欧元忠实拥护者倒戈之谜

    近日，我们听到了许多说法，称欧洲已经步入缓慢复苏阶段、足以拯救欧元。所以，当过去四十年中全球最顶尖的经济学家之一兼欧元拥护者告诉我他改变了主意时，我感到很惊讶。这位叫罗伯特•艾力伯的专家说：“我所谓的‘条顿欧洲’和‘拉丁欧洲’分裂成至少两个货币区的可能性比以往任何时候都要大。”艾力伯如今已经从芝加哥大学（University of Chicago）布斯商学院（Booth School of Business）退休。多年前，我曾有幸在那里聆听过他的教诲。

    艾力伯被学生们亲切地以首字母 “RZA”相称，请大家重视他的观点。他曾成功预测了2007年年中冰岛的悲剧，而世界银行（the World Bank）和国际货币基金组织（IMF）的专家们当时还浑然不知。他回忆道：“冰岛那时负债水平极高，贸易赤字极大。政府只得不停借贷来偿还已有贷款的利息。”鉴于艾力伯在冰岛问题上的远见卓识，作家迈克尔•刘易斯在畅销书《自食其果》（Boomerang）中对他大加赞赏。

    艾力伯引用了两个观点来说明他为什么对欧元越来越悲观。其一是欧盟决定不惜一切代价把希腊留在欧元区。艾力伯说：“这是个可怕的错误。”他说，希腊自2001年成为欧元国起就极度缺乏竞争力。“为了加入欧元区，希腊捏造数据以隐瞒自身问题。它利用虚假合约抹去了官方账目中的许多债务。”他表示，当初希腊在2010年初开始出现不可避免的崩溃时，欧盟就应当强迫它退出。“由于捏造了数据，希腊商品起初就定价过高，之后依然只升不降。一旦退出，希腊就能重新定价了。”脱离欧元区原本有希望提高希腊出口和旅游业的竞争力，还能避免艾力伯所说的“类似美国大萧条的境况”。

    第二个因素是他所说的北部“条顿”欧洲和南部“拉丁”欧洲的“不均衡格局”。德国、奥地利、芬兰和荷兰通过向南部邻国出售大量汽车和计算机，产生了大量贸易顺差。法国、西班牙、意大利和葡萄牙的产品与北部的出口商品相比过于昂贵，因此出现了大量贸易逆差。艾力伯说：“拉丁欧洲的贸易逆差不会消失。法国的债务只会越积越多。德国的出口业生机勃勃，法国则不然。”

    艾力伯称，过去，缩小竞争力差距的办法是货币贬值。“法国货币每10年就贬值一次，使它的产品成本与德国保持一致。”值得一提的是，对于欧元的基本原理，许多负责任的经济学家曾认为，货币贬值是一根拐杖，在统一货币的压力下，法国和意大利为谋求竞争发展，将会被迫压缩过度增长的工资和福利。但这种状况并未发生，相反，这些国家在2005年前后经济景气时，隐瞒了借贷过多的开支问题。艾力伯认为：“高水平的住房支出和大量财政赤字抵消了原本可能出现的高失业率。不过能借的钱也就这么多了，之后竞争力缺乏的问题就会越来越明显，然后高失业率便不可避免了。”          

    We're hearing a lot of talk these days about how Europe is staging a modest recovery that's sufficient to save the euro. So I was surprised when one of the top international economists of the past four decades, and a former euro-fan, told me that he's changed his view. "The chances are higher than ever that the what I call Teutonic Europe and Latin Europe will split into at least two currency zones," says Robert Aliber, now retired from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where I was privileged to have him as a teacher many years ago.

    Pay attention to Aliber, affectionately known by his initials "RZA" to his students. He predicted the disaster in Iceland in mid-2007, when the experts at the World Bank and IMF were still asleep. "Iceland was suffering from a very high level of indebtedness and very large trade deficits," recalls Aliber. "They got the money to pay the interest in the form of new loans." For his foresight in Iceland, Aliber won plaudits from Michel Lewis in his bestseller Boomerang.

    Aliber cites two factors for his growing pessimism on the euro. The first is the EU's decision to keep Greece in the common currency at all costs. "That was a dreadful mistake," says Aliber. Greece, he says, was highly uncompetitive as a euro-member from its entry at the start of 2001. "Greece fudged the data to hide its problems in order to join the euro," says Aliber. "It used sham contracts to get lots of its debt officially off its books." He says that when the inevitable collapse began in early 2010, the EU should have forced Greece to exit, "So that its prices, which were set too high at the start because of the fudged data and only got higher, would be reset." A euro-escape would have made Greece's exports and tourist industry far more competitive, and avoided what Aliber calls "A situation resembling our Great Depression."

    The second force is what he calls "the pattern of imbalances" between the northern "Teutonic" and southern, or "Latin," zones. Germany, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands are all running big trade surplus by selling lots of cars and computers to their southern neighbors. France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are running big trade deficits because their products are just too costly to compete with exports from the north. "The Latin trade deficits will not go away," says Aliber. "France's indebtedness will only increase. Germany has a vibrant export sector, France does not."

    In the past, he says, the solution to the competitiveness gap was devaluation. "France would devalue every 10 years to get its costs in line with Germany's," says Aliber. It's worth noting that the rationale for the euro among responsible economists held that devaluation was a crutch, and that under the pressure of a single currency, France and Italy would be forced to restrain excessive wage and benefit growth to compete. It didn't happen, instead those countries papered over their cost problem with big borrowings when times were flush in the mid-2000s. "High levels of housing expenditures and large fiscal deficits offset what would otherwise would have been high levels of unemployment," argues Aliber. "But you can only borrow so much, and then the lack of competitiveness became clear and led to the high unemployment that was inevitable."