By Catherine Boyle / CNBC
Euro-zone governments have around three months to ensure the survival of the single currency, billionaire investor George Soros said in a speech on Saturday.
“We are at an inflection point. After the expiration of the three months’ window, the markets will continue to demand more but the authorities will not be able to meet their demands,” he warned in a speech at the Festival of Economics in Trento, Italy. (Read the text of his speech.)
The European Union is “like a bubble” – not a financial bubble but a political bubble -- that could pop as a result of the euro -zone crisis, Soros said.
“In the boom phase, the EU was what the psychoanalyst David Tuckett calls a ‘fantastic object’ – unreal but immensely attractive,” he said.
“In retrospect, it is now clear that the main source of trouble is that the member states of the euro have surrendered to the European Central Bank (ECB) their rights to create fiat money. They did not realize what that entails – and neither did the European authorities,” he said.
The euro zone needs a European deposit insurance scheme for banks, Soros said, as well as direct financing by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) for banks, which “must go hand-in-hand with euro-zone-wide supervision and regulation.”
The “blockage” at the moment is coming from the Bundesbank and the German government, he said. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been cautious about increasing Germany’s support for the rest of the euro zone.
Soros believes Germany will eventually do what it takes to keep the euro zone going because of the large losses German banks would suffer if it broke up and the damage to exports which could be caused by a return to the Deutschmark, which would likely be substantially stronger than the euro.
“A German empire with the periphery as the hinterland,” could be the result of the current predicament, he warned.
The ECB has been instrumental throughout the crisis and its liquidity injection via a long-term refinancing operation helped boost European markets earlier this year, giving policy makers some much-needed breathing space.
Soros said that too much blame had been placed on peripheral euro-zone countries such as heavily indebted Greece and Spain, and that creditors like Germany had to share responsibility.
“The “center” is responsible for designing a flawed system, enacting flawed treaties, pursuing flawed policies and always doing too little too late.
“In the 1980s, Latin America suffered a lost decade -- a similar fate now awaits Europe,” he said. “That is the responsibility that Germany and the other creditor countries need to acknowledge.”
Soros argued that the focus on austerity instead of growth had been a mistake by the European authorities.
“The authorities didn’t understand the nature of the euro crisis; they thought it was a fiscal problem, while it is more of a banking problem and a problem of competitiveness. And they applied the wrong remedy: You cannot reduce the debt burden by shrinking the economy -- only by growing your way out of it,” he said.
“The crisis is still growing because of a failure to understand the dynamics of social change; policy measures that could have worked at one point in time were no longer sufficient by the time they were applied,” he said.
These views are echoed by well-known economists including Paul Krugman. An increasing number of politicians in the euro zone are also arguing for less austerity and more promotion of growth. The debate has come to prominence during both the Greek election campaign and the Irish referendum on the EU fiscal pact for euro-zone-wide austerity measures.
