Bust E-Book

Matthew Lynn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Bloomberg (UK)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 529

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Athens, Greece—May Day 2010. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) were putting together the final details of a $100 billion euro rescue package for the country. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, had agreed to a savage package of “austerity measures” involving cuts in public spending and lower salaries and pensions. Outside, riot police were deployed as protestors gathered to fight the austerity program. A country with a history of revolution and dictatorship hovered on the brink of collapse—with the world’s financial markets watching to see if the deal cobbled together would be enough to both calm the markets and rescue the Greek economy, and with it the euro, from oblivion.

In Bust: Greece, the Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis, leading market commentator Matthew Lynn blends financial history, politics, and current affairs to tell the story of how one nation rode the wave of economic prosperity and brought a continent, a currency, and, potentially, the global financial system to its knees.

Bust is a story of government deceit, unfettered spending, and cheap borrowing: a tale of financial folly to rank alongside the greatest in history. It charts Greece’s rise, and spectacular fall from grace, but it also explores the global repercussions of a financial disaster that has only just begun. It explains how the Greek debt crisis spread like wildfire through the rest of Europe, hitting Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and ultimately provoking a crisis that brought the euro to the edge of collapse. And it argues that the Greek crisis is just the start of a decade of financial turmoil that will eventually force the break up of the euro, and a massive retrenchment in the living standards of all the developed economies.

Written in a lively and entertaining style, Bust: Greece, the Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis is an engaging and informative account of a country gone wrong and a must-read for anyone interested in world events and global economics.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction: May Day in Athens

Chapter 1: Now We Are Ten

Chapter 2: How to Blag Your Way into a Single Currency

Chapter 3: At Club Med the Party Never Ends

Chapter 4: The Story of the Swabian Housewife

Chapter 5: Fixing a Debt Crisis with Debt

Chapter 6: Burying Your Head in the Greek Sand

Chapter 7: The Debts Fall Due

Chapter 8: The Trillion-Dollar Weekend

Chapter 9: Contagion

Chapter 10: The Debt–Deflation Death Spiral

Chapter 11: How to Break Up a Single Currency

Chapter 12: The Global Economy after the Single Currency

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Lynn. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lynn, Matthew.

Bust : Greece, the euro, and the sovereign debt crisis / Matthew Lynn.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-470-97611-1 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-99068-0 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-119-99069-7 (ebk)

1. Financial crises—Greece—History—21st century. 2. Debts, External—Greece—History—21st century. 3. Greece—Economic conditions—1974– 4. Greece—Economic policy—1974– 5. Economic stabilization—Greece—History—21st century. I. Title.

HB3807.5.L96 2010

330.9495—dc22

2010042208

To my mother

Introduction

May Day in Athens

It had been a long time since the Hammer & Sickle, the Marxist symbol of the unity of workers and peasants, had been flown anywhere in Europe with anything approaching pride. But on May 4, 2010, as the protests in Greece over the austerity package imposed on the country by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund gathered force, members of the Greek Communist Party stormed the Acropolis and draped a huge banner across its famous old stones. The slogan, “Peoples of Europe Rise Up,” was etched into the banner, and, next to the words, in stark, blood-red graphics, the crossed implements that were formally adopted as the official flag of the Soviet Union way back in 1924.

The Acropolis is the most potent symbol of Greek culture; indeed, it is one of the foundation stones of Western civilization, a monument that reminds all of us of the common intellectual and cultural heritage we all share. Over the next 24 hours, across all the news networks, the protestors’ flag was broadcast as a backdrop as reporters filed reports on the riots rampaging through Athens.

There could be no better way of illustrating what was happening, both on the streets and in the financial markets. On one level, ordinary Greeks were venting their anger and frustration over an economy that appeared to have gone off the rails as suddenly and violently as a train accelerating into a crash. On another, a wider conflict was being played out. The riots were about far more than just a few budget cuts in one smallish country far from the center of the world economy. They were about whether a whole economic and political system created over three generations was sustainable. Or whether, groaning under a mountain of debts and a mess of ill-thought-through dreams and aspirations, it was about to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

It was no exaggeration to argue that the postwar economic system established in Europe was breaking apart in front of people’s eyes. And the Hammer & Sickle drove that point home with the kind of unrelenting clarity that would have bought a smile to the corpse of the man who had approved the design, Vladimir Lenin.

Early May 2010 in Athens was to prove an extraordinary few days. Violent, brutal, and passionate, on the streets of the Greek capital, all the fault lines and conflicts within the global economy were about to be played out in vivid Technicolor.

The drama had been brewing for the past two years. In the wake of the credit crunch, following the collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers, the financial markets had frozen. There was a sudden and terrifying collapse in world trade: In response, governments everywhere had massively increased their budget deficits in an attempt to steady economies that looked to be on the verge of tipping into a replay of the Great Depression of the 1930s. But as 2009 turned into 2010, and as the fears of another depression eased, the markets started to worry about something else. The cure was starting to look even worse than the disease. And the buildup of sovereign debts, and whether those debts could ever possibly get repaid, was suddenly the issue everyone was worrying about.

There were a dozen different countries the bond dealers could have picked on. But it happened to be Greece. Over the course of the past few weeks, the country’s Prime Minister, George Papandreou, had been taught a painful lesson in the harsh realities of global finance: When the money runs out, so do your options. The capital markets were no longer interested in buying Greek bonds. Their neighbors and allies in the euro area showed little interest in helping out, either. The country’s debts were proving quite literally impossible to finance. Already, the Greeks had been forced to appeal for outside help. Now the European Union and the International Monetary Fund had landed in Athens with the promise of a rescue package. But the price they would demand would be a heavy one: cuts on a brutal and massive scale, an end to the easy-money culture that had taken root in Greece over the past decade, and a shocking assault on the living standards of ordinary people. That was the price that would have to be paid, and it was no longer negotiable.

As May 1 dawned, it was already clear that this was to be a pivotal weekend in Greek history. The nation that had been the birthplace of modern democracy, which had indeed created the word itself, did not have a great track record of implementing the ideals for which it had been the cradle. Between 1946 and 1949, it had been the scene of a vicious civil war between rival armies backed by the forces of left and right. The country was left in ruins. It struggled to rebuild itself, and managed to miss out on the postwar reconstruction of Europe. In 1967, a group of reactionary, socially conservative military leaders staged a coup, creating a buffoonish, at times ridiculous, “Regime of the Colonels” that lasted until 1974. This was a country with a long history of settling its divisions with riots and bloodshed. It had happened plenty of times in the past. And now it looked to be happening again.

May Day has always been a crucial date in the European calendar. As the International Workers’ Day, it is the traditional moment for trade unions and leftwing political parties to mobilize their forces and challenge the capitalist order. It is, as well, the month of revolution. The convulsions that shook much of Europe in 1968 started in that month. Perhaps the start of spring turns people’s minds to the possibility of creating society afresh. Whatever the truth of that, officials from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union could have hardly chosen a worse moment to descend on the Greek capital demanding cuts.

The trouble started on the Saturday night, May 1. As Labor Day rallies gathered to march through the city, scuffles broke out with riot police armed with shields and batons. Nineteen people were arrested. The former president of the Greek Parliament, Apostolos Kaklamanis, was targeted by demonstrators, and both missiles and abuse were hurled at him before the police managed to extricate the surrounded politician and get him safely away to the hospital.

On the Sunday night, there were signs of more trouble brewing when a bomb exploded outside a branch of the British bank HSBC in central Athens. A small, homemade device, put together by enthusiastic amateurs from gas canisters and petrol, it wasn’t powerful enough to do much more than damage the front of the building. It was, however, a warning of worse to come over the next few days. Meanwhile, far away in Brussels, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, a veteran of European Union negotiations and the current president of the euro group that represented the interests of the nations sharing the single currency, had called an emergency meeting of euro-zone finance ministers for 5 p.m. Athens time on the Sunday evening. Their task would be to endorse whatever deal the troika, the group of European Union, European Central Bank, and IMF officials, had managed to hammer out with the Greek government over the course of the weekend.

Against the backdrop of simmering violence, a deal was finally welded into shape. The euro-zone finance ministers agreed on a $146 billion package that would enable the Greek government to limp through the next few months. In return, the Greek government agreed to push through 30 billion euros of budget cuts, amounting to 13 percent of GDP. Of the bailout package, 10 billion euros would be set aside for helping out the country’s battered banking system. “I want to tell Greeks very honestly that we have a big trial ahead of us,” Prime Minister Papandreou told his nation in a televised address on the Sunday evening after the deal was announced. “I have done and will do everything not to let the country go bankrupt.” Ordinary Greeks would, he continued, have to accept “great sacrifices” to avoid “catastrophe.”1

A solution to the crisis? That was far too much to hope for. To keep her own electors at home happy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had played up the extent to which her government had toughed up the conditions attached to the loan. “This is an ambitious program that contains tough savings measures and on the other hand seeks to improve the efficiency of the Greek economy,” Merkel insisted at a press conference in Bonn after the deal was agreed. “Three months ago it would have been unthinkable that Greece would accept such tough conditions.”2

For the Greeks, the idea of a German Chancellor imposing painful austerity measures on their country was more than many could tolerate. This was, after all, a country that had suffered terribly under German occupation during World War II. Three hundred thousand people had died of starvation in Athens during the winter of 1941–1942 as the Nazi occupying regime requisitioned food and fuel to send back to the Third Reich. And in towns such as Kalavryta, German troops had executed almost the entire adult male population (they left only 13 male survivors and children) in reprisals for attacks by the Greek resistance. Too many Greeks had been raised on stories of German brutality for Merkel’s language to be anything other than provocative.

There was little sign that the Greeks were willing to accept their fate, at least not without violent, bitter protest. Giorgos Delastik is a popular columnist in the country, writing for To Ethnos, a mass-market daily controlled by the Bobolas family of industrialists. “Today, people across the country woke up to a palpable atmosphere of tension in the wake of the government’s announcement of a fresh package of austerity measures including major wages cuts, which will prompt a significant decline in living standards,” he wrote in an incendiary column published on May 3.

Civil servants and pensioners will be worst affected, but private sector workers will also lose out. Perhaps the most galling aspect of this latest development is the fact that Prime Minister George Papandreou announced the austerity package under orders from the foreign powers that have now assumed control of our country: the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.3

He warned his readers that Greece faced a bleak future of unparalleled austerity:

There is no denying the utter disregard for social progress in these austerity measures, which are worse than anything that Greece has seen in more than a century . . . the GDP of our country is set to fall by a record 4 percent in 2009, the most dramatic decline in 50 years—a slump only exceeded by a 6.4 percent drop in 1974 prompted by the joint effect of the oil crisis and the invasion of northern Cyprus by the Turkish army, which followed the fall of the military junta. And worse still, they will have no positive impact on Greece’s public debt, which is set to increase from 115 percent in 2009 to 140 percent in 2014.

That was just one small snapshot of the mood right across Greece. As the emergency rescue package was unveiled, the civil service union called an immediate general strike. Greeks are used to strikes, and they are used to far-left communist and anarchist groups stirring up trouble. But this was different. Ordinary people were willing to march out into the streets themselves, protesting what they believed was an unfair and unjust package imposed on them by outsiders.

It was on May 5, as the scale of the pain about to be inflicted on the Greek people became clear, that the violence turned raw and ugly. The crowds chose their spots well, gathering in places which were, for most ordinary Greeks, filled with the symbolism of past conflicts.

The first demonstrators flocked to Sintagma Square. With the Parliament building directly behind it, the square is a popular meeting place and a hub for the Athens Metro. The English translation of its name is Constitution Square, and it acquired its name from the constitution that Greece’s King Otto was forced to grant his people in 1843 after a popular and military uprising. (Otto was born Prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig of Bavaria, another reminder of the unhappy history of German meddling in Greek affairs.) Throughout modern Greek history, the Square has been the arena for voicing protest and anger against the reigning powers. Other protestors gathered around Athens Polytechnic, the site of a student uprising against the military dictatorship in 1973: At least a dozen people were killed in that year, and many more were injured in violent clashes that eventually turned out to be the catalyst for the downfall of the military junta. Now, once again, the Polytechnic students were out on the streets, and the Communist Party organizers were finding a willing audience for their recruiters. It was not hard to imagine that the IMF-EU junta, as some of the protestors already referred to it, might go the same way as the colonels of an earlier generation.

As the day progressed, the mood started to turn uglier. Protestors, aware that the world’s media had descended upon Athens and that their actions would be broadcast around the world, attempted to storm Parliament, ready to take the building by force if necessary. Many no doubt had learned the story of Lenin’s assault on the Winter Palace in October 1917, a grand, theatrical coup that set the stage for the Bolshevik revolution. Capture the right building at the right moment, and you can take possession of an entire country. The riot police stood firm, however. Demonstrators rushing up the steps of the building chanted “thieves!,” their voices carrying on the breeze to the politicians inside. With batons, shields, muscle, and tear gas, the police lines repulsed wave after wave of attacks. Paving stones were ripped up, and improvised petrol bombs were hurled toward them in a brutal assault of flame and concrete, but the police stood resolute. The protestors threw up barricades and set cars on fire. One building was incinerated, and the fire-fighters managed to pull four people to safety at the last moment before they died in the flames.

On Stadiou Avenue, a road leading up toward the Square, protesters firebombed the Marfin Bank. Twenty people were working inside that day. As the flames took hold, most of them managed to escape. But three of the staff tried to make their way up to the roof to avoid suffocation. Their way was blocked, and as the flames kept rising higher and higher, it was too late for the fire-fighters to do anything for them. All three died in the blaze. The riots had claimed their first casualties. As news spread around the city of the deaths, an angry mob started to gather around the burned-out building. When the owner of the bank arrived on the scene, he was accused of forcing his workers to stay at their posts despite the general strike called by the trade unions.

More protests were rising up around the country. In Salonika, 50,000 people marched through the streets destroying dozens of banks and shops in Greece’s second largest city. Over many hours demonstrators fought running battles with the police. Anarchists occupied the city’s labor center. In Patras, around 20,000 protesters were joined by farmers driving tractors and garbage truckers on their vehicles, as flaming barricades were erected along the central streets of the city. There were fierce clashes between protestors and the police. In Ioannina, the protesters attacked banks and shops, prompting the police to respond with tear gas, while in Corfu, protesters occupied the County Headquarters. The Administrative Headquarters of Naxos and the City Hall of Naoussa all came under attack. Although the riots and demonstrations eventually fizzled out, for a moment the anger of the country appeared revolutionary in its potency.

As the debris was cleared up, Greece awoke the next morning asking itself tough questions: “Can a society self-destruct?” asked the Greek daily newspaper Kathemerini, posing the question in big, bold capital letters. “Of course it can, and it is certain that this will happen if we continue this way—when the state and society allow some nihilist hooligans to burn the city and murder three working citizens.”

It was a good point, and one that could well be posed more widely. After all, it wasn’t just Greece that was being put to the test as the rioters rampaged across the capital and through the streets of all of Greece’s major cities. It was the euro, a currency still only just over a decade old. And it was the European Union, the foundation of peace and prosperity across the continent for the past half-century.

The euro was created by an economic elite convinced that they were creating a better, more harmonious, and more efficient Europe. But now it was being defended with tear gas and truncheons. That was certainly not the way it was meant to be.

As the burned-out cars were cleared away, it was obvious to anyone that Greece was bust. It faced a generation of grinding austerity, political turmoil, and resentful poverty. But the euro was broken as well, and with it the idea of the EU, or at least one centralizing version of it.

On May Day in Athens, the edifice had cracked. That, as we shall discover over the rest of this book, had been a long time coming. Arrogance and hubris had caught out a generation of political leaders that had pushed too hard and too fast for political and monetary union.

But broken it was. And, as we shall also discover, it will be impossible to put it together again.

When the rioting stopped, the Hammer & Sickle was no longer flying over Europe. A day after it was put up, the banner draped across the Acropolis urging the people of Europe to rise up had been removed. Tourists could once again wander amid the ancient stones. But a kind of revolution had taken place. The euro no longer looked like the future of anything. Sovereign debt was dominating discussion in the world markets. And that was a transformation—and one that was to ready to dominate the continent, and indeed the global economy, for much of the coming decade.

Chapter 1

Now We Are Ten

On January 13, 2009, Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central bank, traveled to the Strasbourg to give a lecture celebrating the tenth anniversary of the euro. It was a pleasant, downbeat occasion. Over much of its short existence, Europe’s single currency had been a bitterly contested, viciously fought-over creation. Over prolonged European summits it had been argued over savagely by a whole generation of political leaders. Careers had been made and broken. Referenda had been played out across Europe, and, as the votes were counted, the fate of the project regularly hung in the balance. As preparations were made for its introduction, the global financial markets poured endless buckets of scorn on its prospects for success. As the notes and coins were introduced from Bavaria to Lombardy, from Catalonia to Provence, shopkeepers turned up their noses at this strange, foreign money, a garishly colored imposter creeping into their tills. And as it made its debut on the markets, it was treated much as the new fat boy might be at a rough school: an object to be kicked around and bullied, mainly for the amusement of the bigger and nastier children.

And yet, even at the tender age of 10, it appeared to be approaching a kind of calm, middle-aged serenity. If it was possible for a currency to pull on a cozy pair of slippers, make a cup of hot chocolate, pull itself up by the fire, and start reading the gardening supplement in the newspaper, then that is what the euro would be doing. And that mood was very much reflected in the tone of Trichet’s speech to the European Parliament that afternoon.

“For decades, the single European currency was merely an idea shared by a few people. Many others said that it could not be done, or that it was bound to fail,” said Trichet.

Today, the single currency is a reality for 329 million citizens. The creation of the euro will one day be seen as a decisive step on the long path toward an “ever closer union” among the people of Europe.

Since the introduction of the euro, fellow Europeans have enjoyed a level of price stability which previously had been achieved in only a few of the euro area countries. This price stability is a direct benefit to all citizens. It protects incomes and savings, and it helps to bring down borrowing costs, thus promoting investment, job creation and prosperity over the medium and long term. The single currency has been a factor of dynamism for the European economy. It has enhanced price transparency, increased trade, and promoted economic and financial integration within the euro area and with the rest of the world.1

Indeed so. Trichet is in many ways the perfect Mr. Euro. A smooth, articulate French intellectual, he speaks with the calm authority of a fiercely intelligent technocrat. You could interrogate the man for weeks and not force him into a single error, slip, or gaffe. Over a career spent pushing for the closer integration of the European nations, he sometimes appears to have transformed himself into a living embodiment of the ideals he strives to articulate: a kind of Franco-German unity turned, with surprising success, into flesh and bone. Like all French political and intellectual leaders, his speeches and press conferences are often elaborately erudite, laden with cultural, historical, and literary references. In the manner that only French officials can achieve, he is never afraid to make the connections between poetry and central banking (Goethe and Dante turn out to be among the influences on the European Central Bank’s decisions on interest rates, in case you were wondering). But he has also assumed a Teutonic rectitude and sternness. He is never shy about imposing a very German view of financial conservatism on Europe. He discusses thrift and balanced budgets as matters of morality as well as economics and bookkeeping, in a way that plays better in Bavaria or Saxony than it does anywhere else in Europe. He is well aware that money is as much a matter of national identity as a medium of exchange, and perhaps more so. The euro could have no better champion.

In his lecture, he pointed to three key achievements of the first decade since the euro was introduced, first as a financial currency in 1999 and then in the form of physical notes and coin in January 2002.

First, it had overcome the credit crunch. Plenty of people had been warning that the euro didn’t have the strength to survive any kind of significant shock to the global economy. And yet only a few months earlier, following the collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers, the financial system had gone into meltdown. Banks had been going bust all around the world. In the case of Iceland, a whole country had gone pop. Trade had collapsed at a faster rate than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The great container ships that sailed from Shanghai to Rotterdam laden with the mass-produced consumer goods that were the physical manifestation of globalization were suddenly tethered empty to the docks. And yet, even though the ships were empty, the euro had sailed through the crisis unscathed. Whatever the problems weighing down on the global economy—and there were plenty of them, no question about that—no one was suggesting that the euro was one of them.

Next, the economic union that had been the primary goal of the euro had been summoned brilliantly to life. Price stability had been achieved, and the economies of Europe had been drawn closer together. Raw materials harvested in Sicily could be sent to the Rhineland to be manufactured, then trucked to Burgenland in Austria or to the Algarve in Portugal, for sale, and the goods could be paid for, accounted for, and taxed all in the same, uniform unit of money. The result was a Europe that was far more dynamic, more prosperous, more open, and more innovative, Trichet argued.

Finally, it was getting bigger all the time. Whereas its critics claimed the euro would quickly collapse, and while the British, the Swedes, and the Danes snootily declined to take part at the beginning of the grand experiment, fearing it was doomed to inevitable failure, instead this was turning into a club that everyone wanted to join. When the euro was launched a decade ago, Trichet reminded his audience sharply, it had 11 members. As of the first of January 2009, it was the common currency of 16 nations. If the natural impulse of any organism is to survive, replicate itself, and enlarge its territory, then the euro was by that measure a triumphant success.

“Ladies and gentlemen, during its first years of existence, the euro had to face major trials: the establishment of a sound and credible central bank and the creation of a stable new currency inspiring confidence,” he concluded with a flourish. “These challenges were overcome successfully and the euro is today firmly established. Hence, this is certainly a time for celebration.”2

On January 8, Trichet was singing from a similar hymn sheet, this time at a ceremony to mark the arrival of Slovakia in the euro-zone. In Bratislava, the Slovakian capital, on January 8, the European Central Bank welcomed the second of the former Soviet bloc countries into the club of nations that shared the single currency. It was, once again, a remarkable testament to the power of the euro. Two decades earlier, Slovakia had been part of a communist empire that stretched from the borders of Austria and Germany all the way to Vladivostok in the Far East. Now it was able to share its currency with the rest of Western Europe. “Robert Schuman stated in his founding declaration that Europe will be made through concrete achievements which create tangible solidarity among its people. European monetary union is a concrete achievement, and the euro is a tangible sign of solidarity among its people,”3 said Trichet in his remarks welcoming Slovakia into monetary union.

It was, in truth, a historic achievement, and one built against the odds. As it celebrated its tenth birthday, the euro could be celebrated not just with rhetoric, but with, just as Schuman demanded it should be, tangible, demonstrable achievements.

“It is absolutely conceivable that the euro will replace the dollar as [the] reserve currency, or will be traded as an equally important reserve currency,”4 former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, told the German magazine Stern in 2007. According to a study by Harvard University’s Jeffrey Frankel and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, the euro could surpass the dollar as the world’s most important currency by 2022. They looked at the way the dollar gradually replaced the British pound in the years before World War I and found that something very similar was happening right now. The United States was declining in global importance, it was running an evermore reckless fiscal policy, and it was failing to hold the line against inflation. For all those reasons, the rest of the world would gradually despair of holding dollars and start looking for a safer alternative.

As the years rolled by, and as the euro established itself more firmly in the minds of investors, that view was gaining steadily in credibility. OPEC, the powerful cartel of oil producers, started to make noises about pricing oil in euros rather than dollars. The Chinese, who use the vast trade surpluses run up by the country’s exporters to accumulate massive foreign exchange reserves, started to talk by the middle of 2009 about holding more of their assets in euros rather than dollars. The Russians, whose oil reserves meant they were steadily building up financial reserves in the same way the Chinese were, shifted some of their holdings out of the dollar and into the euro. Whichever way you looked at it, the European currency was gaining ground over the American one.

Nor was that a mere matter of continental machismo (although there would be plenty of politicians, particularly in Paris, who would regard every inch of territory the euro gained on the dollar as another step forward for the forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism). There are huge economic advantages to having the world’s reserve currency. Right now, everyone has to hold dollars because that is the money used for world trade. Every time people buy some of those dollars, they are, in effect, making an interest-free loan to the United States. Moreover, the government of the world’s reserve currency has huge financial firepower. A U.S. Treasury bill is the benchmark safe asset for the financial markets. When there is a crisis, everyone buys T-bills: It is the acme of safety. That makes it very easy and very cheap for the U.S. government to issue lots and lots of debt that, in effect, the rest of the world has little choice but to buy. Reserve currency status acts as a kind of tax the United States is allowed to impose on the rest of the world. But if the euro could oust it from that position, then some of those benefits would accrue naturally to Europe and its citizens, rather than to the United Sates. It would be Frankfurt that would tax the rest of the world, not Washington. Europeans would become richer, and Americans poorer, and, best of all, they wouldn’t even have to do any more work. It was a prize well worth striving for.

The growing importance of the euro in the capital markets, however, was only one component of the single currency’s success. In plenty of other ways, the euro was doing well enough to make its founders proud of their creation. Inflation was low and steady right across the vast continental economy the euro now covered. Government bond markets functioned smoothly: Portugal could borrow money just as easily and almost as cheaply as the Netherlands or Germany, despite the fact those countries had vastly better credit records. The capital markets functioned more smoothly. There were signs that trade was increasing between countries as companies no longer had to factor in the risk of the currency markets moving against them when they made goods in Eindhoven and sold them in Turin. What had started out as a great and risky experiment, and one that plenty of people had predicted would collapse when it faced its first real test, was turning into a huge success. By 2009, the euro was becoming boring, normal, a part of everyday life. It was part of the atmosphere, like the oxygen we breathe. It was just there. That was everything its founders could have hoped for.

But, in truth, the tenth birthday party was premature in its toasts of success. That speech in Strasbourg was to be the last chance Trichet would have to celebrate very much. Even as the words were delivered, a crisis was brewing that would, in the year that followed, threaten to blow the single currency to pieces.

It would be a crisis that would expose the flaws built into the very foundations of the euro itself.

A continental currency, with a dual metallic and fiduciary base, resting on all Europe as its capital, and driven by the activity of 200 million men: this one currency would replace and bring down all the absurd varieties of money that exist today, with their effigies of princes, those symbols of misery.5

The notion of a single European currency, like all bad ideas, has been around for a very long time. That sentence was written by the great French writer, Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, among many other works, in Actes et Paroles, which was published in February 1855.

Nor, as it happens, was Hugo the first person to think of it. The patchwork of currencies across Europe, each with its own rules and territories, has long been a puzzle to reforming, liberal minds. Napoleon Bonaparte had proposed a single currency for the whole of Europe, under French leadership, naturally enough. John Stuart Mill, the great philosopher of Victorian improvement, advocated a single European currency as part of the inevitable march toward a single global money. Winston Churchill, far more of a believer in melding European nations together than later leaders of the British Conservative Party, endorsed a single currency as part of his wider vision, put forward in a famous speech in 1946, of a “United States of Europe” to be built out of the rubble and ruins of World War II.

A single currency had long been a dream of politicians, and indeed of some economists. It had even been tried a couple of times already. The Latin Monetary Union was created 1865, and comprised France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and, rather surprisingly, Greece as well. Based on both silver and gold, it made each member’s currency legal tender within every other state. The idea, much like the euro, was to promote trade among the members, while also serving as a stepping stone to a full monetary union. The central bank of the states in the union was meant to coordinate monetary policy among them. It lasted until 1927, but was running out of steam long before that, as the will to coordinate policy between the members lost momentum. It collapsed when both France and Italy, under huge pressure to reinflate their domestic economies, started issuing paper money that was backed by neither silver nor gold.

Another attempt was made with the Scandinavian monetary union, which linked the currencies of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It lasted from 1873 to 1920, and for a period involved intense cooperation among the central banks of the three different nations. And, of course, on a global scale the gold standard, which held sway right through the Industrial Revolution and lingered on in a diluted form until Richard Nixon took the dollar off gold in 1971, was a form of single currency. Every paper currency based on gold was convertible into every other one, depending on the price of the precious metal. So they were, in effect, all the same money, and it certainly wasn’t possible for central banks just to print more currency whenever they happened to feel it might be necessary.

But it was only during the 1970s and 1980s that the idea of a single currency for the European Union started taking real, tangible shape. And it is worth pausing to review how it came about for the simple reason that it is the debates and arguments that led up to the creation of the euro, and the compromises between different visions, that in the decade to come will inevitably lead to its unraveling.

In the 1970s, French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing and his German counterpart Helmut Schmidt faced the inflationary turbulence of that decade with a determination to create a closer union between France and Germany. With the gold standard finally abandoned, and with all the world’s major currencies floating against one another, exchange rates were moving violently against one another. Both leaders were well aware that this was crucifying their manufacturers. When German companies exported to France, they had no way of knowing what they would end up being paid, or whether they would make a profit, and vice versa. It was causing chaos. And there wasn’t much point in taking down trade barriers between the countries of the European Union if they were still reluctant to trade with one another because of turmoil in the foreign exchange markets. The response of both men was the Snake, and it was to prove a formative event in the creation of the euro.

Created by the members of what was then still known as the European Economic Community (the more grandly titled European Union was not to be established until much later), it was in some respects a mini-version of the Bretton Woods system of managed exchanged rates that had lasted from the end of World War II until Nixon’s decision to take the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. Under Bretton Woods, most of the world’s major currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar itself was pegged to gold. Devaluations were periodically allowed as a way of coping with economic shocks, but, by and large, currency rates remained stable against one another over long periods of time. Under the Snake, the European countries attempted to replicate that system for one another. Although the currencies floated against one another on the foreign exchange markets, each member agreed to limit, by market intervention if necessary, the fluctuations of its exchange rate against other members’ currencies. The maximum permitted divergence between the strongest and the weakest currencies was 2.25 percent. The agreement meant that the French government, for example, would ensure that the value of the French franc would experience only very limited fluctuation against the Italian lira or the Dutch guilder, but that there was no commitment to limit or smooth out fluctuations against the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, or any other currencies that were outside the agreement. The idea was that while there might be frantic volatility against other major currencies, the European currencies would never move very much against each other. That would encourage trade among the members of the EU. And it would also mean that the different European currencies that belonged to the Snake would start to behave as a single block. If the deutschmark started to move up against the dollar, then so would the pound and the franc and the lira, because all the different currencies were in effect linked to one another. It was the euro in the making.

The trouble was, it didn’t work very well. Britain and Ireland tried it for a month, and then, with the typical hesitancy of the Anglo-Saxons over any European project, gave up and withdrew. The French found it too hard to stay the course, and so did the Italians. Only the Germans, with typical determination, remained members all the way through to the end of the system, which lasted until 1979. Countries stayed in when it was easy to maintain membership, but generally opted out as soon as the exchange rate mandated by the system became difficult to defend. It wasn’t, as it turned out, much of a protection against anything, because everyone always abandoned it as soon as the going got difficult.

The flaw in the system was simple. It was set up to fight the currency markets. The only way, for example, that the franc–deutschmark rate could be defended was if the Bank of France intervened to buy francs as soon as currency traders started selling them. But that quickly became ruinously expensive (to the central bank, that is; it was fabulously profitable for foreign exchange traders). The central bank was always going to lose money on the trade. By 1979, the system had become a joke: It was merely a way of transferring wealth from taxpayers to bankers. There was no point in carrying on with it.

With the collapse of the Snake, a fresh generation of European political leaders had another go at stabilizing exchange rates within the European Union. This time it was called the European Monetary System. Launched soon after the Snake collapsed, the EMS was a more serious and hardheaded approach to the issue. It created a new currency unit called the ECU (standing, not very imaginatively, for the European Currency Unit). The ECU was a basket of each member’s currencies, weighted in terms of the respective size of their economies. Each member of the system undertook to manage the value of its currency against the value of the ECU. It worked in much the same way as the Snake in that it stabilized exchange rates between the member states of the EU, while allowing them to fluctuate against the rest of the world’s currencies. It was, however, easier to defend. The standard maximum exchange-rate fluctuation permitted for each EMS currency was 2.25 percent. However, there were wider bands for weaker members, such as Italy from 1979 onward, Spain from 1989 onward, and the UK from 1990 onward. The system was also subject to frequent realignments of the grid, which had a tendency to make a mockery of the whole structure of the EMS. The trouble was there wasn’t a huge amount of stability in the system when any one country might suddenly need to revalue the rate at which its currency was traded against the notional ECU. Rather like the Snake, it worked only when times were good. But, of course, when times were good, you didn’t really need it. What you wanted was a system that could stand up to storms and shocks in the global economy, and the European Monetary System certainly wasn’t that.

The system blew apart after the British joined. In 1992, with a deep recession in the UK, currency traders were selling the pound. The Bank of England was finding it impossible to defend the rate against the ECU (and in effect against the German deutschmark) mandated by the system. The German central bank, the Bundesbank, showed no inclination to help out by intervening in the markets on behalf of the pound, or by adjusting its own interest rates to bring them more into line with British ones. After a desperate battle with the markets, which cost the Bank of England billions of pounds in foreign exchange reserves, the British were ignominiously forced out of the system. Soon afterward, the trading bands for the EMS were widened to 15 percent. It was, in effect, dead. If currencies can fluctuate by 15 percent against one another, they are not fixed in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Snake and the EMS were both quite rightly regarded as failures. They had foundered on two main rocks. Any attempt to fight the foreign exchange markets was always doomed to ultimate failure. And any attempt to tie together very different economies was always going to produce strains and tensions that would in the end tear the system apart: It was the attempt to bind the very different British economy into the EMS that was to prove its downfall. But, as we have already noted, you can’t keep a bad idea down. While some people might have concluded that any attempt to manage exchange rates between the members of the European Union was doomed to failure, the EU’s political and bureaucratic elite drew precisely the reverse lesson. Their verdict was that the next time around they would try even harder, creating a single currency that was completely impregnable to attack by the currency markets, and that would bind the economies of its members together so tightly that they would in effect congeal into one harmonious economic whole, much as the economy of the United States did under its own single, continental currency, the dollar.

And so the idea of the euro was born.

On the banks of the river Meuse, which runs through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands before emptying out in the North Sea, the town of Maastricht is a historic tourist destination in the Dutch province on Limberg. It is famous both for its university and for its elegant stone streets. But these days it is probably better known as the city in which the euro was born.

On February 7, 1992, the leaders of the European Community gathered to sign what became known as Maastricht Treaty. Under the leadership of the energetic Frenchman Jacques Delors, the Treaty was the most decisive step yet taken toward a single government for the whole of Europe. The Treaty established the European Union as a political as well as an economic union. And it committed the members to full monetary union. It laid down the criteria for membership, the essential rules that would govern the single currency, and a timetable for their introduction. There were still plenty of hurdles, but after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty the die was cast. Europe was committed to merging its old currencies, and there was no turning back.

When the treaty was signed, there were 12 members of the newly restyled European Union. British Prime Minister John Major, mindful of the fiercely anti-European mood of the Conservative Party back in the UK, had negotiated an opt-out for the British: They could join if they wanted to, but were under no obligation to do so. The Danes, who also tend to be suspicious of centralizing schemes cooked up in Paris and Brussels, hitched a ride with the British, and secured an opt-out of their own. But once the Treaty was ratified, the rest of the EU’s members were formally committed to merging their old national currencies into one new one. The timing could be negotiated. So could the details of the new money. The ultimate goal could not.

But what kind of single currency? Nobody had ever attempted a project of this scale or ambition before. True, there had been earlier attempts at monetary unions in Europe, as we saw earlier in this chapter. The United States created a single currency with the dollar, a currency that replaced the old state-issued money that existed prior to the Declaration of Independence. Some would argue, with much merit, that it was only with the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 that the United States moved to creating a genuine single currency for the entire country. Yet those were experiments of a completely different order. The European currency mergers of the nineteenth century were small, practical, local affairs. And anyway, with a foundation in gold and silver, they were already part of a global monetary system. The United States was a single country when it created its currency. It may have been a federal republic with a weak central government. But it would be absurd to imagine that Massachusetts and Texas, for all their obvious differences, were not recognizably part of the same country, in a way that France and Portugal, or the Netherlands and Spain, were simply not. In truth, this was the first serious attempt to create a single currency for a diverse continent. The scale of the ambition was breathtaking. So, too, were the challenges the new currency would soon face.

“There is no example in history of a lasting monetary union that was not linked to one state,” argued Otmar Issing, chief economist of the German Bundesbank back when the euro was first being put together in 1991.6

Issing was absolutely right. Economists have been studying currencies since the dismal science was first invented. One feature they shared in common was absolutely clear. They were always and everywhere linked to a strong and unified central government: one that could raise taxes, distribute wealth between regions, borrow money on the global capital markets, and authorize a central bank to issue paper money. They weren’t based on loose, optimistic confederations, with no significant revenue-raising powers, no ability to move funds around the region, and, when you looked at it closely, no genuinely popular mandate. Of course, that wasn’t to say it wasn’t possible. It was just that it hadn’t been tried before.

As the euro was created, there were two views on whether it needed to be backed by an effective central government in Brussels. One said that the central authority would come in time. Indeed, the euro would be an instrument that would summon a single European super-state into being. Ever since the French politician Jean Monnet had founded the European Iron & Steel Community, the forerunner of today’s European Union, in 1951, the federalist dream of uniting Europe had progressed by stealth. No one had ever said their goal was creating a strong, centralized government in Brussels: They pushed some other agenda, which ended up creating a stronger European government, as if it was a by-product of something completely different. The euro very much fitted into that pattern. It could be sold as a simple technocratic adjustment, a minor economic reform to make life easier for the accounting departments of companies that exported stuff around Europe and to save tourists the bother of swapping currencies if they had to change trains in Brussels. Once it was created, it would become gradually clearer and clearer that, to make it work, you needed common tax policies as well, and then common spending plans on top of that, until pretty soon you ended up with something that looked identical to a central government in Brussels. And by then it would be too late to do anything about it: The consequences of trying to unravel the single currency, once established, would be too horrific for anyone to contemplate.

The euro would have nudged Europe toward a fully centralized super-state.

An alternative view was that a currency could float above national governments. The Nobel prize–winning economist, Robert Mundell, is sometimes known as “the father of the euro,” and with good reason. Mundell pioneered the concept of what became known in economics as an optimal currency area: that is, a geographic region where economic efficiency was optimized by sharing a single currency. Sometimes that would happen to be a single country, but quite often it wouldn’t be. So, for example, it is easy to imagine that the Netherlands and Belgium could form a natural currency union, so similar are the two economies, while Italy, with its vast differences between the wealthy, industrialized north, and the rural, poverty-stricken south, probably wouldn’t. The concept was a powerful impetus behind the creation of the euro. If you could demonstrate that Europe was an optimal currency area, then you wouldn’t need a strong central government to try and iron out the differences between regions. The euro would function perfectly well as the currency for all of them without one.

But it depended on what kind of euro you had: a strong or a weak one? And what kinds of rules would govern it? Those were issues that would be fought out in the years to come as the ground rules for the new currency were established. And they were battles that, as we shall see later, were to determine in due course whether the single currency would last for generations as its founders hoped and dreamed it would. Or whether it would buckle and then break when the first financial storms started to blow up around it.

On the surface, there was a smooth timetable laid out for the progress toward the euro. In stage one, the candidate members were to set strict targets for borrowing, inflation, and growth. The architects were well aware that you couldn’t suddenly merge very different economies. And you couldn’t even merge quite similar ones if they happened to be at different stages of the economic cycle. Once countries shared a single currency, that meant they also shared a single central bank and the same interest rate. If one economy was contracting and another was suffering from rising inflation, then it would be impossible for a single central bank to mitigate one while controlling the other. You had to get all the economies moving in sync, and then hold them there, to have any realistic prospect of making the euro work.

Stage two was the detailed planning for the new currency. The central bank had to be created, staffed, and policies and objectives set for it. Even a name for the new currency had to be chosen. There were plenty of suggestions. To the Italians, the term florin seemed a natural choice, harking back to the coins that circulated in medieval Florence. The Greeks argued that the word drachma had the virtue of unmatched longevity, if not stability. To the French, ecu seemed the most obvious name: An ecu was not just the European Currency Unit, the immediate forerunner of what became the euro; it was also a thirteenth-century French coin. There was even a suggestion that each country keep the name of its own currency, but prefix it with the word euro, so that the “euromark” would circulate in Germany, and the “eurofranc” in France, and so on. Among German bankers, there was a joke that any currency that ended with a vowel was always a disaster: the lira, the drachma, the peseta, or the escudo, for example. Proper currencies ended with a consonant: the pound, the dollar, the yen, or, since you happen to mention it, the mark. On that logic, they favored the “euromark” as the name for the new money.

That, however, like every name that included part of the old currencies, or was rooted in one particular language, seemed to miss out on the spirit of the new money. It wouldn’t have severed the link, psychologically at least, between the old national currencies and the new European one, which would inevitably make it far too easy to go back to the old ones if that was what people wanted to do one day. And that was not what the founders intended at all. The euro was designed to be irreversible, and everything about it had to suggest solidity and permanence. In the end, in 1995, it was decided to go for the simple word euro. It was the first four letters of the continent’s name. And it was the one word every European could pronounce easily enough, if not always in the same way.

But it was not matters such as the name that really counted, nor whether you put Beethoven or Picasso on the banknotes. Those were all relatively trivial issues. What really counted was the plumbing: the way the central bank would work, and the way it would govern the huge new economic empire that it would take charge of. Behind the scenes, a fierce battle was being fought for the type of euro that would be created. A hard, stern, anti-inflationary currency, modeled on the German deutschmark, and with a central bank built in the image of the old Bundesbank? Or a soft, political bank, much closer to the old Bank of France, firmly under the control of the politicians? That was the crucial choice that had to be made.

One victory was won over the location of the ECB. Frankfurt won out over Paris and Brussels, and indeed, rather implausibly, London. According to a theory fashionable in the late 1990s, the location of the central bank played a crucial role in determining which cities emerged as important financial centers. It was never a very compelling explanation. After all, the Federal Reserve was based in Washington, but the American banks were 200 miles away in New York. Even so, it stoked the argument, with the British and the French insisting they needed the ECB headquarters in their capital to preserve the status of their financial center. The British had no plans to join the euro, so their new Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, never had much of a claim. Brussels already had more than enough European Union buildings to be getting on with. Paris was a more serious contender. It had the backing of the French, and they always win more battles in the European Union than they lose. But in the end, Frankfurt was the more important financial center. And only basing the new central bank there would convince the global money markets, the audience that really counted, that the ECB meant serious business.

There were other battles to be fought as well. The French wanted one of their own men, Bank of France Governor Jean-Claude Trichet, to be the first president of the new European Central Bank. The Germans were proposing Dutch banker Wim Duisenberg. In EU political dogfights, the Dutch tend to be used as proxy Germans, allowed to take up senior roles when the Germans feel bashful about grabbing them for themselves.

But, in reality, the issues of the headquarters and the presidency were just metaphors for a much larger and far more important battle. The key fault-line was emerging, as might be suspected, between France and Germany. The Germans wanted a strictly disciplined currency. They wanted the central bank to be completely independent of any form of political interference. They wanted hard, inflexible limits on how much debt any member of the single currency could run up. And they wanted there to be no bailouts between member states.

The French wanted something different. They didn’t express it as a “weak currency.” That wouldn’t have sounded quite right. But they did express it as putting the central bank under firm political control. They demanded an “economic government” for Europe to be built into the creation of the euro. At a summit to discuss progress toward monetary union in 1996, then–French Prime Minister Alain Juppe hammered home the historical differences between the French and German approaches to economic management. “We don’t want a technocratic, automatic system that will be exclusively under the control of the European Central Bank,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in December 1996. During that month, Juppe and French President Jacques Chirac called for an EMU Advisory Council to be created alongside the ECB, with the power to advise on interest rates. That proposal was fought off by German Finance Minister Theo Waigel.