The Economy's Perilous Waters

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In throwing a lifeline to their banks, European governments are insisting these institutions resume their stalled lending to businesses and individuals. But it's clear that even if all goes according to plan, the sort of carefree dishing out of credit that marked the financial sector — and which both underlay the banking crisis and helped to propel Europe's economies — is history. "There won't be a return," says Jean-Marc Franceschi, a banking specialist at law firm Hogan & Hartson in Paris. "It will never be like it was before."

Inflation or Deflation
The amount of money that European governments and the U.S. are promising to put into the financial system is so vast — close to $2 trillion, if the cash injections and state guarantees are added up — that it could end up stoking inflation. Consumer prices have anyway been climbing for much of this year, as the cost of everything from oil to milk and cereal has risen. That trend is now changing as the global economy falters. Inflation leaped to a 16-year high in the U.K. in September, but elsewhere in Europe it has slowed, and economists say it should also drop back in Britain. Still, by borrowing huge amounts of cash to inject into the financial system, governments could create a medium-term inflation problem of their own. What's tricky is that the alternative is also a serious possibility: if household spending and business investment drop sharply and exports don't take up the slack, Europe could be confronted with deflation of the sort that took hold in Japan in the 1990s. "We're somewhere between the two," says Riches-Flores of Société Générale.

Figuring out exactly what's happening and then reacting accordingly falls to the European Central Bank and its president, Jean-Claude Trichet. The bank has been nervous about inflation all year, but earlier this month it slashed its lending rates by 0.5% to 3.75% as part of a coordinated rate cut by the world's biggest central banks. Riches-Flores expects the bank to cut rates further in the near future as the economy slows. At the weekend, the E.U.'s Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Joaquín Almunia, even called for monetary easing "in the near term." But Trichet is famously stubborn and independent, and the bank's entire culture is built on a near obsession with inflation.

Fiscal Creep
Around Europe, that ripping noise you hear is the sound made by Treasury officials tearing up their 2009 budgets. With the economy slowing, tax receipts are lower than expected, and in Britain, France and elsewhere government spending is higher than forecast. Now comes the bank bailout, and with it, a huge increase in government borrowing. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been the first to detail his national package, and it's making fiscal hawks shudder. It involves injecting up to $65 billion into three British banks — Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB — in exchange for equity stakes.

Under international accounting rules, the government should rightfully add the liabilities of those banks to its national debt. RBS's liabilities alone exceed the total national income of the U.K. Even excluding them, Brown is almost certain to break one of his own cardinal rules by failing to keep the total debt level below 40% of national income. Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, estimates that Britain's budget deficit for the current fiscal year will likely grow from the government's planned 2.8% of GDP to about 4.4%.

The problem of ballooning debt and deficits is the same elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, where the budget deficit was already perilously high before the financial meltdown. The consequences are that the E.U.'s rules stipulating that budget deficits shouldn't exceed 3% of GDP and that debt shouldn't go over 60% are about to be consigned to the trash heap — at least temporarily. "Fiscal rules are going to have to be abandoned," says Buckley of Deutsche Bank. The E.U. commission, which is the keeper of those rules, has already given its green light. "The existence of exceptional circumstances allows a deficit temporarily above but close to 3% of GDP not to be considered as excessive," it said after the announcement of the coordinated bank bailout. The crucial word there is "temporarily." Much of Europe's economic growth over the past few years came about because of a self-imposed fiscal discipline. But, as Patrice Poncet, a finance professor at ESSEC Business School in France, points out: "It's the tendency of politicians to turn temporary measures into permanent ones." Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures. But for Europe's leaders, deciding to bail out the banks may turn out to have been the easy part.