It was hard to know therefore how to interpret the post-1999 flow of capital within the
eurozone from high to low per capita income and productivity countries. Blanchard and
Giavazzi (2002) noted early on that while savings–investment correlations fell sharply
with the advent of the euro, there existed two quite different interpretations of the
associated intra-eurozone imbalances. The positive interpretation was that investment
finance was flowing to the low-income countries of the eurozone periphery because they
were the economies with the most scope for rapid productivity growth. The negative
interpretation in contrast saw capital as flowing toward problem countries riddled by
domestic distortions – bubble-driven asset booms, excessive budget deficits and unrealistic
expectations of future growth – and resulting in excessive levels of public- andprivate-sector consumption, rather than the putative investment boom. Alan Walters
(1986) had warned of this possibility long before the advent of monetary union: he pointed
to the danger that the low-income countries of the European periphery with relatively high
inflation rates but now suddenly the same nominal interest rates as their high-income
partners would ‘enjoy’ relatively low real interest rates, giving them every incentive to
borrow, whether for reasons good or bad.In fact, already a decade ago there were a number of disturbing anomalies that, with
benefit of hindsight, should have attracted more attention. First, there was little rise in
investment rates at the eurozone periphery. There was little evidence that the investment
rate had become a more strongly increasing function of the per capita income gap. Second,
when that rise in investment eventually came, much of it took the form of residential
construction, which did little to enhance productivity growth. Third, already in 2002 there
were signs of real exchange rate appreciation and real overvaluation at the eurozone
periphery. There were signs, in other words, that differential inflation rates exceeded what
could be explained by the Balassa-Samuelson effect (the tendency for the prices of
nontraded goods to rise more rapidly in fast-growing catch-up economies and hence for
the overall inflation rate to be higher). Fourth, saving seemed to decline in the countries
of the eurozone periphery more rapidly than could be explained by the positive wealth
effect of lower interest rates and the positive income effects of faster growth due to the
freer availability of foreign finance.6
With hindsight, we are led to ask: why was more attention not paid to these warning
signs? Part of the answer is that, so long as they lasted, these capital flows were profitable
for the borrowers and lenders alike. The German banks undertaking much of the lending
booked substantial profits, while the Greek government, Irish banks and Spanish real
estate developers doing the borrowing were similarly able to live high on the hog. If the
process could create problems, well, these would occur on someone else’s watch.
More perplexing is why academic and other analysts failed to sound louder warnings.
Part of the answer here is the subliminal tendency to go along with the market consensus;
nonconformity is costly. Then there is the intrinsic difficulty of distinguishing good and
bad imbalances. The same debate about whether the American current account deficit in
the decade leading up to 2006 was a good imbalance driven by the attractive investment
opportunities associated with information and the productivity miracle, or a bad imbalance
reflecting chronic budget deficits and asset-market distortions prevailed in the United
States. We now appreciate that there was some justification for both views: while the
information technology revolution in the United States was real, so was the real-estate
bubble.
Even now, after the fact, there remains deep disagreement about how to apportion those
deficits into their ‘good’ and ‘bad’ components.7 Will the history books revise downward
earlier estimates of the effects of the productivity revolution in the United States, given
that much of it was concentrated in finance (along with, it should be acknowledged, retail
and wholesale trade), where much of the growth in ‘output’ was unsustainable and the
gains proved illusory? Is it not the case that retrospective analyses that now attach
considerable importance to global imbalances as a factor in the financial crisis, or at least see imbalances and the crisis as products of common causes (making imbalances the
canary in the coalmine), suggest that policy-makers should have leaned against them
earlier and harder? That a task is difficult does not give policy-makers dispensation to
ignore it. Policy-makers have reluctantly come around to this view when it comes to
asset-price bubbles: while these may be hard to identify, this does not mean that they can
be treated with benign neglect. The same logic applies to imbalances, whether we mean
global imbalances or intra-European imbalances.