Paul Krugman je pravkar na IMF konferenci predstavil paper “Currency Regimes, Capital Flows, and Crises” na temo, ali se “grška” kriza lahko zgodi državam z lastno valuto. In njegov point je v skladu s tistim, ki ga zagovarja Paul de Grauwe: države, ki imajo svojo valuto, ki se zadolžujejo v svoji valuti in ki imajo drseči tečaj, so manj ranljive.

At this point I think it’s safe to say that both the expansionary austerity hypothesis and the proposition that there is a debt cliff have been strongly rejected by the data – but these debates are not what I want to talk about in this lecture.

What I want to talk about instead is a question that some of us have been asking with growing frequency over the last couple of years: Are Greek-type crises likely or even possible for countries that, unlike Greece and other European debtors, retain their own currencies, borrow in those currencies, and let their exchange rates float?

What I will argue is that the answer is “no” – in fact, no on two levels. First, countries that retain their own currencies are less vulnerable to sudden losses of confidence than members of a monetary union – a point effectively made by Paul De Grauwe (2011). Beyond that, however, even if a sudden loss of confidence does take place, countries that have their own currencies and borrow in those currencies are simply not vulnerable to the kind of crisis so widely envisaged. Remarkably, nobody seems to have laid out exactly how a Greek-style crisis is supposed to happen in a country like Britain, the United States, or Japan – and I don’t believe that there is any plausible mechanism for such a crisis.