Rogoff reiterates sovereign debt crises follow financial crises

The cruel irony of the euro area’s predicament is that, in many ways, the whole exercise was designed to produce the very credit explosion that bedevils it today. After all, one of the driving motivations of the euro was to enable member states to compete with the US for a share of the global reserve currency business. Reserve currency status, in turn, is the essence of America’s “exorbitant privilege” (a term coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president). The most important perk the US gets is the ability to issue debt at a lower interest rate than would otherwise be the case. Indeed, recent research suggests that simply by enhancing the size and liquidity of financial markets, the euro may have helped to lower real interest rates across Europe, and not just for government borrowers...