Wednesday, April 28, 2010

No FDIC in the Eurozone

Austrians, Libertarians, Gold Bugs, and Keynesians -- you wanted a gold standard and you can see one in action in the Eurozone! Each European Country has a central bank, but there is no Treasury function, and thus no ability to increase net private sector financial assets to avoid a Depression. It's as if the US kept the Fed, eliminated the Treasury, and decided that each State was on its own.

Almost key graph:
One member of the audience, though, had a really good question: what happens to the European system of sovereign guarantees of interbank lending? When those sovereign guarantees aren’t worth much any more, Euribor is likely to spike, since suddenly there’s a lot more credit risk involved in interbank lending. And there are hundreds of trillions of euros of debt contracts linked to Euribor, which could suddenly get very expensive and take control of short-term interest rates out of the hands of the ECB.
Correct, which is what happened to Lehman. It misses the mark though by not wondering about deposit insurance which cannot be credibly supplied in today's Eurozone.

That is correct -- the EU has no deposit insurance. It's almost enough to stock up on Gold.

1 Comments:

Blogger RomeoStevens said...

so failure isn't papered over....isn't this a good thing? would it be better for greece's untenable economic policies to continue indefinitely?

deposit insurance faces the same problem as the banks do in liquidity traps, it just moves the problem one step higher on the ladder.

2:22 AM  

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