For those of you in San Diego I wanted to call attention to a roundtable discussion this Friday March 6 on some of the ongoing concerns about European sovereign debt. I’ll be appearing along with Jeffrey Frieden from Harvard (who will be quite familiar to regular readers of Econbrowser) and David Leblang of the University of Virginia. Details on how to register for the event can be found here.
Why should the U.S. be concerned about the poor economic policies of foreign countries, when the U.S. has no control over them?
If the E.U. and China, for example, want more suboptimal growth, that shouldn’t be our problem.
1. Looking at the IMF data
http://de.slideshare.net/genauer/gd-pper-capita-in-ppp-us-versus-euroarea-germany
US growth is on par with the EuroGroup, Japan, and Germany sticks out
2. And some of the US & UK growth was probably bought with a much larger increase in government debt, please see
http://de.slideshare.net/genauer/sampler-of-gdp-and-other-data-emphasis-on-russia, page 3
3. Given that everybody in the Eurogroup, but Greece, enjoys substantially lower interest rates than the US,
e.g. http://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/government-bond-spreads
I find those american worries about Euro debt somewhat strange
4. Combining point 2 (lower government debt in the Eurogroup than in the US) and point 3 (for the large countries the interest rates are lower by 1.85% Germany (ahead of target to achieve 60% debt/GDP in 2018), 1.6% France, 0.95% Spain, 0.9% Italy)
the total interest burden in the Eurogroup will be quite significant 1.5% lower than for the US
5. Even a supposedly conservative nobel prize winner Phelps does not seem to be aware of the basic facts, when trotting out his arrogance in the Financial Times (FT)