In a speech given on 11 June 2018 in the IFo Institute (Munich), former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis noted the urgent need for a fiscal reform, which France and Germany see in a very different way, in order to save the Eurozone.
In the last few months, we have witnessed a worrying downward revision to US savings rates, in addition to the clear declining trend in savings. If US households don’t dedicate part of the resources freed up by the government’s planned tax reform to savings, we will be facing some very bad news.
BoAML | The ECB has closed many doors in December. The 2015-16 strategy of monetary policy covering for fiscal loosening to facilitate structural reform has changed.We are back to national governments having to navigate through strained fiscal trajectories, leaving very little room for mistakes. Potential growth prospects are not great, not only in the periphery.
Trump and the republicans are already considering a fiscal amnesty which would repatriate – with a tax rate of 10% – the 2.5 billion dollars US companies have outside the country.
BBVA Research | For 2017, the economic cycle is expected to continue correcting the deterioration in Spain’s public accounts, but in a scenario without changes in fiscal policy, the shortfall would decline only to 3.6% of GDP, and would exceed the budgetary target set at 3.1%. Further adjustments will be required to ensure a durable correction.
Roberto Tamborini, author, Professor of Economy at Trento University says The Corner at this interview that “we can only start on the road towards a satisfactory recovery with fiscal and monetary coordination in the eurozone, and this fiscal stimulus can only be coordinated via Brussels. This directly calls into question the eurozone’s economic governance, one of the pillars of which is the Maastrich principle of exclusive national responsability.”
Francesco Saraceno | Last week’s data on EMU growth have triggered quite a bit of comments. I was intrigued by Paul Krugman‘s piece arguing (a) that in per capita terms the EMU performance is not as bad (he uses working age population, I used total population); and (b) that the path of the EMU was similar to that of the US in the first phase of the crisis.
Francesco Saraceno | The EMU policy debate in the past few months kept revolving around monetary policy. Just this morning I read a Financial Times report on the never ending struggle between hawks and doves within the ECB. I am all for continued monetary stimulus. It cannot hurt. But there is only so much monetary policy can do in a liquidity trap. I said it many times in the past (I am in very good company, by the way), and nothing so far proved me wrong.
PARIS | By Francesco Saraceno | So, Mario Draghi is disappointed by eurozone growth, and is ready to step up the ECB quantitative easing program. The monetary expansion apparently is not working out as planned.
PARIS | April 20, 2015 | By Francesco Saraceno | Recently I commented on the intriguing box in which the IMF staff challenges one of the tenets of the Washington consensus, the link between labour market reform and economic performance. But the IMF is not new to these reassessments. In fact over the past three years research coming from the fund has increasingly challenged the orthodoxy that still shapes European policy making.