.”
- “We can argue over how much the 2008 devaluation helped but it clearly acted as shock absorber at a crucial moment. It was in any case a far less painful way to restore short-term competitiveness than the ‘internal devaluations’ and mass unemployment suffered by the eurozone’s Club Med bloc.”
- “But there is a deeper point today that is often overlooked. Central banks across the developed world are caught in a deflationary trap. The ‘Wicksellian’ or natural rate of interest has been falling ever lower with each economic cycle and is now at or below zero in half the global economy, a full seven years into the expansion.”
- “By the accident of Brexit, Britain has pulled off a Wicksellian adjustment that eludes others. With luck, the economy may even generate a few flickers of inflation, enough to let the Bank of England raise interest rates and start to restore ‘intertemporal’ equilibrium.”
bto: An dieser Stelle ist der Hinweis interessant, dass die Bank of England auch bei höherer Inflation die Zinsen auf Rekordtief belassen möchte. Offizielles Ziel ist es, die Wirtschaft zu stärken: “We’re willing to tolerate a bit of an overshoot in inflation over the course of the next few years in order to avoid [higher joblessness], to cushion the blow and make sure the economy can adjust as well as possible”, wird der Chef der Notenbank Carney in einem weiteren Artikel zitiert. Das ist natürlich brillant, erlaubt es den Engländern doch ein “beautiful deleveraging”, indem das nominale BIP schneller wächst, die Exporte belebt und die Importe gedämpft werden. Und das Ganze ohne das Risiko, von der Welt als Währungsmanipulant gebrandmarkt zu werden. Die Engländer werden in den kommenden Jahren vermutlich ihre reale Schuldenlast deutlich senken.
Doch nun zurück zu der Frage, wie der Brexit abläuft:
- “(…) what has caused me to harden my view – somewhat – is the open intimidation by a number of EU political leaders. “‚There must be a threat,‘ said French president Francois ‚There must be a price … otherwise other countries or other parties will want to leave the European Union.‘”
- “What he is also admitting – à son insu – is that the union is held together only by fear. He might as well write its epitaph.”
- “(…) the four freedoms-movement, goods, services, and capital (…) are nothing but pious shibboleths. They often do not exist, and where they do exist they are routinely honoured in the breach. Services make up 70pc of the EU economy yet account for just 22pc of internal EU trade. All attempts to open services up to cross-border commerce have been defeated, to the detriment of Britain. The sorry saga of the Services Directive in 2006 tells all you need to know about how the EU works. ‚The French and Germans gutted it‘ (…).”
- “The ‘country of origin rule’ that would have allowed firms to operate anywhere in the EU under their own domestic law was dropped, casualty of the ‚Polish plumber‘ scare. The directive did not cover health care, transport, legal services, professions, tax experts, and the like. Germany protected it guilds.”
- “So much for the freedoms of capital and services. Nor has the free movement of people been strictly upheld. France and Germany – unlike Britain – blocked access to their labour markets and welfare systems for East Europeans for seven years after they joined the EU in 2004. It was political decision.”
- “If they want to find a compromise solution, they can do so easily. (…) On the one hand the EU is so insecure that it talks of punishing Britain to deter other escapees; on the other it exhibits an imperial reflex, demanding submission entirely on its own terms, seemingly unable to accept or even to imagine a reciprocal trading relationship based on sovereign equality.”
“Mr Hollande wishes to bring about the hardest possible Brexit. If this proves to be the EU position – and it may not be, since it is lunacy and he for one will soon be irrelevant – it does at least clarify the issue.”
bto: Natürlich ist das aus der britischen Perspektive geschrieben. Doch ist es deshalb nicht falsch.
→ The Telegraph: “If Europe insists on a hard Brexit, so be it”, 12. Oktober 2016
Und hier die Quelle für das Zitat des Chefs der englischen Notenbank:
