Cenários para o futuro

Ontem, Ambrose escreveu "Portugal next as EMU's Máquina Infernal keeps ticking":
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"This is the worst profile in Europe. It requires a drip-feed of external funding that can be shut off at any moment, and undoubtedly will be unless the global economy goes full throttle into another boom. Or as the IMF puts it, "the longer the imbalance persists, the greater the risk the adjustment will be sudden and disruptive".
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The origins of this crisis go back to Portugal’s fateful decision to push for euro membership at least 20 years before it was ready. Lisbon then failed to tighten fiscal and credit policy enough to offset a fall in interest rates from 16pc to 3pc as Portugal prepared to join in the 1990s – if it is possible to offset monetary error on such a scale.
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Portugal saw its competitiveness destroyed by the boom, and has never been able to get it back. The country has been in perma-slump ever since with a Teutonic currency that raises the bar ever higher. It has lost swathes of low-tech industry to Chinese and East European rivals faster than it can create high-tech alternatives.
Portugal has in a sense been the victim of EMU, a casualty of ideology, wishful thinking, and untested academic theories by Nobel laureates about optimal currency unions.
By the time the eurozone crisis began to blow up in Greece a year ago, it was probably too late already for Portugal. The government then made matters worse by letting its budget deficit creep higher over the first half of the year, while the rest of the Club Med slashed frantically. It is hard to see how Portugal will meet a deficit target of 7.3pc for 2010 agreed with EU.
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The eurozone will face its moment of existential danger the day that Portugal is forced to tap the EU bail-out fund. A third rescue in months will push the combined bill towards €300bn (£257bn) and risk exhausting the political capital of EMU, leaving little left for Spain even if the European Financial Stability Facility can in theory handle one more domino.
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What happens if Spain tips back into recession in 2011, and or when Spanish banks start coming clean on the true scale of their property losses, and Spanish companies have trouble rolling over foreign loans? What happens if Spanish 10-year bond yields creep above 5pc?
Can Mrs Merkel go back to the Bundestag and request fresh money to boost the collateral of the EFSF in order to cope with the next casualty?
A reader asked me this week whether there is any graceful way to avoid this coming chain of disasters.
Yes, there are two options, neither entirely graceful. The European Central Bank can print money like a drunken sailor, flood the bond markets with €2 trillion, and tank the euro against China’s yuan for good measure.
If the Germans refuse to accept this, they should abandon EMU at once, leaving France and southern Europe with the residual euro and the institutions of monetary union. Existing euro debt contracts would be upheld. Germany would revalue – alone or with Finns, Dutch, etc - so holders of Bunds would enjoy a windfall gain."
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Engraçado que no Domingo à noite tenha escrito "Parece que a Alemanha vai ter de abandonar o euro". Foi há mais de um ano que a ideia me surgiu "E se for a Alemanha a ter de sair da zona euro?"