Documents Mody, Ashoka 4 results

"The euro area's political contract requires member nations to rely principally on their own resources when confronted with severe economic distress. Since monetary policy is the same for all, national fiscal austerity is the default response to counter national fiscal stress. Moreover, the monetary policy was itself stodgy in countering the crisis, and banking-sector problems were allowed to fester. And it was considered inappropriate to impose losses on private sector creditors.

Thus, the nature of the incomplete monetary union and the self-imposed taboos led deep and persistent fiscal austerity to become the norm. As a consequence, growth was hurt, which undermined the primary objective of lowering the debt burden. To prevent a meltdown, distressed nations were given official loans to repay private creditors.

But the stress and instability continued and soon it became necessary to ease the repayment terms on official loans. When even that proved insufficient, the German-inspired fiscal austerity was combined with the deep pockets of the European Central Bank. The ECB's safety net for insolvent or near-insolvent banks and sovereigns, in effect, substituted for the absent fiscal union and drew the central bank into the political process."

"To compensate for the inflexibility due to fixed exchange rates, the eurozone needs flexibility through a system of orderly debt restructuring. With virtually no room for macroeconomic manoeuvring since the crisis onset, fiscal austerity has been the main instrument for achieving reduction of public debt levels; but because austerity also weakens growth, public debt ratios have barely budged. Austerity has also implied continued high private debt ratios, and these debt burdens have perpetuated economic stasis. Economic theory, history, and the recent experience all call for a principled debt restructuring mechanism as an integral element of the Eurozone design. Sovereign debt should be recognized as equity (a residual claim on the sovereign), operationalized by the automatic lowering the debt burden upon the breach of contractually specified thresholds. Making debt more equity-like is also the way forward for speedy private deleveraging. This debt–equity swap principle is a needed shock absorber for the future but will also serve as the principle to deal with the overhang of ‘legacy' debt."

"The eurozone sovereign and banking crisis evolved in three phases. Following the onset of the subprime tremors in July 2007, the risk premia (spreads) on bonds issued by eurozone sovereigns rose from historically low levels; but they rose largely in tandem across the eurozone membership along with global banking stresses. The rescue of the US investment bank, Bear Stearns, in March 2008, oddly enough, marked the start of a distinctively European banking crisis accompanied by increased differentiation of countries within the eurozone. With the greater expectation of public support for distressed banks, the spreads that a sovereign paid tended to rise following evidence of stress in its domestic financial sector. This was especially so in countries with lower growth prospects and higher debt burdens. But there was as yet no feedback from banks to sovereigns. Finally, as the limits of fiscal support for domestic banks became clearer, and coinciding with the nationalization of Anglo Irish in January 2009 but gathering steam with evidence of the Greek sovereign's distress in May 2010, sovereign weaknesses also came to be quickly transmitted to a more pessimistic assessment of the financial sector's prospects, creating the potential of mutual destabilization."

"How did the Subprime Crisis, a problem in a small corner of U.S. financial markets, affect the entire global banking system? To shed light on this question we use principal components analysis to identify common factors in the movement of banks' credit default swap spreads. We find that fortunes of international banks rise and fall together even in normal times along with short-term global economic prospects. But the importance of common factors rose steadily to exceptional levels from the outbreak of the Subprime Crisis to past the rescue of Bear Stearns, reflecting a diffuse sense that funding and credit risk was increasing. Following the failure of Lehman Brothers, the interdependencies briefly increased to a new high, before they fell back to the pre-Lehman elevated levels – but now they more clearly reflected heightened funding and counterparty risk. After Lehman's failure, the prospect of global recession became imminent, auguring the further deterioration of banks' loan portfolios. At this point the entire global financial system had become infected."