WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- It doesn't take a seer to predict the next agonizing crisis for the eurozone. It simply requires a calendar.
Ireland will have a general election early in the new year, according to Prime Minister Brian Cowen, or as soon as his emergency budget is passed. He will be replaced and the main opposition party vows to reverse Cowen's plan to cut the minimum wage and the second opposition party in the polls says it will reject the eurozone rescue plan altogether.
So the Irish crisis has simply been postponed, rather than resolved, by the latest $100 billion bailout devised last week by Ireland's European partners.
Then there is the date of March 27 when the German voters of Baden-Wurttemberg go to the polls and, for the first time in more than 50 years, it looks as if they will eject Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party. This is mainly because of a local issue, a highly controversial plan to push a high-speed rail line through the center of the main city of Stuttgart, which has provoked unpleasant TV scenes of police violence against peaceful protesters.
But it will be seen as a verdict on Merkel and her highly responsible but unpopular decision to keep on using German taxpayer funds to bail out improvident Greeks, Irish and probably by then Portuguese and Spaniards, too.
Merkel, who has already lost her majority in the upper house of Germany's Parliament, could fall. Even if she remains chancellor until the next general election in 2013, she will have had an awful warning. And it is an open and difficult question whether any future chancellor would dare repeat her bailouts for the larger cause of Europe.
Elmar Brok, a leading German figure in the European Parliament, told this reporter last week that Germany's political and business leadership were staunch in their readiness to do whatever it took to sustain the euro and the European Union. That may be but the German voters disagree. An opinion poll last week by Open Europe indicated 70 percent of German respondents said they were against any more bailouts.
So the next two predictable euro crises are the Irish election and the German election. There are others, with rather less certain dates.
Spain has to raise funds next year to roll over some $200 billion in existing bonds that fall due and also to finance next year's deficit which is likely to exceed $100 billion. Spain's autonomous regions, with debts of another $130 billion, are another problem.
The great question is how much interest will Spain have to pay to borrow these sums. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is right to complain that "irrational" bond markets demand that Spain pay the same interest rates as Pakistan. But the bond markets must be given an incentive against the prospect of default. Currently Spain has to pay almost 3 percent more than the German interest rate, which will be punishing, given that Spain's economy is unlikely to grow even as much as 1 percent next year.
Then there is Italy, which has a state debt of $2.4 trillion and which is expected to be in the market to borrow at least $400 billion and maybe as much as $500 billion next year. Italy is having to pay interest that is 2 percent higher than German rates.
All of this is unsustainable and the markets know it. Given the collapse of their growth rates, Greece and Ireland won't be able to repay their debts. Portugal, Spain and Italy wait nervously in the wings. Behind them, Europe's banks are even more nervous at the talk of haircuts and defaults, since they have more than $2 trillion at risk in these wobbly countries. If and when defaults start, Europe's banks will face a collective Lehman Brothers moment.
This week, the European Central Bank calmed the markets with massive interventions, buying tranches of hundred-billion euro bonds from Ireland and Portugal to push their borrowing rates down by a full percentage point. This is something the orthodox and cautious ECB hates to do but it felt it had no choice, such is the gravity of the threat.
There are now four scenarios for the euro. The first is that the eurozone moves to full fiscal as well as monetary union, with a common tax and budget policy and automatic cash transfers from richer to poor countries, much as New York exports money to poor states like Alabama. Another way to do this would be to have a single euro-bond, which would mean Germany guaranteeing the bonds of everyone else. Politically, this is very unlikely, since either course would require endless German subsidies.
The second scenario is that the ECB continues to buy the dodgy bonds of insolvent countries, in the hope that the savage austerity programs and long-delayed structural reforms (like raising the retirement age) will turn them into German-style powerhouses, or at least into paragons of fiscal orthodoxy. This is unlikely to succeed but it will at least buy time.
The third scenario is for "restructuring" of the weak countries' debt, a polite way to describe a soft default. This could be through an agreement to extend the terms of loans or to defer interest payments, which the banks and bond-holders would hate but they may have little choice. This would shift the focus of the threat to Europe's banks, which may have to be bailed out by the ECB in their turn.
The fourth scenario, a breakup of the euro, would be catastrophic for world financial market and for Europe. There would be massive bank failures and new currency controls. Germany would lose many of its export markets as a new deutsche mark would rise in value to punitive levels. For the Greeks, Portuguese and the Spanish, this would mean that existing euro debts would have to be paid in the new weaker national currencies and the level of debt wouldn't just be 150 percent of their gross domestic product, but up to 250 percent. The domino effect of credit default swaps for failing banks would be another Lehman Brothers moment for the global financial system.
As we wait for the next Irish crisis and the next German election, the stakes are very high indeed.
