Portugal Loses Patience With Europe!

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  Portugal Loses Patience With Europe
  By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
  Portugal’s new premier Pedro Passos Coelho — a free marketeer — began to growl over the weekend. “We want to take part in an ambitious European project and make our contribution so Europe can confront its problems in the most ambitious way, but as prime minister I will not stand by and wait for Europe to govern Portugal,” he told the party faithful.
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  So, it has begun: last week Greece’s premier George Papandreou launched two angry broadsides against EU magnates. How could he do otherwise after Eurogroup chair Jean-Claude Juncker told a German newspaper that Greece’s sovereignty would be “massively limited”?
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  “Massively limited?”
  Mr Juncker should be clamped in irons if he dares set foot on Greek soil.
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  Now the leader of what is arguably Europe’s oldest nation state (foundation 868, under Vimara Peres) has shown the first hints of frustration. Just to remind you: unemployment in Portugal is 12.4pc (youth: 28.1) and about to rise much further as the fiscal punch hits. The figures for Spain are 20.9pc (44.4), Greece 15pc (38.5), Ireland 14pc (26.5), Latvia 16.2pc (32.9). Yet the these countries are all facing further headwinds of fiscal and monetary tightening.
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  For a serving prime minister to make such remarks at this delicate juncture might be taken by some as a cloaked threat  to walk away from the EU project, if the country continues to be treated in a humiliating and damaging fashion. Mr Passos Coelho is fencing with a double-edged blade. Even to hint at misgivings over EMU is to set matters in motion. The markets were very quick to pick up on political body language during the ERM crisis in 1992.
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  I have great sympathy for Mr Passos Coelho and for the Portuguese people. The German-led creditor states have treated the EMU crisis as if it were a morality tale, castigating Club Med and Ireland for alleged fecklessness. All that is required — goes the argument — is further austerity, a dose of 1930s wage and debt-deflation, and virtue will be its own reward. The Left-wing Bloco calls it “social terrorism”.
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  Adding injury to insult, Germany has insisted that Portugal, Greece, and Ireland pay a penal rate of interest some 200 to 300 basis point over the cost of funding paid by the EU’s bail-out machinery, though this may soon be cut somewhat. As former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said this morning in the pink sheet, such penal rates play havoc with debt dynamics and are driving a string of countries into insolvency and depression.
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  This Germanic view of events is self-serving and intellectually dishonest. Southern Europe is in trouble because Europe’s monetary union is and always was dysfunctional. The Maastricht process caused interest rates to plunge in the Club Med bloc, setting off credit booms. Portugal’s rates fell from 16pc to 3pc in short order.
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  The ECB poured further petrol on the fire by tilting monetary policy to German needs in the middle of the last decade, when Germany was in trouble. The ECB breached is own eurozone M3 and inflation targets for year after year.
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  In the specific case of Portugal, the boom occurred earlier, in the late 1990s. … Yet over the last eight years Portugal has been relatively frugal. It did not have an Irish banking bubble, or a Spanish property bubble. It did let social transfer costs creep up to 22pc of GDP — when they should have been falling — but it also passed a string of fiscal austerity packages.
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  Yet at the end of the day it was punished anyway. It has failed to reap any worthwhile benefits. There has been no economic convergence or EMU catch-up effect. Productivity has remained stuck at 64pc of the core-EU average. Portugal switched from surplus on its external accounts in the early 1990s to a deficit of 109pc of GDP today.
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  Public and private debt has ballooned to 330pc of GDP, one of the highest in the world. Portugal will still have a current account deficit of almost 8pc this year and the budget deficit was still running at a 8.7pc rate in the first quarter. Such a profile two or three years into draconian cuts and demand compression is almost tragic.
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  And now they must implement yet further austerity, without debt relief or offsetting monetary stimulus or devaluation. This policy is a near certain formula for economic asphyxiation..
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  …. for the full article click here!

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