Coppola Comment

"No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal", says Theresa May. Her Brexit sidekick David Davis appeals to MPs not to "tie her hands". And that master of flannel, trade secretary Liam Fox, says that leaving without a deal would be "not just bad for the UK, it's bad for Europe as a whole". These three statements sum up the hopes of the Brexiteers. The idea seems to be that if the UK adopts a really strong stance in its forthcoming negotiations with the EU, the Europeans will be so horrified at the prospect of the UK leaving without any agreement that they will cave in and give the UK what it wants. Welcome to the Brexit game of chicken. On the face of it, the UK government's negotiating principles appear sound: set out your red lines, make it clear that you won't tamely agree to everything the other side wants and that you will walk away rather than give ground on things that really matter. But if you are going to play brinkmanshi...

On October 30th 2015, I gave a keynote speech at Birmingham University's Finance Forum on the implications of Grexit and Brexit for financial stability. I've now written this up as a paper. I start by outlining the purpose of financial stability. Since the 2007-8 financial crisis, “financial stability” has been all the rage. We must prevent another crisis: we must solve the problems that make our financial system “unstable”.  But what exactly do we mean by “financial stability”? Most people would define a stable financial system as one which doesn’t fall over when it is hit by a major shock; doesn’t cost us huge amounts of money in repair bills when it is hit by a major shock; doesn’t draw in its horns and refuse to lend when the going gets tough; doesn’t become over-exuberant and lend far too much at too high a risk when times are good.  But financial stability is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means to an end. What we really want is a financial system...

 Greece's banks have been closed since 29th June. The closure followed the ECB's decision not to increase ELA funding after talks broke down between the Greek government and the Eurogroup. The closure is doing immense economic damage. The cash withdrawal limit of 60 euros per bank card per day is restricting spending in the Greek economy to a trickle. Media generally focus more on the hardship that the cash limit causes for households: but far worse is the inability of businesses to access working capital and make essential payments. Businesses are failing at a rate of knots. People are losing their jobs. And bank loan defaults are rising rapidly. The closure was, of course, the decision of the Greek government, as was the associated decision to impose partial capital controls. But it is hard to see that they had any choice. Deposits have been draining from Greek banks for months, but when talks broke down the outflows increased to a full-blown bank run. The  ECB's ...

The atmosphere in the Greek standoff is turning ugly. On Tuesday , after new Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos turned up to Eurogroup talks with nothing but hastily-drafted notes written on hotel paper, Eurozone leaders told the Greek government in no uncertain terms that if it did not produce credible proposals by Sunday 12th July Greece would be thrown out of the Eurozone. "We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail", said European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk - one of the very few consistently sane and reasonable voices in this drama - said that inability to find agreement may lead to the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system. And he warned that there would be serious - possibly irreparable - geopolitical repercussions for the European Union. "If someone has any illusion that it will not be so," he said, "they are naive". Others have also warned abo...

Guest post by Tom Streithorst Vladimir Illych Lenin may well be the most destructive political theorist of the 20 th century.  His glorification of a conspiratorial party as agent of a glorious future legitimised mass murder from Bolshevik Russia to Nazi Germany to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge .  Nonetheless, he did invent an analytical tool political scientists and economists should use more often: “Kto Kovo”, or “who beats whom”.  In examining any policy, Lenin suggests the first question to ask is who gains and who suffers. Neoclassical economics pretends that we search for an optimum solution that serves the economy as a whole. In truth, all change creates winners and losers.  The most obvious example is currency appreciation.  If the dollar is strong and its value rises against the euro, then American tourists enjoy nicer vacations, able to eat and drink more luxuriously for less money, but American exporters pay the price.  The cost of their...

In a reply to a comment on my recent post about Target2 and ELA, I said this: There are no "Greek euros" or "German euros". There are only European euros. So the ECB is not exchanging Greek and German euros at par. Both countries are using the same currency, which is produced by the Eurosystem. The NCBs are not autonomous entities, they are part of the Eurosystem. They do not create their own currencies : collectively, they create the single currency. This is how a single currency works. If there are multiple "central banks" within a single currency area - as there are in the United States, for example - they do not produce their own currencies. St. Louis Federal Reserve does not produce St. Louis Dollars. It produces United States dollars. As does the Minneapolis Fed, and the New York Fed, and the Atlanta Fed, and so on. The twelve Federal Reserve banks collectively produce one currency, the US dollar. So the person who argued that Greek and Ge...