Sunday, February 28, 2016

Shanghai G20, a summit with small solutions – Il Tirreno


 Big problems, big countries, small solutions. The G20 summit in Shanghai was closed yesterday with a new index of the trouble that deluge the economy of the industrialized countries. To those now known – financial instability, the effects of the sharp drop in oil prices and the slowdown in emerging economies – are two new-fangled titles are added: Brexit and refugees. That is the fear of the repercussions of a possible victory of the “yes” to the British referendum on the EU, the poll of June, and predictions about the crisis of refugees have already arrived and arriving in the EU itself.


 


 The two crises, though so different, have a common root. And once again, it is Europe that frightens the world. Compare a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions, like that of people fleeing the war that we are rejecting the borders of our world, with all the political and institutional event may seem wrong, and even a little ‘cynical. But if the wobbles Union is because he has not and does not find the means to respond in a coordinated and supportive emergency: exactly the same reason why people look to save itself, and the British, from the height of their history, their “specialty” within the Union, and their myths I think even more highly of others.

 


 As you can remember each of us is an illusion to think to stop those who run away from a danger of death or starvation. Yet, one after the other many countries, even those that at first they had opened the door, raise their walls. And Britain try to promote the highest, in the middle of the English Channel. If not for compassion, you could avoid pride of the first world superpower: this is the European Union, at least for aggregates. Divide the emergency and manage it in a coordinated way would be possible. But there are no seats, the institutions, nor the political will to do it. Just as there was the political will to respond with solidarity and coordinated crisis that eight years ago, we come upon us from across the Atlantic.


 


 This new phase is called by someone “ secular stagnation “, from other chronic crises from under-employment; but also without resorting to bleak predictions or textbook definitions, we see it all in the paradox that we are entering a bank not to ask but to deposit: if we bring the money, we are not welcome, that money is more of a burden than anything else. Do not do anything. Nobody wants them, because little investment. We are trapped in the prophesied so many years ago by Keynes, the one for which the economy has fallen into such a deep spiral that the loose monetary policy is not the least effect possible.


 


 They also said the G20, in smoky statement that closed the proceedings: need for growth policies, because the monetary policy. alone is not enough. But who needs them these policies for growth? The countries where “there is fiscal space”: a way to give a shot at the rim (fiscal policies, ie reducing taxes or increasing spending, they serve) and a barrel (but does not have to make the countries that have already in deficit, for example, us). without doing anything to force those countries active on the public budget and trade – primarily Germany, which with its Minister Schaeuble has put his foot in Shanghai against every turn “expansionist” – to turn the page.

 


 So, we are once again waiting rabbit hanging that will pull out of the hat “ SuperMario “, the governor of the ECB, that March 10 will announce the continuation or strengthening of the monetary policy that the German hawks complain that it is too expansionist but, by all accounts, is not enough. A paradox. As is the formula

used by the governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, in commenting on the G20: there was “a revision of pessimism.”
 


 Correct their pessimism it does not mean yet to become optimistic.


 


  * co-director of Pagina99

 


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