Paul Krugman:
Origins of the Euro Crisis: Kash Mansori has an excellent post… documents the fact — which the Germans cannot bring themselves to acknowledge — that fiscal irresponsibility had very little to do with it. And he shows that what really predicts who found themselves in crisis was capital inflows…. I’d add that it is very difficult in real time to convince people that capital inflows pose a threat, no matter how obvious the numbers seem. Somewhere in the years just before the crisis I was at a meeting in Barcelona where Olivier Blanchard tried to tell the Spaniards how dangerous the situation was getting; he got trashed and ridiculed for his pains, just like those who warned about the US housing bubble.
Kash Mansouri:
The Street Light: What Really Caused the Eurozone Crisis?: [W]hile they didn’t necessarily make the right decision every time, the peripheral EZ countries were up against powerful exogenous forces - capital flow bonanzas and sudden stops - that tended to push them toward financial crisis. They were playing against a stacked deck.
It’s useful to reevaluate the macroeconomic history of peripheral Europe in light of this interpretation. Rather than large current account deficits being the result of fiscal mismanagement or excessive consumption, the current account deficits were the necessary and unavoidable counterpart to the surge in capital flows from the EZ core. Rather than above-average inflation rates and deteriorating competitiveness being signs of labor market inefficiencies or lax fiscal policies in the peripheral countries, appreciating real exchange rates were inevitable as the mechanism by which those current account deficits were effected.
The eurozone debt crisis is big enough that there's plenty of blame to go around, and some of it certainly should go to the crisis countries themselves. But it must also be recognized that as soon as those countries adopted the euro, powerful forces were set in motion that made a financial crisis likely, and very possibly unavoidable, no matter what the governments of the peripheral euro countries did. Irresponsible behavior by the periphery countries did not set the stage for the eurozone crisis; the common currency itself did.
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