Greece, EMU and Democracy

More on Greece from Antonio Fatas:

Greece, EMU and democracy: One more post on Greece, possibly not the last one.

Markets are more worried about what is going on and there is more and more talk about the possibility of and exit of Greece from the Euro area. As I have argued in my previous posts, exit will not be the choice of the Greek government, it will be the only solution for Greece as the ECB refuses to provide liquidity to Greek banks as depositors run to avoid capital losses on their Euro deposits in the scenario of Greece leaving the Euro.

Let me start by repeating (as I have expressed many times in this blog) that I find that the economic policies followed in Europe have been a disaster, that the suffering that countries such as Greece had to go through during the last years should not have taken place. And I am convinced that in many of these countries, austerity has produced higher debt-to-GDP ratios, as opposed to lower ones. A real disaster.

But this is not what this negotiation is going to be about. The reality is that the crisis has had an impact on the way we all see the experiment of sharing a single currency, the experiment of EMU. While in the early days we all talked about optimum currency areas, the synchronicity of business cycles, the absence of a fiscal transfer mechanism, what we now realize is that the real issue is how to handle a full-blown crisis that puts governments at the edge of default and creates bank runs among Euro countries (something that many l thought it was impossible). The role that the ECB plays in those circumstances is not the typical role a central bank plays and one cannot ignore the political aspects associated to the difficult decisions they face. ...