“You there, Bernanke, isn’t it? Go to the headmaster’s office. You, King, join him.” Just then there was a knock on the door; it was last year’s head boy, who had returned to re-take a course. “You asked to see me, Sir,” said the former top boy. “Greenspan,” came the reply, “you are expelled!”
Yesterday it was a lot like that. The Bank of International Settlements has been described as the central bank’s central bank. Yesterday it seemed to take on the persona of that really strict teacher everyone was frightened of. And the boys and girls under the rap were the great and the good of the economic world.
They were slammed. The problem that haunts the global economy was laid out in clear, and quite distressingly lucid, detail, and a solution, was proposed.
Of the great economic crisis of 2008, yesterday saw one of the most important developments.
The most deadly venom was saved for the report’s last sentence: “Businesses” it concluded, “and banks are expected to undertake business continuity planning in advance of trouble. Surely we should expect as much from policymakers.”
And in a way that says it all. Our policymakers, it appears, let us down. The answer: quick, transparent, decisive action. None of this business of trying to appease shareholders with big dividend payments. Massive bonus payments must stop. Losses must be declared. Debts repaid.
It will be tough, “But,” said BIS, “if history is any guide, failing to make such efforts will eventually entail recourse to still more expensive and dangerous measures during the crisis itself.”
But there is a snag. You may have had that experience at school, when your teacher leans over you, face red with fury, admonishing you, telling you to fix your mistake, but not telling you how. The BIS report did smack a little of that.
The problem, according to the BIS, is that central banks and governments misdiagnosed what was going on. “For many years,” it said, “global inflation was maintained at low levels, aided by the tailwinds of numerous positive and overlapping supply shocks arising from deregulation and technical progress, but perhaps due even more to the entry of major emerging economies into the global trading system. However, instead of temporarily allowing inflation to drift lower, analogously to the past treatment of negative supply shocks, policymakers interpreted this quiescence of inflation differently. They took it to mean that there was no good reason to raise interest rates when growth accelerated, and no impediment to lowering them when growth faltered. It is not fanciful, surely, to suggest that these low levels of interest rates might inadvertently have encouraged imprudent borrowing, as well as the eventual resurgence of inflation.”
Well, over five years ago now, Investment and Business News said: “If inflation is not the result of the current monetary and fiscal policies of governments and central banks, then every economic text book ever written will have been torn up.”
The good news: the text books can remain. The trees that were felled in their creation were not lost in vain.
The bad news: well it seems the banks made a massive mistake. You may recall, a few years ago the talk was of deflation. Greenspan and Co were scared we were in danger of experiencing a Japanese style period of deflation. So they slashed interest rates. But they were perhaps a little mixed up. Back then, low prices were not down to low demand, which is what caused deflation in Japan; prices were falling because the world had got better at producing things. It was a good thing prices were falling. Wages were not falling, we were getting better off. But, in this wonderful environment of improved technology and increased specialisation that comes with globalization, we celebrated too much. The result, asset prices shot up. House prices went through the roof.
The fundamental problem, it seems, is that we, that’s all of us, you and me, are not good at learning from the past. Churchill once said: “The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.” Mark Twain said: “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.”
Yet, whenever there is a boom, the same old clichés are dragged out. “This time it is different.” “It is a new paradigm, now.” The BIS called it an “inherent tendency to ‘procyclicality’ in liberalised financial systems. That is, as credit expansion fuels cyclical economic growth, asset prices and optimism rise while perceptions of risk recede. This further supports credit expansion, not least through the provision of more collateral to allow more borrowing, leading to spending patterns that could eventually prove unsustainable. Initial rational exuberance might in this way become irrational, setting the stage for a possible subsequent collapse.”
The central banks, by slashing interest rates, created the seeds for today’s crisis. Then the temptation to overdo things when times are good got the better of us.
And boy, is the problem intractable? The BIS is worried about inflation and deflation. “There are dangers in saying that food and energy prices can be ignored in setting domestic policy because they are externally driven,” it said. “For the world as a whole, these are not external supply shocks, but rather seem to have been primarily demand-driven. These examples indicate that our domestic frameworks for policymaking need to be better adapted to the realities of globalisation.”
The solution then, is that interest rates need to go up… everywhere. This will curtail demand, and bring inflation under control. This may of course create recession in some countries, the UK, US, Ireland and Spain, presumably the favourites.
But then there’s another danger. The BIS said: “… that households facing heavy debt burdens, and sometimes falling house prices, will seek to raise secularly low saving rates by cutting consumption quite sharply. The fact that in the United States and some other advanced industrial countries the stocks of houses, cars and other durables already seem rather high could encourage such behaviour. Unfortunately, everyone cannot save more simultaneously, since one person’s spending is another person’s income. The end result of such a process would be lower economic activity and employment, not only in these countries, but also in those reliant on exporting to them.”
And the conclusion: “If asset prices are unrealistically high, they must eventually fall. If saving rates are unrealistically low, they must rise. And if debts cannot be serviced, they must be written off. Trying to deny this through the use of gimmicks and palliatives will only make things worse in the end.”
“Government’s actions should be quick and decisive, with the clear objective of removing all uncertainty about future private sector losses. This happened in the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s, whereas in Japan the government took too long to act decisively.”
“… losses should fall heavily on those who incurred them in the beginning: first the borrowers and then those who lent unwisely to them. In practice, however, the possible implications of widespread household bankruptcies (including resulting litigation) would also have to be seriously considered.”
“If the public sector chooses to socialise the losses, it should be done explicitly and transparently, without shifting potential losses onto the balance sheets of central banks. In practice, however, as was seen in Japan in the early 1990s, inadequate legislation pertaining to deposit insurance gave the central bank very little alternative to providing emergency assistance to insolvent institutions.”
Finally, says BIS: “The moral hazard associated with the use of government money should be counterbalanced by the introduction of forward-looking measures to prevent similar problems arising in the future.”
©2008 Investment and Business News. All Rights Reserved.
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