Die Steinbrück – Krugman – Kontroverse

Peer Steinbrück, Finanzminister mit Rückgrat, erläuterte in einem Interview mit Newsweek am 6. Dezember die ablehnende deutsche Position zu einem großen kreditfinanzierten und neuverschuldungswirksamen Konjunkturstützungsprogramm.

Paul Krugman, sozialdemokratisch orientierter Ökonom und diesjähriger Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger, kommentierte am 11. Dezember Steinbrücks Interview in seinem New York Times-Blog – und nahm dabei wahrlich kein Blatt vor den Mund:

There’s an extraordinary — and extraordinarily depressing — interview in Newsweek with Peer Steinbrueck, the Germany finance minister. The world economy is in a terrifying nosedive, visible everywhere. Yet Mr. Steinbrueck is standing firm against any extraordinary fiscal measures, and denounces Gordon Brown for his “crass Keynesianism.”

You might ask why we should care. Germany’s economy is the biggest in Europe, but even so it only accounts for about a fifth of EU GDP, and it’s only about a quarter the size of the US economy. So how much does German intransigence matter?

The answer is that the nature of the crisis, combined with the high degree of European economic integration, gives Germany a special strategic role right now — and Mr. Steinbrueck is therefore doing a remarkable amount of damage.

Here’s the issue: we’re rapidly heading toward a world in which monetary policy has little or no traction: T-bill rates in the US are already zero, and near-zero rate will prevail in the euro zone quite soon. Fiscal policy is all that’s left. But in Europe it’s very hard to do a fiscal expansion unless it’s coordinated.

The reason is that the European economy is so integrated: European countries on average spend around a quarter of their GDP on imports from each other. Since imports tend to rise or fall faster than GDP during a business cycle, this probably means that something like 40 percent of any change in final demand “leaks” across borders within Europe. As a result, the multiplier on fiscal policy within any given European country is much less than the multiplier on a coordinated fiscal expansion. And that in turn means that the tradeoff between deficits and supporting the economy in a time of trouble is much less favorable for any one European country than for Europe as a whole.

It is, in short, a classic example of the kind of situation in which policy coordination is essential — but you won’t get coordination if policymakers in the biggest European economy refuse to go along.

And if Germany prevents an effective European response, this adds significantly to the severity of the global downturn.

In short, there’s a huge multiplier effect at work; unfortunately, what it’s doing is multiplying the impact of the current German government’s boneheadedness.

13. Dez. 2008: In einem Interview mit dem „Spiegel“ legt Krugman noch einmal nach. „Sie (Steinbrück und Merkel) denken immer noch in den Kategorien einer Welt, wie sie vor ein oder zwei Jahren zu sein schien, mit Inflation und Defiziten als größter Gefahr. Die Folge: Sie verkennen den Ernst der Wirtschaftskrise und verschwenden so wertvolle Zeit – für Deutschland und für Europa. (…) Vielleicht fehlt ihnen intellektuelle Beweglichkeit.“

Holger Schmieding, Chefvolkswirt für Europa der Bank of America, äußert in seinem Kommentar in der Financial Times am 8. Dezember erheblich mehr Verständnis für die deutsche Position: „Calls for a German fiscal stimulus defy logic“.

Die Wirtschaftskrise mit Inflation bekämpfen

Das fordern immer mehr Fachleute, und es ist schon in vollem Gange: „Das größte Wirtschaftsexperiment aller Zeiten“ nennt die Münchner Finanzwoche in ihrer neusten Ausgabe die gegenwärtigen  „gigantischen Re-Inflationierungsbemühungen“ der Notenbanken. Die Finanzwoche ist einer der wenigen Wirtschafts- und Börsenbriefe, die seit Jahren vor den dramatischen Folgen einer überbordenden Verschuldung, vorwiegend infolge der langanhaltenden Politik des leichten Geldes (Greenspan), gewarnt haben.

Der bitische Guardian veröffentlichte am 2. Dezember 2008 einen Kommentar des Harvard-Ökonomen Kenneth Rogoff, in dem auch dieser sich für eine bewusst herbeigeführte Inflation ausspricht: „This once-in-a-lifetime global economic recession requires a unique response. Inflation is needed to combat the crisis.“

Hier die wichtigsten Ausschnitte:

„It is time for the world’s major central banks to acknowledge that a sudden burst of moderate inflation would be extremely helpful in unwinding today’s epic debt morass. (…)

Modern finance has succeeded in creating a default dynamic of such stupefying complexity that it defies standard approaches to debt workouts. Securitisation, structured finance and other innovations have so interwoven the financial system’s various players that it is essentially impossible to restructure one financial institution at a time. System-wide solutions are needed.

Moderate inflation in the short run – say, 6% for two years – would not clear the books. But it would significantly ameliorate the problems, making other steps less costly and more effective.

True, once the inflation genie is let out of the bottle, it could take several years to put it back in. No one wants to relive the anti-inflation fights of the 1980s and 1990s. But right now, the global economy is teetering on the precipice of disaster. We already have a full-blown global recession. Unless governments get ahead of the problem, we risk a severe worldwide downturn unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s.

The necessary policy actions involve aggressive macroeconomic stimulus. Fiscal policy should ideally focus on tax cuts and infrastructure spending. Central banks are already cutting interest rates left and right. Policy interest rates around the world are likely to head toward zero; the United States and Japan are already there. The United Kingdom and the euro zone will eventually decide to go most of the way.