Wolfgang Schäuble leaves the position of finance minister in the German government which he held since 2009. A passionate Europeanist, he was also the bearer of a conception of the monetary union that almost decreed its end, attributing the instability of the markets to fiscal incontinence , where the main cause was the lack of a lender of last resort on the government securities market. The austerity policies in 2011-12 and the fiscal compact are children of that vision; have plunged many European countries into a second recession, after the already dramatic one following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which produced extremely high social costs. The confrontation between creditors and debtors within the eurozone has fueled growing opposition to Europe and populist movements.
He leaves his par, with a document of a few small pages distributed to the Eurogroup in which he increases the dose. The completion of the monetary union can be achieved, but only if the individual responsibility of countries for their sovereign debts is put at the centre. Therefore, he proposes to change the role of the European Stability Mechanism (the State-saving Fund, as it is sometimes called), assigning it the role of both crisis prevention, with direct powers of intervention on national budgets divergent from the objective of equilibrium, and monitoring of the Stability Pact (putting out the Commission, now judged to be unreliable). He also wants a preventive mechanism for the automatic restructuring of the sovereign debt of countries that have to resort to the Mechanism and the introduction of risk coefficients that penalize the bank debt portfolios of their own sovereign. No common budget, no common countercyclical mechanisms, no common deposit insurance.
If this is the design, it is clear that the eurozone is starting to face new crises and that this time the affected country would not be Greece, but perhaps Italy or Spain. The hypothesis of the dissolution of the system would not be farfetched. While respecting his personal integrity and consistency, therefore, one cannot regret his passage to another position. Knowing, however, that his influence will remain important even from the new position, which is that of president of the Bundestag. Who had obtained special powers from his Budget Commission in granting loans to countries in difficulty. And also knowing that the new finance minister may not be very different in approach.
Source: inpiu.net
