euro: dez anos de idade e de durabilidade exemplar

“The euro at ten”

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“Demonstrably durable”

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“Europe’s single currency has been a haven in recent financial storms. But as capital markets become more discriminating, it no longer affords shelter from reform”

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“PAUL VOLCKER once likened global capital markets to a vast sea that cannot escape the occasional big storm. Mr Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve who is now an adviser to Barack Obama, counselled that when the waters got choppy, it was far safer to be on a big ship. A stately liner can sail serenely through turmoil that would capsize even the sturdiest small vessel.

Mr Volcker was speaking a few months after the collapse of the Thai baht set off the Asian financial crisis, and a few months before the launch of the euro, which celebrates its tenth anniversary on January 1st. A decade on, the euro has demonstrated the virtue of size in rough seas. As small economies were tossed by the financial storms that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, the currencies with global clout, such as the euro and the dollar, were the most stable.

In its first ten years the euro has come through several tests already. Claims that the currency zone would fall apart have proved groundless. Nor is the euro a soft currency, as some had feared. The European Central Bank’s (ECB) common monetary policy has drawn on the traditions of its best constituent central bank, the Bundesbank—and has produced an even better record of low inflation.

From the standpoint of economic stability, the euro has been a success. If there is cause for disappointment it is that sound money and the price transparency afforded by a common currency have not fostered faster economic growth. The hope when the euro was launched was that countries stripped of the licence to cheapen their currencies would be forced to compete directly, and that competition would beget more flexible markets and higher productivity. Yet there has been little improvement in the euro area’s underlying growth rate in the past ten years. Income per person has remained at around 70% of that in America.

Perhaps the euro has proved too safe a haven. Partly sheltered from the whims of fickle foreign capital, member states have been under less pressure to shape up. If that is true, the blame may not lie entirely with the single currency. The run-up to currency union and most of the euro’s first decade coincided with the Great Moderation, a period of economic stability and low inflation—and hence low interest rates—in the rich world. But investors who once underpriced risk are now charging heavily to bear it, which will affect companies and governments inside the euro’s embrace as well as beyond it. As budgetary laxity and weak growth become costlier, reforms are more likely.

The crisis has another legacy: despite the weakness of the dollar in recent weeks, the euro may struggle to challenge the greenback as the world’s main reserve currency. Lately, it is true, the euro has gained in value against the dollar—partly because the ECB seems reluctant to follow the Federal Reserve’s path to zero interest rates.

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(Lido em: The Economist, 30 de Dezembro de 2008)