Man muss immer und immer wieder dankbar dafür sein, in welcher Klarheit Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger Paul Krugman Tag für Tag manche Dinge klarstellt. Dass die Euro-Staaten deshalb in einer Krise seien, weil sie „über ihre Verhältnisse“ gelebt und hemmungslos Schulden gemacht haben, ist ein Ideologenmärchen. Das heißt nicht, nur um nicht mißverstanden zu werden, dass hohe Staatsschuldenstände irgendwie irrelevant oder gar erstrebenswert seien, aber wer behauptet, die Probleme der Euro-Zonen-Länder auf den Finanzmärkten hätten primär mit den hohen Staatsschuldenständen zu tun, der versteht einfach nichts von der Materie. Warum das so ist, habe ich unlängst hier dargelegt. Krugman schreibt dazu nun in seiner jüngsten Kolumne in der New York Times:
First, if you look around the world you see that the big determining factor for interest rates isn’t the level of government debt but whether a government borrows in its own currency. Japan is much more deeply in debt than Italy, but the interest rate on long-term Japanese bonds is only about 1 percent to Italy’s 7 percent. Britain’s fiscal prospects look worse than Spain’s, but Britain can borrow at just a bit over 2 percent, while Spain is paying almost 6 percent.
What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies. In particular, since euro-area countries can’t print money even in an emergency, they’re subject to funding disruptions in a way that nations that kept their own currencies aren’t — and the result is what you see right now. America, which borrows in dollars, doesn’t have that problem.
The other thing you need to know is that in the face of the current crisis, austerity has been a failure everywhere it has been tried: no country with significant debts has managed to slash its way back into the good graces of the financial markets. For example, Ireland is the good boy of Europe, having responded to its debt problems with savage austerity that has driven its unemployment rate to 14 percent. Yet the interest rate on Irish bonds is still above 8 percent — worse than Italy.
The nations now in crisis don’t have bigger welfare states than the nations doing well — if anything, the correlation runs the other way. Sweden, with its famously high benefits, is a star performer, one of the few countries whose G.D.P. is now higher than it was before the crisis. Meanwhile, before the crisis, „social expenditure“ — spending on welfare-state programs — was lower, as a percentage of national income, in all of the nations now in trouble than in Germany, let alone Sweden.
Mit einem Wort: Glaubt den Ideologen kein Wort, die behaupten, man müsse nur dieses und jenes einsparen, dann würde wieder Frieden mit den Märkten herrschen – und umgekehrt, wenn nicht dies und jenes weggestrichen würde, dann drohe das Schlimmste.