Friday, June 15, 2012

Room to Move (Redux)

. Friday, June 15, 2012

Layna Mosley, one of my professors at UNC, has a piece in Foreign Affairs on the European sovereign debt crisis. In a sense she's come back around to her dissertation work, in which she argued that international investors care much more about outcomes than the particular policies used to generate those outcomes, or things like the partisan composition of governments. Turns out that she was pretty much right about that, at least in the case of Europe.

She has two primary points. The first is that the composition of debt maturity matters quite a lot; a lot of short-term debt means a lot of servicing, which means a greater sensitivity to short-run developments. The second is that investors don't have nearly as much influence on government policies as most commentators ascribe to them. What influence they do have is, again, over outcomes rather than the particular decisions used to reach them. So yes, investors prefer lower debt levels, but they don't particularly care whether fiscal probity is achieved via spending reductions or taxation. Mosley previously referred to this relationship as giving governments "room to move": so long as they stay within certain parameters -- mostly relatively low/stable inflation and relatively low/stable debt levels -- governments have quite a lot of latitude to pursue other policies without being punished by investors.

It's a good piece with valuable lessons. Read it.

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Room to Move (Redux)
 

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