Europe’s Long-Term Economic Woes—and America’s

by Richard Posner

The Becker-Posner Blog
May 30, 2010

Europe’s current economic crisis is being attributed to its having a common currency but no common fiscal authority. It’s as if the United States had no Treasury Department, and a state that had borrowed heavily from banks in other states got into serious financial trouble, like Greece. It could not reduce its debt burden by devaluing its currency (and thus repaying its debts to the banks in other states in cheaper dollars), which would have the further benefit of stimulating exports (by enabling the same amount of foreign currency to buy more U.S. products) and discouraging imports (because it would take more dollars to buy products denominated in a foreign currency). The state could not expect to receive any transfer payments from other states, and the federal government would not be authorized to transfer money to the state (remember that I’m assuming that the federal government has no Treasury Department). So the state probably would default on its bank debt (“restructure” the debt is the current euphemism), and this might bring down the banks that had made the loans that were now in default.

That is the current economic situation, with Greece taking the place of the defaulting state, and the European Union taking the place of the U.S. government, in my hypothetical example. And the situation will be resolved, one way or another. One way would be by a default, perhaps accompanied by a bailout of banks whose solvency is endangered by the default. Another way would be by Greece’s abandoning the euro in favor of its own currency, And a third way would be by fiscal measures (“austerity”) that would restore the government’s solvency.

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