It is an interesting world when a super rich financier is more radical than our Labour Party – or indeed any European socialist Party. Here is a snippet of George Soros’s new warnings for the Eurozone and a radical plan to solve it in Social Europe Journal. The fiscal integration required is very worrying though.
”The member states have transferred their seignorage rights to the ECB, and the ECB is currently earning about €25 billion ($32.7 billion) annually. The seignorage rights have been estimated by Willem Buiter of Citibank and Huw Pill of Goldman Sachs, working independently, to be worth between €2-3 trillion, because they will yield more as the economy grows and interest rates return to normal. A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) owning the rights could use the ECB to finance the cost of acquiring the bonds without violating Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty.
Should a country violate the fiscal compact, it would wholly or partly forfeit its reward and be obliged to pay interest on the debt owned by the SPV. That would impose tough fiscal discipline, indeed.
By rewarding good behavior, the fiscal compact would no longer constitute a deflationary debt trap, and the outlook would radically improve. In addition, to narrow the competitiveness gap, all members should be able to refinance their existing debt at the same interest rate. But that would require greater fiscal integration, so it would have to be phased in gradually.
The Bundesbank will never accept these proposals, but the European authorities ought to take them seriously. The future of Europe is a political issue, and thus is beyond the Bundesbank’s competence to decide. Link to full article
