Mrs. Merkel Lives in a World of Her Own

I woke up today to read the following on the front page of the Financial Times (“Merkel highlights Eurozone divisions with observations on interest rates”).

Angela Merkel underlined the gulf at the heart of the eurozone when she waded into interest-rate policy, arguing that, taken in isolation, Germany would need higher rates, in contrast to southern states that are crying out for looser monetary policy.

The German chancellor’s highly unusual intervention on Thursday, a week before many economists expect the independent European Central Bank to cut its main interest rate, highlights how the economies of the prosperous north and austerity-hit south remain far apart.

What could Mrs. Merkel possibly have meant by this remark? Presumably she means that inflation in Germany is higher than she would like it to be, so that her preference would be that the ECB raise its lending rate, thereby tightening monetary policy for the entire Eurozone in order to bring down the German rate of inflation (which is now less than 2 percent under every measure). The question is why did she bother to say this? My guess is that she is trying to make herself look as if she is being solicitous of the poor unfortunates who constitute the rest of the Eurozone, those now suffering from a widening and deepening recession.

Her message is: “Look, if I had my way, I would raise interest rates, forcing an even deeper recession and even more pain on the rest of you moochers. But, tender-hearted softy that I am, I am not going to do that. I will settle for keeping the ECB lending rate at its current level, or maybe, if you bow and scrape enough, I might, just might, allow the ECB to cut the rate by a quarter of a percent. But don’t think for even a minute that I am going to allow the ECB to follow the Fed and the Bank of Japan in adopting any kind of radical, inflationist quantitative easing.”

So the current German rate of inflation of 1-2% is too high for Mrs. Merkel. The adjustment in relative prices between Germany and the rest of Eurozone requires that prices and wages in the rest of the Eurozone fall relative to prices and wages in Germany. Mrs. Merkel says that she will not allow inflation in Germany to go above 1-2%. What does that say about what must happen to prices and wages in the rest of the Eurozone? Do the math. So if Mrs. Merkel has her way — and she clearly speaks with what Mark Twain once called “the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces” – things will continue to get worse, probably a lot worse, in the Eurozone before they get any better. Get used to it.