by Anders Åslund, Peter Boone and Simon Johnson
The Baseline Scenario
November 17, 2010
Last week’s renewed anxiety over bond market collapse in Europe’s periphery should come as no surprise. Greece’s EU/IMF program heaps more public debt onto a nation that is already insolvent, and Ireland is now on the same track. Despite massive fiscal cuts and several years of deep recession Greece and Ireland will accumulate 150% of GNP in debt by 2014. A new road is necessary: The burden of financial failure should be shared with the culprits and not only born by the victims.
The fundamental flaw in these programs is the morally dubious decision to bail out the bank creditors while foisting the burden of adjustment on taxpayers. Especially the Irish government has, for no good reason, nationalized the debts of its failing private banks, passing on the burden to its increasingly poor citizens. On the donor side, German and French taxpayers are angry at the thought of having to pay for the bonanza of Irish banks and their irresponsible creditors.
Such lopsided burden-sharing is rightly angering both donors and recipients. Rising public resentment is testing German and French willingness to promise more taxpayer funds. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hasty and ill thought out plan to demand private sector burden sharing, but only “after mid-2013”, marks a first response to these popular demands. We should expect more.
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