It doesn’t seem to be helping. Their economies are still tumbling, and the debt continues to grow. The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has just downgraded the sovereign-debt ratings of nine eurozone countries, including France. The United Kingdom is likely to follow.
To anyone not blinded by folly, the explanation for this mass downgrade is obvious. If you deliberately aim to shrink your GDP, your debt-to-GDP ratio is bound to grow. The only way to cut your debt (other than by default) is to get your economy to grow.
Fear of debt is rooted in human nature; so the extinction of it as a policy aim seems right to the average citizen. Everyone knows what financial debt means: money owed, often borrowed. To be in debt can produce anxiety if one is uncertain whether, when the time comes, one will be able to repay what one owes.
This anxiety is readily transferred to national debt – the debt owed by a government to its creditors. How, people ask, will governments repay all of the hundreds of billions of dollars that they owe? As British Prime Minister David Cameron put it: “Government debt is the same as credit-card debt; it’s got to be paid back.”
The next step readily follows: in order to repay, or at least reduce, the national debt, the government must eliminate its budget deficit, because the excess of spending over revenue continually adds to the national debt. Indeed, if the government fails to act, the national debt will become, in today’s jargon, “unsustainable.”
Again, an analogy with household debt readily suggests itself. My death does not extinguish my debt, reasons the sensible citizen. My creditors will have the first claim on my estate – everything that I wanted to leave to my children. Similarly, a debt left unpaid too long by a government is a burden on future generations: I may enjoy the benefits of government extravagance, but my children will have to foot the bill.
That is why deficit reduction is at the center of most governments’ fiscal policy today. A government with a “credible” plan for “fiscal consolidation” supposedly is less likely to default on its debt, or leave it for the future to pay. This will, it is thought, enable the government to borrow money more cheaply than it would otherwise be able to do, in turn lowering interest rates for private borrowers, which should boost economic activity. So fiscal consolidation is the royal road to economic recovery.
This, the official doctrine of most developed countries today, contains at least five major fallacies, which pass largely unnoticed, because the narrative is so plausible.
First, governments, unlike private individuals, do not have to “repay” their debts. A government of a country with its own central bank and its own currency can simply continue to borrow by printing the money which is lent to it. This is not true of countries in the eurozone. But their governments do not have to repay their debts, either. If their (foreign) creditors put too much pressure on them, they simply default. Default is bad. But life after default goes on much as before.
Second, deliberately cutting the deficit is not the best way for a government to balance its books. Deficit reduction in a depressed economy is the road not to recovery, but to contraction, because it means cutting the national income on which the government’s revenues depend. This will make it harder, not easier, for it to cut the deficit. The British government already must borrow £112 billion ($172 billion) more than it had planned when it announced its deficit-reduction plan in June 2010.
Third, the national debt is not a net burden on future generations. Even if it gives rise to future tax liabilities (and some of it will), these will be transfers from taxpayers to bond holders. This may have disagreeable distributional consequences. But trying to reduce it now will be a net burden on future generations: income will be lowered immediately, profits will fall, pension funds will be diminished, investment projects will be canceled or postponed, and houses, hospitals, and schools will not be built. Future generations will be worse off, having been deprived of assets that they might otherwise have had.
Fourth, there is no connection between the size of national debt and the price that a government must pay to finance it. The interest rates that Japan, the United States, the UK, and Germany pay on their national debt are equally low, despite vast differences in their debt levels and fiscal policies.
Finally, low borrowing costs for governments do not automatically reduce the cost of capital for the private sector. After all, corporate borrowers do not borrow at the “risk-free” yield of, say, US Treasury bonds, and evidence shows that monetary expansion can push down the interest rate on government debt, but have hardly any effect on new bank lending to firms or households. In fact, the causality is the reverse: the reason why government interest rates in the UK and elsewhere are so low is that interest rates for private-sector loans are so high.
As with “the specter of Communism” that haunted Europe in Karl Marx’s famous manifesto, so today “[a]ll the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise” the specter of national debt. But statesmen who aim to liquidate the debt should recall another famous specter – the specter of revolution.
Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is
Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick
University.
Robert Skidelsky: 歐洲債務會變成革命嗎？
歐洲上空飄蕩著債務的幽靈。這個幽靈令所有歐洲領導人心驚膽寒。為了把它趕走，他們正在把各自的經濟推向磨難。
但這一招似乎並不顯靈。他們的經濟仍然蹣跚，而債務並沒有停止增長。評級機構標准普爾剛剛下調了歐元區九國主權債務評級，法國赫然在列。英國很可能將步其後塵。
如果你還沒有被愚昧蒙蔽了雙眼，那麼這次大面積降級的原因就很容易看清。如果你有意要讓GDP下降，那麼你的債務/GDP占比必定會隨之上升。削減債務，除了違約之外，唯一的辦法就是讓經濟增長起來。
擔心債務乃是人類本能；因此，消滅債務的政策目標在普通公民眼中斷然是不會錯的。眾所周知，財務債務的意思是欠錢，通常是借來的錢。如果你對到時候無法償還所欠的錢感到不確定，那麼你的債務就會讓你產生焦慮。
這種焦慮已經轉移到了國民債務層面，也就是政府欠其債權人的債務。人們會問，政府將如何償還它們所欠下的數千億美元債務？正如英國首相卡梅倫所言：“政府債務和信用卡債務是一樣，遲早要還的。”
接下來出現的是，為了償還（或至少減少）國民債務，政府必須消除其預算赤字，因為支出超過收入會繼續增加國民債務。事實上，如果政府行動不力，那麼國民債務將變得——用今天的行話講——“不可持續”。
在這裡，仍然可以用家庭債務來類比。我的逝世並不會讓我的債務消失，稍有頭腦的公民都知道這一點。我的債權人將擁有對我的財產——即我准備遺留給子孫後代的所有東西——的第一索償權。類似地，政府長期未能償還的債務也將成為子孫後代的負擔：我可以從政府的鋪張浪費中獲得好處，這得由我的子孫後代買單。
這就是為什麼削減債務成為大多數政府財政政策的核心。一個具有“可信”的“財政整合”計劃的政府想必不太會對其債務違約，或把它留給未來去償還。人們認為，這能讓政府以更低的成本借到錢，反過來拉低私人借款人的利率，從而能夠提振經濟活動。於是，財政整合就成了經濟復蘇的不二法門。
這便是如今大多數發達國家的指導方針，但其中至少有五大漏洞，而由於財政整合說聽起來無懈可擊，因此這五大漏洞很少有人注意到。
首先，政府不同於個人，其債務並不是必須“償還”的。擁有本國中央銀行的政府可以通過印刷本國貨幣借給自己。這一點對歐元區國家是不成立的。但這些國家的政府也不是必須“償還”其債務的。如果（外國）債權人給它們施加太多的壓力，它們可以選擇違約。違約絕不是好事。但違約之後的日子並不會比不違約差。
其次，刻意削減赤字並不是政府平衡預算的最佳方式。在經濟蕭條時削減赤字絕非復蘇之路，反之，恰恰是收縮之路，因為這意味著連同政府收入所依賴的國民收入一起削減了。
這會讓赤字削減變得更困難而不是更容易。英國政府於2010年6月宣布赤字削減計劃，但現在，它所必須借入的資金規模比計劃中多了1120億英鎊。
第三，國民債務並不是子孫後代的淨負擔。盡管這會提高未來稅收負擔，但這一負擔會從納稅人手中轉移到債權人那裡。這可能會造成令人不快的分配後果。現在試圖削減國民債務將給子孫後代造成淨負擔：收入會馬上出現下降，利潤會縮水，退休基金規模會不足，投資項目會被取消或中止，住房、醫院、學校也將無法建設。未來政府的境況會因此更加糟糕，因為它們失去了本可以留在手中的資產。
第四，國民債務規模和政府融資成本之間並沒有多少聯系。日本、美國、英國和德國的國民債務償還成本一樣低，盡管它們的債務水平和財政政策相差極大。
最後，政府借債的低成本並不會自動拉低私人部門的資本成本。畢竟，公司借款人不可能以像美國國債那樣的“無風險”收益率借錢，有證據表明，貨幣擴張可以拉低政府債務的利率，但很難影響銀行向公司和家庭發放的新貸款的利率。事實上，這裡的因果關系正好相反：英國和其他地區的政府利率之所以如此之低，是因為私人部門貸款利率太高了。
馬克思著名的《共產黨宣言中》中說道，“共產主義的幽靈”游蕩在歐洲上空，而如今，“就歐洲的所有勢力已經結成了一個神聖同盟，驅逐國民債務的幽靈”。但意在清除債務的政客們應該記住另一個著名的幽靈——革命的幽靈。
作者為英國上議院議員，華威大學政治經濟學榮休教授
