Since the Middle Ages it has been known that there are two ways to subjugate a country: by the sword and by debt. Except for the Urals, the preferred modality in the West today is debt. Fifteen years ago, Berlin’s and Brussels’ response to the Great Recession was one of the biggest black magic operations in recent economic history: a financial crisis on the books, with banks gorged on toxic assets, was managed like a debt crisis. public with that union of “expansive austerity”. It was a kind of hopeful pain, based on contracting the economy to facilitate further expansion: a bad joke. It failed, of course, as crazy hallucinations often fail. Chancellor Merkel always thought that debt was “immoral”, “like robbing future generations” (Davos, 2006). And during the Great Crisis, he deliberately fostered uncertainty in the markets to subject the entire eurozone to his dictates, tampering with democratic customs when necessary: ”We will find ways to organize parliamentary decisions in a way that complies with the markets” (September 2011 , in the German Parliament). Her finance minister, the unforgettable Wolfgang Schäuble, went so far as to propose that Greece not hold elections; He has a great phrase: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.”
That was already 15 years ago. Over the last five years, however, it has seemed that the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, had learned their lesson.
But history repeats itself: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce. Another Moriarty to walk around the house has just appeared, the liberal Chirstian Lindner, Minister of Economy of the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, to star in that farce. Lindner tries to blow up Brussels’ effort to make fiscal rules a little less idiotic. The European Commission wants more flexible rules, agreed with the governments for the entire electoral cycle, with room to be able to invest in green energy and digital transition, and above all it wants to avoid that this charade of expansive austerity is ever repeated. Lindner signs a document that seeks to cut off almost all the flexibility elements of the European proposal: he wants to “restrict discretionary room for manoeuvre”, “limit exceptions”, “maintain excessive deficit procedures”. Biblical translation: he plans to continue handling the scissors as he pleases. And the icing on the cake: make sure that the most indebted euro partners reduce public debt by at least 1% of GDP per year. Come rain or shine: in expansionary phases and in recessions, the objective is always to cut back. Why 1%? Nobody knows. A decade ago it was said that any country that exceeded the debt threshold of 90% of GDP was doomed; the academic paper on which that magic figure was based was an Excel spreadsheet riddled with errors. Lindner does not even have that Excel sheet: the argument is a pure ideological intoxication, of the so-called ordoliberalism, a kind of neoliberalism based on corset-rules that, curiously, always end up benefiting Germany. Instead of flexible, country-specific rules, Berlin is once again designing a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. German economic thought is reminiscent of the characteristic trait attributed to the Bourbons, neither learning nor forgetting. But further south it is difficult not to remember that pig in a poke from 2008: thousands of people suffered for no reason from the wrong recipes.
The hawks are circling the eurozone again. We’ll see who wins this time, because the triumph of German ideas would be catastrophic. The economic jargon has a word that defines this type of ideas: with them we would once again have “procyclical” economic policies. Procícilicas is a fine way of saying stupid.
Final coda: words are never innocent. The Germans use the same lexical root, schuld, for debt and for guilt. But in Italian, in Spanish and even in English, credito comes from the Latin root of belief, I will believe. At this crossroads of etymologies are the two conceptions of the EU: the two souls of Europe.
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