Suchergebnisse

La théorie de la "debt-deflation", proposée par I. Fisher en 1933 pour rendre compte de la violence et de la durée de la Grande Dépression, repose sur une articulation originale des facteurs monétaires (avec monnaie endogène) et financiers, c'est à dire prenant en compte les variations de la richesse nette et des déséquilibres de bilan. La déflation y provoque une hausse de l'encours réel de dette qui pousse les emprunteurs au désendettement, ce qui entretient la chute des prix en même temps que celle de la masse monétaire. Cet article analyse la nouveauté et la cohérence d'une telle dynamique, tout en s'interrogeant sur son articulation avec les thèses antérieures de Fisher et sur sa pertinence actuelle du point de vue théorique et empirique. Le cas pris en exemple est celui de la crise financière qui a frappé les pays de l'OCDE au tournant de la dernière décennie.

What will become the interest rate spreads1 that still prevailed recently between the debts of individual sovereign states of the Economic and Monetary Union? These spreads, well on, will no longer result from exchange rate premiums. However, they could clearly persist. They would then derive partly from liquidity differences in relation to the issues of a reference borrower, surely the German "Bund" or the French Treasury, or a combination of the two (perhaps also with the Dutch government). But obviously spreads may also persist due to the risk of default. Therefore, what will be the extent of these differentials and how far could they increase depending on the risk? This is one of the important issues currently facing economists studying EMU, in particular because of its close link with the concerns underlying the Maastricht Treaty: possible slippage of public debt, risks of monetisation, proclaimed refusal of bail-out. ; What will become of the interest spreads on the debts of different sovereign borrowers under EMU ? Will these always be small and merely reflect differences in liquidity, as they do today, or will they progressively widen and also reflect default risk? Such are the questions posed in this study. We offer a variety of reasons for doubting that the current convergence of interest rates in the euro zone constitutes a permanent situation. Prominent among these is a large set of new data of our own construction concerning the spreads on the debts of lower-level governments, or governments without money-issuing power, for a dozen countries. Those spreads clearly give rise to the suspicion that default-risk premia may reappear in the yields on the debts of different sovereigns in EMU. ; What will become the interest rate spreads1 that still prevailed recently between the debts of individual sovereign states of the Economic and Monetary Union? These spreads, well on, will no longer result from exchange rate premiums. However, they could clearly persist. They would then derive partly from liquidity ...