Fiscal debt — what we should be aiming for

23 Feb, 2015 at 15:08 | Posted in Economics, Politics & Society | Comments Off on Fiscal debt — what we should be aiming for

 

Lynn Parramore: Do you think there are lessons in what has happened in the Eurozone for students of economics and the way the subject is taught?

Mario Seccareccia: Yes, indeed. Ever since the establishment of the modern nation-state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the creation of the euro was perhaps the first significant experiment in modern times in which there was an attempt to separate money from the state, that is, to denationalize currency, as some right-wing ideologues and founders of modern neoliberalism, such as Friedrich von Hayek, had defended. What the Eurozone crisis teaches is that this perception of how the monetary system works is quite wrong, because, in times of crisis, the democratic state must be able to spend money in order to meet its obligations to its citizens. The denationalization or “supra-nationalization” of money with the establishment that happened in the Eurozone took away from elected national governments the capacity to meaningfully manage their economies. Unless governments in the Eurozone are able to renegotiate a significant control and access money from their own central banks, the system will be continually plagued with crisis and will probably collapse in the longer term.

Lynn Parramore