Tuesday, January 27, 2015

mainly macro: Post Recession Lessons

mainly macro: Post Recession Lessons: If you are familiar with this blog, you will know that I regard 2010 as a fateful year for the advanced economies in their recovery from re...

Greece had to default because previous governments had been profligate and had hidden that fact from everyone, including the Greek people. Recessions rather than booms tend to be when things like that get exposed. If Greece had been a country with its own exchange rate, then it would have been a footnote in global macroeconomic history: fiscal stimulus that had begun in all three countries/zones in 2009 would have continued (or at least not been reversed), and the recovery would have been robust.

Instead Greece was part of the Eurozone, a monetary union that had been implemented in such a way that it was particularly vulnerable to the threat of default by one of its members. Policy makers in other union countries prevaricated, partly to protect their own banks, partly because they worried about contagion.

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