Entre tango et sirtaki : incohérence du régime monétaire et insoutenabilité de la dette publique

Thanks to the two experiences of Argentina and Greece in the 1990s and the 2000s, this article underlines the importance of taking into account monetary regime when analyzing the traverse of public debts. In contexts of financial liberalization and monetary rigidity (exchange rate rigidity and setting back of Central Bank), the unsustainability of public indebtedness has more to see with the accumulation of current account deficits than with squandered fiscal policies. The article also discusses different policies aiming at getting out of the crisis. We show, through the Greek experiment since 2010, it is vain to try to make public debt recover thanks to austerity policies and internal devaluation, given that these policies do not address the inconsistency matter of monetary regime. At the opposite, we conclude from the Argentine experiment of the post-2002 years that a reconsidered monetary regime, coupled with favorable macroeconomic circumstances, is able to straighten up at best count the situation of public finance.