It isn’t Italy that holds the key, it’s not even the ECB, “my friends”

By Fernando Fernandez, professor at IE Business School

Forget about short cuts and soft measures: Europe’s problem is that it has lost the market’s confidence, and in order to get it back it will have to take some hard measures.It’s a well worn phrase which is why I have permitted myself a certain amount of poetic license, because it seems to go perfectly with the confusion that is rife among markets and analysts following recent events. The feeling of insecurity is such that we are desperately seeking a lifeline to cling to. Someone is always up for the job of throwing said lifeline and public opinion seems to have honed in on two specific groups: governments comprised of technocrats and the European Central Bank (ECB). The former are expected to bring the required level of sanity and the ECB is supposed to start buying up debt with no thought for expenses. But once again it’s the wrong diagnosis.

The European Commission, according to its vice president Olli Rehn, has decided that the key lies in restoring confidence in fiscal sustainability and the financial system, and in speeding up reforms that stimulate growth potential. Hence we have to change our tune or we have to take notice of the Commission, but either way we should not be looking for short cuts.

The European problem is a simple one. Investors have lost confidence in the Euro, not just in Italy. Let’s not confuse the symptoms of this particular illness. They have done it for a series of institutional reasons – the well-known design faults of the Monetary Union – and mistakes made in the way the crisis has been managed. In my opinion they include two particularly big mistakes. The first was to declare that European sovereign debt is restructurable – albeit only Greek debt, but who on earth believes that at this stage – without having the necessary financial resources or legal instruments to effect an immediate exchange, and the second was to punish banks for their sovereign debt holdings without having the necessary resources to fill the hole created. Both decisions have had consequences that were impossible to recover from in the short-term: they have made sovereign debt a credit asset, a financial instrument that competes with emerging debt, and have eroded the credibility of the European banking system, which has been forced to divest its sovereign debt.