Mrs. Merkel needs parliamentary support to carry out decisions made more than two months ago in Brussels, and to bolster her case she met with the Greek prime minister, George A. Papandreou, on Tuesday evening in Berlin. It was a kind of morality play, intended to show to skeptical German voters how the Greek government intends to keep its promises to continue cutting public spending and services to meet stiff deficit requirements, despite increasing political opposition.
Mr. Papandreou spoke again of the “great will for change” in Greece, while Mrs. Merkel talked once more of her “confidence” that her wavering parliamentary coalition would vote on Thursday for an expansion of the European bailout fund, which was agreed to more than two months ago in Brussels.
By the time the entire process is finished, about mid-October if all goes well, Europe’s leaders will have a newly expanded European Financial Stability Facility that most analysts say will be, at $600 billion, grossly inadequate to extinguish the crisis, since it lacks the means to cope with the larger economies of Italy and Spain.
It seems another example of too little, too late on the part of the leaders of the 17-nation euro zone. But it is also another example of sharply differing analyses of the core problem of the euro, making a solution hard to reach.
The German analysis, shared by the Dutch and others in prosperous northern Europe, like the Finns, sees as the main problem the indiscipline and profligacy of others, especially in the south, like Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, which have run up high debts or fiscal deficits.
To rebuild confidence, this analysis says, the sinners must repent, restructure their economies and fix themselves. The road to redemption requires hard work, discipline, sacrifice and pain, even punishment for previous misbehavior.
Mr. Papandreou, acutely aware of this strain of thought and the threat it poses to Greece, sought on Tuesday to calm passions. “We must stop blaming each other for our different weaknesses and unite together with our different strengths,” he said in a speech to a business group in Berlin. “Even Germany depends on Europe, its biggest trading partner, for growth and jobs.”
The problem with the German analysis, notes Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform in London, is that it is not simply self-righteous, ignoring the bad loans German banks made to the troubled nations, but arguably wrong. It is “probably incompatible,” he added, with the survival of the euro zone, which all leaders insist is their aim.
Growth is the key, the counter-argument goes, not austerity.
Everyone agrees that countries like Greece need to cut their deficits. But if everyone is cutting at the same time, and in an uncoordinated way, the result may be a fierce economic contraction for Europe as a whole. And without growth, there is very little hope of getting out of the “debt trap,” whereby more cuts in government spending result in recession, lower tax receipts and larger deficits.
“If there is austerity everywhere, where is the engine for growth?” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, professor of economics at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. “If there is no consumption, no reason to invest, difficulty in accessing the credit market, where is the growth? The only engine that is functioning in this view is the engine of depression, and this will worsen the sovereign debt and deficit problem.”
The Germans and northerners, Mr. Fitoussi said, still believe that austerity and recession eventually will lead to stability, confidence and growth. “But there is no way what the Germans are saying can be true without divine intervention or a belief in miracles,” he said. “No austerity program can lead to growth in a period of discontinuity in the global economy and slowing economic activity everywhere.”
Mr. Fitoussi has just done a study of economic growth in France, which is currently nearly flat, and which will have a growth rate of about 0.8 percent in 2012 if little changes, he said. “But if all the countries in Europe follow this austerity program,” Mr. Fitoussi said, France also will fall into recession, and its economy will shrink by 1 percent.
Nicholas Kulish and Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/world/europe/europe-nears-agreement-on-bailout-fund-that-may-be-inadequate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss