Reports of Europe Economy 欧洲, official, recently, together, message

雨落风残

今天带来关于欧洲经济形势的报道,首先是NY Times:

Reluctantly, Europe Inches Closer to a Fiscal Union


It was a brief lesson from American history that served as a not-so-subtle suggestion for contemporary Europe. When an official from a European central bank met recently with a financial official in Washington, his host pulled out the Articles of Confederation, the 1781 precursor to the U.S. Constitution, to use as talking points.

The message was clear: join together in a stronger union, or risk collapse.
The story of America’s failed early effort to operate as a loose confederation of 13 states is increasingly relevant for many European officials who are grappling with the drastic problems of their own flawed 17-nation currency union. The lack of strong central coordination of the euro zone’s debt and spending policies is a key reason Europe has been unable to resolve its financial crisis despite more than 18 months of trying.
And that is why, despite all the political obstacles, Europe appears to be inching closer to a more centralized fiscal union that would eventually turn the euro zone into something resembling a United States of Europe.
“If today’s policy makers want to successfully stay the course, they will have to press ahead with structural changes and deeper economic integration,” António Borges, director of the International Monetary Fund’s European unit, said during a recent speech. “To put the crisis behind us, we need more Europe, not less. And we need it now.”
Nothing happens quickly in Europe, however. For the most part, such efforts are still being conducted behind-the-scenes and many of the ideas have yet to hit official agendas or the public arena. But several longtime financial and central bank officials and staff members said there had been a substantial step-up in planning for a closer European fiscal relationship to match the unified monetary union under which the euro zone has operated for more than a decade.
For now, officials are mainly talking in public in generalities.
“The crisis has clearly revealed the need for strong economic governance in a zone with a single currency,” Jean-Claude Trichet, the departing president of the European Central Bank, said during a speech Monday, repeating earlier calls for greater fiscal discipline. “I think that European nations will create a confederation and we could then have a confederal finance minister, whose mission would be the surveillance of the entire zone, and who would be able to impose decisions,” on governments in breach of euro zone rules.
Officials, who spoke anonymously because their discussions are politically sensitive, said a major overhaul of the way Europe conducts fiscal policy — coordinating government spending, taxes and deficits — was likely to take a long time and require further changes in the treaties governing the euro. But they pointed to the smaller changes that were already taking place as evidence that euro area financial ministries see that they have little choice but to move together if they want to avoid a catastrophic breakdown of the euro zone.
With the new bailout for Greece that was agreed upon by European leaders in July still awaiting approval from each country in the euro zone, the fractionalized way that Europe runs fiscal decision-making risks setting off yet another crisis at each step along the way. Every plan requires agreement among finance ministers and the Parliament of any member country can veto the deal.
Many economists say that the Continent’s debt crisis, which began in early 2010 with the threat that Greece might have to default on its loans, could have been resolved far more quickly if there were some sort of central financial body, akin to the Treasury Department in the United States.
“If they had the equivalent of the U.S. Treasury then this treasury could have formulated proposals with the collective objective in mind rather than 17 national objectives competing with each other,” said Garry J. Schinasi, a former official with the International Monetary Fund who now privately advises European central banks and governments. “Instead, they fumbled around and took two baby steps forward and three backward.”
The idea of a European Treasury that would enforce fiscal discipline on wayward countries, while also having the power to spread E.U. wealth from healthier countries to ones struggling to pay their debts, is fiercely unpopular among voters in many countries. Those in prosperous nations like Germany do not want to see their taxes used to bail out countries that borrowed their way into trouble. And those in weaker nations are reluctant to allow outsiders to dictate how their governments spend their money and tax their citizens.


Europe’s currency union has its roots in the agreement signed in 1992 known as the Maastricht Treaty. That agreement set in motion the rules for creating the euro and for joining the euro zone. A later agreement established the European Central Bank, which manages interest rates much like the U.S. Federal Reserve.


But the Maastricht Treaty stopped short of telling countries how to handle spending or taxation, leaving them loose rules on budget deficits to follow — or break, as many did, even Germany and France in the early days of the euro.
In the United States, of course, agreements between Congress and the White House on budget measures can be extremely difficult to reach, as the fight over raising the U.S. debt ceiling this summer demonstrated all too well.
But the European process is even more arduous and drawn out. Over the next month, global financial markets are likely to resume their volatility as final negotiations on the Greek bailout continue in Europe. The problems were highlighted Friday when talks between the Europeans, the I.M.F. and Greece were put off because Athens was coming up short in its plans for meeting budget targets for next year. Stock markets promptly fell on the news.
This week, more challenges await. The top court in Germany is scheduled to rule Wednesday whether it is legal for that country’s leaders to make such an agreement. While it is expected to allow Germany to participate in the bailout, the constitutional court could surprise the experts. And it could make it harder to adopt such agreements in the future.
On Thursday, officials in Finland are supposed to make a statement outlining their conditions for approving the deal, which will probably set the pattern for other countries seeking guarantees from Greece that their loans will be paid back.
Later in the autumn, new rules that would bolster the role of the European Commission as an independent arbiter of national fiscal programs are due to be approved.
The heavy lifting involved in approving the new Greece deal illustrates how difficult it would be to create a European Treasury.
But that has not stopped some officials from calling for moves in that direction. Last month, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, proposed new financial transaction taxes for the euro zone as well as standards for corporate tax laws, so no country could lure businesses at the expense of others with exceptionally low tax rates. They also proposed that each country enshrine in its constitution rules that would limit deficits, a process that is now under way in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere.
Earlier in the summer, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the E.C.B.’s executive board, joined the campaign among many private economists to introduce euro bonds to provide joint backing for a substantial share of the sovereign debt of each member of the euro zone.
Last Thursday, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, told the newspaper Bild that he would like to see the E.U.’s treaty revised — an arduous process — to enable the Union to make common fiscal policies.
An official in the German Finance Ministry, who was not authorized to speak on the matter publicly, said the ministry was trying to avoid terms like “transfer union, euro bonds or fiscal union” because it would alienate too many voters. But he acknowledged that they saw such a union as both necessary and inevitable.
“You could call it a fiscal union, but the minister won’t do that,” the official said. “What we are talking about is pooling our fiscal policy and doing to fiscal policy what we’ve done with monetary policy.”
To some extent, leaders in Europe have already started down the path toward such a union. Perhaps the most important step was the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility, which is funded by all the euro zone countries and authorized to lend money to troubled countries in the currency union. The facility will borrow money in the public markets, much like the U.S. Treasury does.
The facility is a step toward euro bonds, analysts said, because it would be a pan-European issuer. But it is not replacing individual countries’ bonds and it is allowed to borrow only a finite amount — currently limited to around €440 billion, or $630 billion — that many analysts say is not adequate to deal with all the countries at risk, including Spain and Italy.
The euro zone is also moving to increase oversight of countries’ budget plans earlier in the process and to give the European Commission greater power to propose tough financial penalties on countries that violate the fiscal rules, including a withdrawal of some E.U. funds, unless blocked by a large majority of members.
If and when that happens, said Graham Bishop, an independent financial analyst who has advised the British and European Parliaments, it “would be the moment of collective control of an errant state — the final step toward a de facto political union.”

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然后是Washington Post的报道：

European markets tremble at confluence of economic worries


DUBLIN — European stock markets tumbled Monday on warnings of a broad crisis developing in the region’s financial sector and intensifying doubt about the ability of euro-area politicians to effectively respond.

Major indexes such as Germany’s DAX and the Stoxx 50 of blue-chip companies were down more than 5 percent for the day. Confidence in the health of the region’s banks is falling, economic growth is slowing and governments are so hamstrung with debt they will have little room to respond with new stimulus or other programs.

An economic downturn in areas that account for much of the world’s trade would be damaging on its own. But a full-blown financial crisis in Europe could have a devastating impact on both sides of the Atlantic.

The financial systems of Europe and the United States are closely intertwined, in ways that would make a major bank failure or loss of confidence in one area ripple through the entire system. The costs that banks pay to fund their businesses would rise, lending would slow and related institutions might also fail because of the complex web of investments that major financial companies often share.

“In a pattern echoing that of the 2007-09 financial crisis, there is a growing risk of the real economy and financial conditions being locked into a mutually-reinforcing downward spiral,” the Institute of International Finance wrote in a paper.

Politically, the signals also were bad. Borrowing costs for Italy jumped Monday as the government there stumbled over how to deliver promised deficit cuts, raising the prospect of what many in Europe consider a doomsday scenario: Italy’s trillions of dollars in outstanding bonds at risk of default, pushing the country toward a bailout that would strain the area’s political and financial capacity.

A defeat Sunday for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, meanwhile, emphasized the problems she may have in persuading her parliament to approve new German-funded support for other European governments.

A steady stream of recent data has pointed to a slowdown among the developed economies. Euro-area growth all but stopped during the past three months — including in Germany, the region’s economic powerhouse — and a report Friday showed no growth in U.S. employment in August.

In a recent analysis of how financial crises in one country can extend across borders, the International Monetary Fund said that the threatened collapse of a major European bank would produce a 40 percent probability of similar problems in a U.S. institution — similar to the stress seen during the crisis that followed the collapse of  Lehman Brothers关于雷曼兄弟的背景知识 in 2008.

The rise on Monday in Italian and Spanish borrowing costs is particularly troubling. The European Central Bank has been intervening steadily in government bond markets to try to hold down the interest rates paid by the two countries, and last week bought an additional $20 billion worth of government securities.

Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and other ECB officials have warned that they consider the bond buying a temporary measure and have urged the Italian and Spanish governments to convince markets quickly that they can get a grip on their public finances.


Italy in particular is considered too big to save, and a threatened default by the country — whose debts are spread deeply throughout the European banking system — would likely cause a profound shock to the global system.

Concern centered on back-room horse trading by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government in a bid to make austerity measures politically palatable to his fraying coalition. Italy’s parliament is supposed to debate the austerity plan Tuesday, and the country’s major union has called for a national strike.

“Italy is still the focal point,” said Elga Bartsch, chief economist with Morgan Stanley in London. But she noted how broad the palette of concerns has become. There are steady rumors that the credit rating not only of Italy but of France may be downgraded, and doubts as well that French President Nicolas Sarkozy can keep the euro-area’s second largest economy on track.

Growth in France is also slowing, and the French leader — heading into a tough reelection — recently unveiled a new round of tax hikes and spending cuts.

“The question is whether it’s going to be possible to run an austerity campaign in a country known for its resistance to austerity during a presidential election,” Bartsch said.

The defeat by Merkel’s party in a regional election in her home state Sunday compounded Europe’s problems as well. A recently expanded bailout for Greece and a host of other measures must be approved by the 17 national parliaments of the states that use the euro, and the leadership of Merkel — as head of the nation that is funding much of it — is critical.

In addition, Finland remains at odds with other euro-zone nations for demanding collateral from Greece in exchange for rescue loans. Slovakia is now threatening to delay approval for weeks or even months.

The thickening set of issues is “a huge, huge problem,” said David Buik, partner at BGC Partners in London. “European leaders need to make up their mind about whether they are finally going to stand together and do what it takes to end this crisis, or simply move toward disbanding the euro, which would exact a price no one wants to pay.”



Faiola reported from London.