In Prospect Magazine, Ken Rogoff reviews Martin Wolf’s account of the financial and European debt crises as well as his policy conclusions. Along the way, he offers his own views. Some excerpts:

Wolf rightly believes that one needs to look at the entire global economic system to understand what happened.

… he essentially concludes that there will be no long-run financial stability without kicking banks out of the money creation business, leaving it as a government monopoly, much as leading “Chicago Plan” economists first suggested in the 1930s.

Although Wolf makes a coherent case for considering this radical reform [the Chicago plan], he is rather circumspect on just how bad things will be if we don’t do it. For one thing, he seems to agree with Chicago economist Robert Lucas (whom he otherwise sharply critiques) that if the US financial firm Lehman Brothers had not been allowed to fail, the financial crisis would have been far less acute.

But if one really believes this, then why take all the risks of radical change? Anyone advocating a radical fix, as Wolf does, needs to convert the many politicians, financiers, regulators and even academics who conclude that the real lesson of the crisis should be to never let big banks fail. (This is certainly not my position.)

… By mulling whether the crisis could have been mitigated simply through better tactics during the weekend of 13th-14th September 2008, Wolf undermines his own case for radical reform. To be clear, I think that a major financial collapse would have been very difficult to avoid regardless of how Lehman was handled. Thus Wolf is fundamentally right: radical change is needed. Turning to the eurozone, … He is right that Germany bears its share of responsibility. But he emphasises the potential role of German fiscal stimulus far too much, and correspondingly underestimates the importance of regulatory failures, the rigidity of the 2 per cent inflation target and, above all, northern recalcitrance to restructure and write down southern debts.

… The first problem with Wolf’s simple arithmetic is that Europe is not a closed economy, and indeed Germany depends vastly more on exports to China and the US than exports to the periphery.

… If the capital flows to the eurozone periphery had been mainly in the form of direct foreign investment or equity (instead of short-term debt), they would have been far less problematic. … Germany’s biggest mistakes, by far, were in financial regulation that produced instability.

In truth, the southern Mediterranean countries in Europe are a place where there really is secular stagnation … But secular stagnation in the periphery would have been happening with or without the financial crisis … what could Germany have done? … First, it should have acted earlier to take a euro break-up off the table. Second, it should have found a way to restructure periphery debts at lower interest rates and with more time to repay. Third, it should have moved earlier to endorse a looser monetary policy at the European Central Bank (ECB). Fourth, and more for itself, it should have expanded infrastructure investment at home and abroad.

… rather than pouring fiscal stimulus into a German economy that has for some time arguably been overheated, it would have been far better to give periphery countries more help. … The point that periphery countries suffer from debt overhang should be an obvious one by now …

Wolf finds convincing the comparison between Spain and the UK made by the Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe, who argues that Spain would have been in much less trouble if it had had its own currency. True, but misleading. The claim overlooks the fact that, in many ways, Spain has still not completed the transition from being an emerging market to being an advanced economy. … But governance and institutional development can take many generations to unfold. My overwhelming presumption is that these countries would still have had problems containing their debts. … It is ludicrous to think the periphery has a mere liquidity problem. That is why the debts needed to be written down, or more likely stretched out at lower interest rates, which amounts to the same thing.

… So Germany could have done more to alleviate the crisis in the periphery. But the best way was not to increase spending in Germany, but to help increase spending in the periphery. Even the IMF has finally reached this epiphany, arguing that it should have insisted on “bailing in” private creditors in Europe; that is, making lenders take losses. Instead, too much of its lending effectively just helped to pay off private creditors, and did not provide meaningful budget relief.

Anyone worried about austerity in the periphery should have been first and foremost focused on writing down debt. The idea that arguing for such policies, and that worrying about the effects of debt overhang on growth, amounted to favouring “austerity” is simply ludicrous.

… Austerity in the periphery eurozone is an entirely different animal to that seen in the US and UK. The eurozone periphery suffered a classic sudden stop in private lending, and although the “troika” of the IMF, European Commission and the ECB did step in to help, they were too limited in their willingness to write down debt. Facing a sudden withdrawal of financing, periphery countries had to reduce expenditures.

For the US and UK, the decision to expand and then gradually reduce deficits gave policymakers considerable discretion over the exit strategy. For these countries, one can meaningfully speak about the trade-off between stability and stimulus….

Another key pillar in recovering from a financial crisis should be to boost infrastructure investment. Virtually every economist of every stripe agrees with this recommendation. … Administration officials privately expressed concern that infrastructure projects would take too long to get off the ground, and by the time they did, the spending would no longer be needed. My book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different, suggested that the recession was likely to be around for a long time, and that infrastructure spending would be extremely helpful.

… In fact, the ostensible argument over debt has nothing to do with progressive and conservative differences. It is about the size of government.

… The financial crisis does create an additional and very important argument in favour of fiscal stimulus, and Wolf is absolutely correct to highlight it. When an economy is at the zero bound on interest rates, and the central bank is unable or unwilling to stimulate inflation, fiscal policy is more effective in raising output. … However, the empirical size of the “fiscal multiplier” (how much output rises relative to increased government spending) is widely debated, and the evidence is very thin. … The fact the UK and US both achieved solid growth in the face of fiscal cuts would seem to contradict the view that multipliers are always and everywhere very large.

… Wolf, in line with Krugman, appears to believe that even wasteful government spending would raise welfare, a claim that is at best debatable.

… As for the resulting debt burden not being an issue, it is far from obvious that governments were wrong to worry about the fiscal burden, as debt more than doubled within a very short time. The ability to issue large amounts of debt in response to crises is a valuable option for governments. But if a country’s debt starts to reach a situation that is perceived as risky, the option might not be as available when needed most.

… Wolf now argues that of course we all knew there would eventually be a vigorous recovery in the UK. I can only say this was not obvious from reading either the Financial Times or the New York Times. Again, this is a matter of calibration, and the awful forecasts of those who focused excessively on fiscal policy and nothing else, underscores how difficult real-world policymaking can be.