17 Prozent Wohlstandsverlust durch Euro und “Rettungspolitik”
Es ist unvoreingenommenen Beobachtern der Eurozone schon lange klar, dass der wirtschaftliche Preis für das politische Experiment des Euro erheblich ist. Nun rechnen Forscher in einer neuen Studie vor, dass sich die Verluste für die Krisenländer Portugal, Irland, Italien, Griechenland und Spanien zusammen auf rund 17 Prozent vom BIP als Folge von Euro und Austeritätspolitik belaufen. Ein Hammer.
Der Telegraph fasst die Studie zusammen:
- “A fascinating new paper has constructed a model that shows how the European economies would have fared under different scenarios. It found that had countries such as Portugal and Italy been able to devalue, they would have bounced back far more quickly from the 2008 crash than they did. And if they hadn’t had cuts in public spending imposed upon them, they would have hardly suffered at all.” – bto: Das ist natürlich ein Ergebnis mit erheblicher Sprengkraft!
- “Greece remains the most dramatic example, with per capita GDP now one quarter below its 2009 level, but a third of the countries in the zone ended 2014 worse off than they were in 2009.” – bto: Nochmal, ein Drittel der Länder ist noch unter Vorkrisenstand. Ganz zu schweigen vom Vorkrisentrend!
- “In a new paper, University of Michigan professors Christopher House and Linda Tesar, along with Christian Proebsting of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, constructed a model to work out how the European economies would have fared under different scenarios.” – bto: Ja, es ist ein Modell, aber besser als gar nichts.
- “First they looked at how the economies actually performed since the recession of 2008, and found that Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal between them contracted by 18pc in total.” – bto: 18 Prozent!
- “Then they ran a simulation in which there was no euro, and those countries had been able to devalue their currencies, or simply seen them weakened by the markets. In that universe, output by the end of 2014 would have been 7pc higher than it actually was. The rest of the eurozone was roughly neutral, because it already benefited from a weaker exchange rate.” – bto: Sieben Prozent sind erheblich. Allerdings stimmt es für den Rest nicht, da der Euro ohne die Krisenländer stärker gewesen wäre.
- “In a second simulation, they ran the same figures for a world in which the austerity demanded by the European Central Bank, and by a German-led European Union, had not been imposed, and those countries were free to set their own fiscal and monetary policy. The result? The peripheral countries would have contracted by only 1pc, not the 18pc that they actually did.” – bto: Das wiederum kann nicht überraschen.
- “So, in total, output is now 17pc lower across those countries than it would have been without monetary union and the austerity that it demanded.” – bto: Wenn man das auf Plakate schreibt in den Ländern …
- “They would have ended up with lower overall debt ratios as well. The cuts in government spending demanded as the price of the bail-outs should have reduced debt ratios across the region. The plan was for debt to come down by 20 percentage points in the five peripheral countries, from an average of 95pc when the crisis started. What happened? The overall ratio actually went up by 20 points, as economies shrank, and the overall amount owed either remained the same or carried on rising. It would be hard to think of a more self-defeating policy.” – bto: Das sind die Staatsschulden. Auch dann hätten wir einen Schuldenschnitt gebraucht. Nur heute ist er größer als damals!
- “An overall loss of 17pc of GDP in less than a decade is a huge price to pay for an experiment in monetary union. For a comparison, the Great Depression in the United States in the Thirties saw a drop in output of close on 30pc.” – bto: Ja, wir haben von Irving Fisher nun wirklich gar nichts gelernt in Europa.
- “With figures this stark, it is hard to believe those countries will put up forever with the damage. The only real question is which will be the first to escape and how?” – bto: Italien bleibt mein Kandidat Nummer 1. Wobei, sollten die Franzosen ähnlich anders wählen als gedacht, wer weiß?
