Having spent a career studying emerging market economies at the International Monetary Fund and on Wall Street, I have seen more than my share of supposedly immutable fixed exchange rate arrangements come unstuck. I have also observed at close quarters the rather well-defined and predictable stages through which countries go as their currency regimes unravel. This experience informs me that, much like Argentina a decade ago, Greece is approaching the final stages of its currency arrangement. There is every prospect that within two to three years, after much official money is thrown its way, Greece’s euro membership will end with a bang.
The first stage on the road to a currency crisis occurs when a country, motivated by the desire to import policy discipline from abroad, adopts a fixed exchange rate to which its economy is patently ill-suited. A serially defaulting Argentina did so in 1991, when it adopted a convertibility plan that rigidly pegged the peso to the dollar in the vain hope of ending its tendency towards hyperinflation.
After failing to meet the criteria for euro membership at the currency’s 1999 launch, a chronically profligate Greece managed to qualify in January 2001 by engaging in creative budget accounting. Going an important step further than Argentina, Greece abandoned its currency in favour of the euro. It joined a club whose very founding envisions no exit option for any of its member countries.
The next stage on the road to ruin occurs when the country pursues domestic policies that are inconsistent with its new currency arrangement. In recent years Athens has thrown any notion of budget discipline to the wind. Euro membership supposedly obliges a country to abide by the Maastricht criteria of keeping its budget deficit below 3 per cent of gross domestic product and its public debt-to-GDP ratio below 60 per cent. Greece’s budget deficit has widened to 12.7 per cent of GDP, while its debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to reach 120 per cent in 2010.
A ballooning budget deficit, coupled with inappropriately low interest rates imported from abroad, sets the stage for the end-game. It does so not simply by putting the country’s public finances on an unsustainable path but also by eroding its international competitiveness, which gives rise to a massive external imbalance. In this department as well, Greece has managed to outdo the Argentina of old by losing over 30 per cent in competitiveness through consistently higher wage and price inflation than its European partners.
As market doubts surface as to the sustainability of the currency arrangement, the country’s external official sponsors ride to its rescue. In Argentina’s case, the sponsor was a US-backed IMF. For Greece, it has been the European Central Bank. The fly in the ointment, however, is that the official sponsor understandably bridles at the prospect of providing unconditional or unlimited funding. Rather, it insists that the country adopts hair-shirt adjustment policies.
In Argentina’s case, conditional IMF support staved off the inevitable for a couple of years before the proposed adjustment measures led to rioting in the streets and it became clear to the IMF that it was dealing with a solvency rather than a liquidity problem. It is difficult to see how Greece’s present crisis can end on a happier note. Any attempt to bring the budget deficit down to the Maastricht target would only deepen the recession. Attempting to restore Greek competitiveness through wage cuts would lead to years of painful and politically unacceptable deflation.
The omens do not look good for retrenchment: budget cut announcements have already sparked widespread labour market unrest. Nor is there much prospect of indefinite ECB funding. Rating agencies have downgraded Greece to below A-, while Jürgen Stark, an ECB official, recently said that the EU would not help bail out Greece were the need to arise.
If there is anything that the Greek authorities might learn from Argentina, it is the folly of attempting to fight the inevitable. Not only does this saddle a country with a mountain of official debt that cannot be rescheduled; it also deepens and prolongs the recession from which any post-devaluation recovery might begin. Athens should leave the eurozone sooner rather than later. However, that is not the way that Greek tragedies play out.
Financial Times
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