More Portugal…
from Peter Oborne writing in the Telegraph…
Some European countries are in the habit of going bankrupt
A few hours after George Osborne’s faintly banal Budget speech, José Sócrates, the Portuguese prime minister, resigned. So far as I know, these two events were not in any way connected. Nevertheless, it is a very good bet that this little Iberian drama will have far more effect on British household finances and our national prosperity over the coming year than the Osborne Budget.
The resignation plunges the eurozone into a crisis it cannot survive. Mr Socrates’s failure to force his austerity package through the Portuguese parliament marks a crucial turning point.
It is the moment when the peripheral eurozone countries refuse to take orders any more from the centre. Effectively, Portugal has adopted blackmail as an economic strategy – and very effective it is, too.
The country is ready to be bailed out of its chronic financial mess, but only on its own terms. Otherwise it has a deadly card to play. It has the option of going bankrupt, an act of naked malice which would set in motion a second round of the banking crisis which began in 2007.
The consequences of this would be terrible: the break-up of the euro, mass unemployment, financial collapse, social despair. The scary truth is that the scale of the problem facing the eurozone has been gravely underestimated by British commentators. The reasons are shaming. One significant factor is the financial and economic illiteracy of political journalists and foreign correspondents. Too many are ill-equipped to look behind the bland statements made by European chancellors or to interpret the deliberately misleading balance sheets of major European banks.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that almost all leading financial journalists share the moral and emotional commitment the European political class has long felt for the euro. The Financial Times, for example, has been a passionate supporter of the single currency since its inception, a pathology which runs so deep that its chief political columnist recently dedicated a column to making the extraordinary argument that the British economy would have been better off if we had joined the euro when it was first introduced.
But the most important problem is the failure to study history. Here the facts are devastating, and bear repetition. Portugal has defaulted on its national debt five times since 1800, Greece five times, Spain no less than seven times (and 13 times in all since 1500).
By contrast, Anglo-Saxon countries rarely, if ever, default. In this country, we haven’t reneged on our debts in nearly 1,000 years, though there have been close shaves. The same applies to Canada, Australia and the United States.
Many European countries are culturally attuned to bankruptcy. Indeed, Greece has spent approximately half of the 182 years since it achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire in a state of default and therefore denied access to international capital markets – a position it is likely to resume in the very near future.
The importance of these statistics is very great. They show that the widespread assumption by bureaucrats, senior politicians and commentators alike that eurozone countries could never go bankrupt is simply wrong.
In fact, the opposite is the case. The normal and indeed the automatic response of Spain, Portugal, Greece and many other European countries to major financial crises such as the one we are living through today has been to renege on their debts. So it would be extraordinary were they not to do so. History also shows that currency unions such as the eurozone invariably fail: the most relevant case in point is the Latin monetary union formed by France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland in 1865, with Spain and Greece joining a few years later. Once again, these failures are invariably sparked by grand financial crises of the kind the world faces today.
These historical facts make contemporary European political discourse completely baffling. It is universally assumed by members of the European political class that the single currency cannot possibly fail because the political will to make the venture succeed is so powerful. There is no doubt about the will: French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will “never, never… turn our backs on the euro… We will never let the euro go or be destroyed.”
Sarkozy and Merkel are dreaming. They are out of their depth, struggling against forces they cannot control and which will in due course wash them away. It is economic reality, not political speeches, that will determine the success or failure of the single currency, and the facts on the ground are so devastating that it is hard to see a way forward.
The experiment of imposing a single currency and a single monetary policy upon economies as divergent as those of Germany and Greece has gone tragically wrong. Germany, bolstered by an artificially low exchange rate and rock-bottom interest rates, is enjoying a boom. But the economies of Ireland, Portugal, Greece and others are being destroyed – businesses closing, unemployment surging, dependent on bailouts, all self-respect and independence gone.
It cannot be emphasised too strongly that were these countries outside the eurozone, there would be no real problem. The IMF could intervene, reschedule their debts and allow the national currencies to float until they reached a competitive level. In the case of Greece, this level would be well under half where it stands today as a member of the euro.
In the very short term, all is well. Portugal will get its bailout: the European Central Bank and its German paymasters have no choice if they are to avoid catastrophe. But it is now impossible that in the medium term the eurozone can survive intact, and increasingly likely that its collapse will be accompanied by a fresh banking crisis that will throw the entire Continent into another crippling recession, in all likelihood far more devastating than the one from which we have just emerged.
Ten years ago, William Hague, then Tory leader, forecast with astonishing precision the predicament that faces the 17 eurozone states today. He compared membership of the euro to being stuck in a burning building with no exits.
Luckily, we do not find ourselves in that position. But houses are already blazing in the next street, and Britain urgently needs to take steps to protect itself. First, and least important, we must minimise our financial commitments to the eurozone. It now looks certain that Britain will be legally obliged to make a very significant financial contribution when the Portuguese bailout comes. This is as a result of the reckless commitment made by former chancellor Alistair Darling in the dying days of the Brown government. Sadly, there seems no way out of this.
More importantly, however, we can take steps to reduce our national exposure to European sovereign debt, much of which is likely to become valueless. George Osborne controls two banks, RBS and Lloyds TSB, a legacy of the 2007 crisis. He needs to prune their balance sheets. Individuals, too, can play their part. Depositors should be chary of placing more than £50,000, the maximum insured by the state, on deposit with Santander (which owns what used to be the Abbey National and Bradford & Bingley). Santander is Spain’s best-run bank by some distance. But we are entering terrifying times, and there is no need at all to take unnecessary risks.