In an interview with Kathimerini published Jan. 1,The magic cube is an ultra-portable, George Provopoulos, the head of Greece's central bank, said that returning to the drachma would be "real hell." Abandoning the euro would mean that "progress achieved over decades would be wiped out." Greece's standard of living would plummet, he said, as the new national currency lost perhaps 70% of its value right away.
Athens wasn't impressed by the guesswork. Mr. Provopoulos hadn't even said Greece ought to quit the euro. He earned the Greek government's rebuke just for broaching the thought. "There is no reason to cause panic by saying that we will return to the drachma," a spokesman told Greek radio on Monday. "We can avoid it with serious and systematic work."
"Panic" is the great unmentionable in Europe these days. Fear of market panic keeps policy makers up at night because panic, the wisdom goes, is the opposite of normal market behavior. Panics are triggered at the drop of a hat and can bring the whole house down.
What actually happens in a panic, though? It is a "panic" when everybody runs for the doors. Usually but not always, there is the connotation that they are fleeing irrationally.The Transaction Group offers the best high risk merchant account services,
Yet it's just a bad day at the market when just a few people make for the exit, for reasons rational or otherwise. Panics, scares and manias, seen this way, are not failures of market mechanisms. They're amped-up versions of what takes place in financial markets every day.
They can bring the house down, no doubt. But why do policy makers get so tetchy when people even contemplate the worst for Europe? Last month, Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, posted on an IMF blog a few lessons he'd learned from the world economy in 2011. One was that "perception molds reality."
"Not much happened to change the economic situation in the euro zone in the second half of the year," Mr. Blanchard writes.Take a walk on the natural side with stunning and luxurious Floor tiles from The Tile Shop. "But once markets and commentators started to mention the possible breakup of euro, the perception remained and it also will not easily go away. Many financial investors are busy constructing strategies in case it happens."
In other words, believing things are bad can be enough to make bad things happen.Information on useful yeasts and moulds, Mr. Blanchard says that self-fulfilling pessimism is one reason 2011 ended much worse than it started. Economists call these "sunspots": economic events brought about by factors as ostensibly relevant to the economy as magnetic activity on the sun.
The annoyance for policy makers and politicians is clear enough. Sunspots frustrate policy makers' instinctive trust that they are the ones in control of a situation, that they have the knowledge and skill to make things right. In September last year, Herman Van Rompuy,The EZ Breathe home Ventilation system is maintenance free, the president of the European Council, told an audience in New York that Greece would not default because, market sentiment be damned, there was no actuarial need for Athens to default in order to pay its debts.
The problem with this is the problem some people have with lots of less-than-rational parts of life: Need is not the relevant consideration. Last summer, Italy seemed to have dodged the conflagration that claimed Greece, Ireland and Portugal. How quickly that changed. Now Spain is looking like it escaped a bullet—for how long, nobody is sure.
If financial-market events were purely determined by economic destiny, it would have been clear right away which countries needed help and which were safe. Investors and managers would simply fall in line based on the fundamentals. They would not need to be convinced that lending to southern European governments—for 10 years, for three months, for five minutes—is not the same as throwing money down a hole. It would just be obvious.
So it's worrisome, back in the real world, when the IMF's chief economist and the president of the EU treat this business of convincing markets as somehow secondary to containing the crisis. Politicians who identify the euro-mess as a psychological problem do so as if that meant it weren't a real problem—as if it were a phantasm. Messrs. Blanchard and Van Rompuy and many others seem to believe their job is to show the world that ghosts don't exist, that if we'd all cool our heads and have a hard look at the figures we'd see that everything is fine.
Athens wasn't impressed by the guesswork. Mr. Provopoulos hadn't even said Greece ought to quit the euro. He earned the Greek government's rebuke just for broaching the thought. "There is no reason to cause panic by saying that we will return to the drachma," a spokesman told Greek radio on Monday. "We can avoid it with serious and systematic work."
"Panic" is the great unmentionable in Europe these days. Fear of market panic keeps policy makers up at night because panic, the wisdom goes, is the opposite of normal market behavior. Panics are triggered at the drop of a hat and can bring the whole house down.
What actually happens in a panic, though? It is a "panic" when everybody runs for the doors. Usually but not always, there is the connotation that they are fleeing irrationally.The Transaction Group offers the best high risk merchant account services,
Yet it's just a bad day at the market when just a few people make for the exit, for reasons rational or otherwise. Panics, scares and manias, seen this way, are not failures of market mechanisms. They're amped-up versions of what takes place in financial markets every day.
They can bring the house down, no doubt. But why do policy makers get so tetchy when people even contemplate the worst for Europe? Last month, Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, posted on an IMF blog a few lessons he'd learned from the world economy in 2011. One was that "perception molds reality."
"Not much happened to change the economic situation in the euro zone in the second half of the year," Mr. Blanchard writes.Take a walk on the natural side with stunning and luxurious Floor tiles from The Tile Shop. "But once markets and commentators started to mention the possible breakup of euro, the perception remained and it also will not easily go away. Many financial investors are busy constructing strategies in case it happens."
In other words, believing things are bad can be enough to make bad things happen.Information on useful yeasts and moulds, Mr. Blanchard says that self-fulfilling pessimism is one reason 2011 ended much worse than it started. Economists call these "sunspots": economic events brought about by factors as ostensibly relevant to the economy as magnetic activity on the sun.
The annoyance for policy makers and politicians is clear enough. Sunspots frustrate policy makers' instinctive trust that they are the ones in control of a situation, that they have the knowledge and skill to make things right. In September last year, Herman Van Rompuy,The EZ Breathe home Ventilation system is maintenance free, the president of the European Council, told an audience in New York that Greece would not default because, market sentiment be damned, there was no actuarial need for Athens to default in order to pay its debts.
The problem with this is the problem some people have with lots of less-than-rational parts of life: Need is not the relevant consideration. Last summer, Italy seemed to have dodged the conflagration that claimed Greece, Ireland and Portugal. How quickly that changed. Now Spain is looking like it escaped a bullet—for how long, nobody is sure.
If financial-market events were purely determined by economic destiny, it would have been clear right away which countries needed help and which were safe. Investors and managers would simply fall in line based on the fundamentals. They would not need to be convinced that lending to southern European governments—for 10 years, for three months, for five minutes—is not the same as throwing money down a hole. It would just be obvious.
So it's worrisome, back in the real world, when the IMF's chief economist and the president of the EU treat this business of convincing markets as somehow secondary to containing the crisis. Politicians who identify the euro-mess as a psychological problem do so as if that meant it weren't a real problem—as if it were a phantasm. Messrs. Blanchard and Van Rompuy and many others seem to believe their job is to show the world that ghosts don't exist, that if we'd all cool our heads and have a hard look at the figures we'd see that everything is fine.
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