Krisenmanagement: Lehren für die transatlantische Politik

Aus den aktuellen dramatischen Ereignissen auf den Finanzmärkten könnten zwei wichtige Lehren bezüglich des Krisenmanagements für die transatlantische Politik gezogen werden, schreibt Wolfgang Münchau, der Mitbegründer und Direktor von Eurointelligence. Er behauptet, dass die EU und die USA voneinander lernen könnten.  

The first lesson comes from Sweden, where during the early 1990s, the government overcame a severe financial crisis by only bailing out a small subset of banks with a chance of survival after first writing off their debt. The others were either liquidated or merged, with all depositors covered by an explicit government promise of compensation. This success story, in which costs for the taxpayer were also minimal, is a lesson for the US that „bank bail-outs should be handled conservatively and should come in the form of direct capital injections,“ argues Münchau.

Nevertheless, the US financial crisis is much bigger than the Swedish one, he observes, arguing that the difference is that the US needs to shrink its financial sector „a lot more, and wants to shrink it a lot less“.

This, Münchau says, is the main problem with the major rescue plan prescribed by US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Indeed, it not only lacks direct equity injections, but would also apply indiscriminately to banks with ‚junk‘ debt on their balance sheets. He contends that not only is this „simultaneously unfair and futile,“ but „without a contraction in the financial sector, the US administration risks a debt explosion and a sudden withdrawal of foreign investment“.

The second lesson, for the EU this time, is that bank bail-outs require a swift political response as seen in the US. Yet in the eurozone, it is not clear where this would come from. Indeed, Münchau states that „by the time European ministers have travelled for a meeting in Brussels, let alone reached or implemented a decision, the financial markets would have long melted“.

While European financial authorities reached agreement on the future of Fortis, the Belgian-Dutch bank, it is only one of several large cross-border European banks, he points out, bemoaning the fact that „there is no agreement about who pays for a bail-out if any one of them goes down“.

„While Americans need a better rescue plan, the Europeans need a lot more: a system that could produce a rescue plan in the first place,“ Münchau concludes.