The German Euro Is Overvalued

I keep telling people that the German euro is undervalued, but some folks seem not to believe me. (See the comments section from this post last year for an example.) But this is a really big deal. The dominant narrative about the eurozone crisis is that fiscally irresponsible countries like Greece were bringing the once-proud currency to its knees, and weakening the European project to boot. Meanwhile, the virtuous Germans keep on cranking out trade surpluses and have to bail out Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. And it’s pretty clear that the Germans believe this version of events.

Never mind that Spain and Ireland, for two, had budget surpluses prior to the crisis, or that Spain’s economy is five times as large as Greece’s. What’s going on in Greece is supposedly the true explanation for the eurozone’s problems.

Let me challenge that narrative that with a simple thought experiment. Instead of one euro, let us reason as if each of the 18 eurozone members had its “own” “euro.” Let’s begin by thinking about what creates the value of the current 18-country euro. We might include interest rates, inflation rates, growth rates, and trade balance, among other things, and of course expectations for all these variables. What we need to remember is that the value of today’s euro represents the averaged effect of all these variables in all 18 countries, rather than reflecting the economic conditions of any one of them.

So the euro is currently worth about $1.25. It used to be higher; what is dragging it down? The simple answer is that conditions in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and at time Italy have pulled its value down. As has often been noted, if Greece pulled out of the euro it would then devalue the drachma, becoming internationally competitive again without the need for the brutal austerity that has pushed its unemployment rate over 25%. The same is true for the other peripheral countries. By looking at what would happen to the drachma/punt/peseta/escudo, we can see that, for these countries, the euro is overvalued. Another way to say it is that the “Greek euro,” for example is overvalued.