Europe: on soigne le symptômes sans s'attaquer aux causes(NY Times)

Éditorial du New York Times de ce matin. Trop timide le "plan de relance"?

"Europe’s leaders did better than expected, but expectations were low to start. After Wednesday’s all-night summit meeting, they announced a greatly strengthened financial rescue plan that includes bigger write-downs of Greek debt and new injections of capital into weakened European banks. Still, far too many of the crucial details have been left to work out over the days, weeks and months ahead.

Until those are known, it will not be clear if Europe has finally mobilized enough cash and political will to stop the unraveling that now also threatens Italy, Spain and even France. And Europe is still only grappling with the financial symptoms of the crisis, not the underlying causes.

One of the biggest of those is that while Europe has a unified currency, and independent central bank, it has no lender of last resort — like the Federal Reserve — that can supply unlimited emergency funds to governments and banks that need them. And Europe’s continued insistence on imposing punitive austerity in exchange for bailouts, which will make it impossible for weaker economies to generate enough growth to pay down debts.

Of this week’s commitments, the write-down plan has advanced furthest. Greece’s nongovernmental creditors — banks and private investors — were told to agree to “voluntary” swaps and reschedulings that would yield them roughly 50 cents out of every dollar now owed to them. Markets value this debt at close to 40 cents on the dollar, so the Institute of International Finance, representing leading global banks, has agreed to go along.

Greece is nowhere near out of the woods and won’t be for years to come. There is a lot that it must do for itself to regenerate growth — including liberalizing labor markets, spreading tax burdens more fairly, decreasing the size and increasing the efficiency of the state bureaucracy and selectively privatizing state-owned properties. But if Europe keeps insisting on fiscal austerity programs unrelated to these reforms, Greece cannot grow and current reform efforts will sputter out."