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The Eurozone's Crisis: Assessing Debt, Banking, and Growth Challenges

In a 2012 conference at University College Dublin, Karl Whelan discusses the Eurozone's multifaceted crisis. With Italy as a focal point, he emphasizes the dangers posed by high debt ratios exceeding 120% and the urgency for solutions like expanded ESM and effective debt restructuring. Whelan analyzes interconnected crises: banking stability, political willingness for reforms, and a stagnant growth rate averaging only 1.2% since 2000. He raises the pressing question of whether European leaders can implement necessary, complex policy changes to maintain the integrity of the Euro.

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The Eurozone's Crisis: Assessing Debt, Banking, and Growth Challenges

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  1. The Eurozone’s Three Crisis Karl Whelan University College Dublin June 11, 2012 Infiniti Conference

  2. A Debt Crisis • Italy the poster-child. Fragility of 120% debt ratio. • Solutions? • Super-sized ESM, perhaps with banking licence. • Debt restructuring. PSI and OSI. • Political problems. • Readiness to use ECB resources in this manner • Willingness to comply with conditionality.

  3. Peter Boone’s Graph on Italy

  4. A Banking Crisis • Linked to fiscal crisis but would exist even without it. Key element in potential quick meltdown of the euro. • Solutions: • Euro-wide bank recapitalisation fund. • Euro-wide deposit insurance. • Political will for this? Practical readiness? Not this weekend there wasn’t. • Practical problem: Redenomination insurance?

  5. A Growth Crisis • Eurozone as a whole has a serious growth problem: Average growth over 2000-2011 of 1.2 percent per year. • Periphery has high levels of private debt. • Can only pay down both public and private by growing fast and running current account surpluses. • But periphery also has serious competitiveness problems. Unit labour costs ran ahead of core for many years. • Hard to solve with nominal GDP growth, with fiscal adjustment and low ECB inflation target.

  6. High Private Debt-GDP Ratios

  7. Unit Labour Cost Growth

  8. Current Account Balances

  9. The Endgame • Massive dislocations for the core if the Euro ends. • But keeping it together requires major, complex, inter-related policy changes. Are Europe’s politicians up to it? • Economic incentive may be there for core to keep things together but severe political difficulties. • Few things are permanent and irrevocable: The euro may not prove to be an exception.

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