[Updated to include labour cost inflation too]
Here are the stories at the FT, the WSJ, the Economist (in their blogs) and for a won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children perspective, the Guardian [1].
There are plenty of arguments against the increase. You could argue that there’s a sizeable output gap, so any inflation now is unlikely to be persistent. You could argue that core inflation is low and that it’s only the headline rate that’s high. You could argue that with the periphery countries facing fiscal crises, they need desperately to grow in order to avoid a default or, worse, a breakup of the Euro area. You could argue that a period of above-average inflation in Europe’s core economies and below-average inflation in the periphery would allow the latter to (slowly) achieve what a currency devaluation would normally do: make them more competitive, attract business and allow them to grow in the long run (above and beyond the short-run stimulus of low interest rates).
On that last point, though, it’s worth looking at the data. It’s a great idea, in principle, but unfortunately and despite all the austerity packages, the data show exactly the opposite picture at present. Here’s the current year-over-year inflation rate broken down by country, from Eurostat (HICP and Labour Costs):
| Economy | HICP | Labour Cost Index |
| Euro area as a whole | 2.4% | 2.0% |
| Germany | 2.2% | 0.1% |
| France | 1.8% | 1.5% |
| Greece | 4.2% | 11.7% |
| Ireland | 0.9% | n/a |
| Portugal | 3.5% | 1.0% |
| Spain | 3.4% | 4.1% |
For some reason Ireland doesn’t seem to be included in the Labour Cost data. Look at Greece and Spain. They’re getting more expensive to do business in relative to Germany and France. Portugal is in the right area, but with Germany’s growth rate in Labour Costs so low, they’re still coming out worse. The same story is painted in consumer inflation. It looks like Ireland is doing what it needs to, but Greece, Portugal and Spain are all getting even less competitive.
Here’s my theory: The ECB hates the fact that they’re temporarily funding these governments, but can’t avoid that fact. Furthermore, they reckon that Greece, Ireland and Portugal are eventually going to restructure their debt. Given that they cannot shove the temporary funding off onto some other European institution, the ECB either doesn’t care whether it’s in 2013 or today (they’ve already got the emergency liquidity out there and it can just stay there until the mess is cleaned up) or quietly wants them to do it now and get it over with. Either way, the ECB is going to conduct policy conditional on the assumption that it’s as good as done.
[1] Just kidding, Guardian readers. You know I love you. Mind you, the writing in that article could have been better — it says that inflation has gone above the ECB’s target of 2% and never mentions what it actually is, but later mentions the current British inflation rate (4.4%) without explaining that it is for Britain and not the Euro area.