Chrystia Freeland

Chuck Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, already has one of his talking points for 2012 — he plans to lambaste the Republicans for their “tax cuts for millionaires,” a reference to the right’s refusal to end the Bush tax breaks at the upper-end of the income distribution.

That’s a big deal, because for much of the post-war era, class has been a forbidden subject in U.S. politics. Americans were sold on the idea of living in the land of opportunity — their country, after all, was the one huddled masses fled to for the chance to build a better life. That self-image was so appealing and so powerful that politicians ran against it at their peril—Morning in America played better on the campaign trail than class war.

Schumer is a centrist whose constituency includes many of America’s plutocrats —he has sometimes been called the Senator from Wall Street. He is also one of the country’s savviest politicians. So his judgment that “millionaires tax break” will make a good bludgeon for Republicans says a lot about how deep the chasm has become between America’s super-elite and everyone else, and how worried middle-class Americans are that the old promise of social mobility is no longer delivering.

Liberals concerned about this divide have focused on the ways in which it has been created by pro-rich tax policies, a concern documented in Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, and further stoked by this week’s tax deal. That’s a legitimate gripe.

But the two Americas are moving further and further apart for another reason, too, and it is one over which U.S. legislators and U.S. voters have little control. After a century when succeeding in America was the surest route to commercial success, the country’s best businessmen and women have realized that the way to win is to go global.

Nouriel Roubini is #12 on on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. Over the past few years, the economist at New York University says he’s been thinking most about why financial crises occur and whey they are occurring more frequently than we have expected.

Contrary to the conventional notion that crises are random and infrequent events, Roubini has been arguing for the better part of a decade that financial crises can be predicted based on macroeconomic and policy mistakes. In fact, they occur every few years in some country around the world, he says. Roubini characterizes these financial crises as a “white swan” event. He emphasizes their regularity in his recent book Crisis Economics. Roubini says the pattern of crises is always the same: initially there is an economic boom, which drives up asset prices, leading to an excessive build-up of debt and leverage, which eventually leads to a downturn and then a market crash and bust.

The co-founder of Roubini Global Economics, Roubini credits his 20 years of experience studying financial crises in emerging markets — he published a book about their causes and consequences in 2004 — for enabling him to spot the risks for a crash. He also notes that others who foresaw the crisis, such as Morgan Stanley Asia’s Steve Roach and then-Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, share a global view of economic dynamics, intellectual courage and a certain outsider status, a characteristic that fellow FP Global Thinker Mohamed El-Erian said was vital for his own success.

Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is #26 on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. His big idea is: “capitalist economies work well when everybody has access to the basic conditions they need to compete: access to education, access to health care, and access to finance.” In the absence of these conditions, Rajan argues that a capitalist society will be beset by income inequality, political frictions, and rent-seeking behaviors that subvert healthy competition. Capitalism is at its best when it creates equal opportunity:

If we all started off at age 21, 22, somewhere there, with all the education we needed, all the access to finance we wanted, and reasonable health, and we were told, ‘Here’s a level playing field. Go out and compete.’ And 25 years later some did very well, some did not so well, I think we would all be reasonably satisfied with that outcome. And that’s really the ideal of capitalism. But we’re very far from that ideal. Where you’re  born matters a lot. Of course, what you make of it also matters, but to the extent that you can reduce the impact of where you’re born, what conditions you’re born under, and what kind of impediments that creates, I think capitalism is better for it.

Rajan’s recent book, Fault Lines — the most recommended book on FP’s survey of the Global Thinkers — looks at the recent financial crisis through this lens. In the lead-up to the crisis, many citizens of the United Stated lacked access to higher education, a prerequisite for many of today’s jobs. Median wages stagnated as a result, and the government faced pressure to do something about it. Washington responded with the short-term fix of expanding cheap credit, notably through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which temporarily masked the rise in income inequality but ultimately did nothing to address the structural issues of the U.S. economy.

Reuters editor-at-large Chrystia Freeland interviews international investor Jim Rogers, as part of the 2011 Reuters Investment Outlook Summit.

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Part 5

Chrystia interviewed currency maven John Taylor this morning to kick off the Reuters 2011 Investment Outlook Summit. Taylor is the chairman and CIO of FX Concepts, the largest currency hedge fund in the world, with around $8.5 billion in assets under management.

Taylor led Chrystia on a tour of world currency markets and offered his predictions for 2011, including:

–The euro will sink to parity with the dollar, thanks to a debt crisis in Spain.
–Switzerland, which is a “little Brazil,” will see the franc rise against the euro as capital leaves the eurozone.
–The Australian dollar will depreciate by 15 or 20% due to a fall-off in commodity and housing prices.
–The Canadian dollar will depreciate to C$1.15 vs. the dollar on lower commodity prices and lower growth in the U.S.
–Sterling will appreciate against the euro.
–The Brazilian real is attractive but its outlook is uncertain given the Brazilian’s government’s determination to tame appreciation. On the other hand, investors like Taylor who are bullish on Brazil may have more ammunition than the government, thanks to the Federal Reserve and the resurgence of the carry trade.

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz is #30 on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. Stiglitz told Chrystia that his big idea is “globalization is something that has to be shaped.”

For much of recent history, special interests have driven the globalization agenda, he says. One of the primary obstacles to completing the Doha Round of free-trade negotiations is the billions of dollars of subsidies the U.S. showers on about 25,000 American cotton farmers, a policy that impoverishes more than 10 million cotton farmers in Africa and that has been judged as a violation of WTO rules.

Despite globalization’s shortcomings, Stiglitz does not believe it is to blame for the hollowing out of America’s middle-class. Increases in productivity and technological changes have reduced the demand for the unskilled labor. “The real failure of public policy,” Stiglitz says, is that “it hasn’t responded effectively to the driving forces of technology and globalization.”  Stiglitz argues that by lowering barriers to trade while failing to invest in health care and education, America has resigned itself to having a middle class that lacks the skills to compete in the global economy.

Mohamed El-Erian, PIMCO’s CEO, is #45 on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. He tells Chrystia that his big idea is a “recognition that we are living in a period of major global realignment.”  This rapidly changing environment favors emerging markets, which are accustomed to periods of upheaval, as well as businesses, which have the metrics and flexibility required to make quick course corrections. The developed world has been hobbled by years of inertia, he says, and is at a disadvantage in responding to these global shifts.

In El-Erian’s eyes, being an outsider is fundamentally connected to being a top global thinker.  He credits his unconventional background — growing up in Egypt, studying four different schools of economics at Cambridge, and analyzing emerging markets for 15 year at the IMF — with his ability to spot the realignment in world economic growth towards the developing world.

El-Erian attributes PIMCO’s success to its heterodox culture — the investment giant’s motto is to be “constructively paranoid,” and once a year management invites a “shadow” investment committee to its Newport Beach offices to second-guess the portfolio managers’ investment decisions.

It is impossible not to be fascinated by the WikiLeaks release of U.S. State Department cables this week. It is a story that has everything, ranging from insight into the U.S.-Russia relationship, to salacious tidbits like Ghaddafi’s predilection for buxom Ukrainian nurses, to raising the meaty issues of free speech, the internet and a government’s need for privacy.

But the most significant revelation isn’t what is in the documents—it is what is missing from them. The financial crisis of 2008, and its agonizing aftermath, changed the world profoundly. We now know it didn’t change the State Department. The most important take-away from the WikiLeaks data dump is that America needs a new foreign policy paradigm to deal with the post-crisis world.

The starting point for that paradigm must be to put the economy at the heart of foreign policy. Some of America’s savviest wise men are already making that point, most notably in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, with two seminal essays on the importance of the economy for statecraft.

Robert Shiller of Yale University is #48 on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. He tells Chrystia that his big idea is that “finance can serve humanity, especially if it democratizes.” In fact, Shiller argues that the spread of finance is responsible for the super-cycle of economic growth that the world has enjoyed over the past half-century. He disputes the charge that finance is mainly beneficial to a small cabal of bankers in the world’s financial capitals.

Over half the population of the United States uses mutual funds, retirement plans and complex mortgage contracts to manage risk. And, risk-management techniques could be expanded to include more of the uncertainties of middle-class life, he says.

Professor Shiller has two big ideas in the pipeline: a book that will address the popular prejudices against finance and a book to be co-written with George Akerlof on the future of international financial regulation.

At the end of Chrystia’s interview with Dan Ariely yesterday, he revealed that his next research priority is to demonstrate how pernicious conflicts of interest really are:

My personal mission is to think about conflicts of interest. So it turns out that if I pay you lots of money to see reality in a certain way, you too will be able to do it … It turns out conflicts of interest paint us. They paint our view of the world in deep ways that we don’t understand. So imagine I pay you $5 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as a good product. Now, I’m sure you could pretend to like them, but the question is would you really start believing that they are better products than they really are? And that’s the case. We find that people actually can change their deeply held beliefs. They would invest their own money. If something is worthwhile for you to do financially, you would convince yourself that this is also good for you. And if it’s something that is difficult and complex, it turns out it’s even easier for us to do it. And if it’s something that is remote from money — for example, in our experiments when we get people to cheat for something that is not money but a step removed from money — stock, stock options — people find an easier time doing that. So my big issue right now is to try to eliminate conflicts of interests. When you have a situation with conflicts of interest and you put good people in those conditions, you should not expect anything but failure.

As Ariely tells Chrystia, this is a problem not just limited to finance. Doctors and politicians can lose their ability to objectively see reality through their contact with drug reps and lobbyists, he says. And while he’s not wide-eyed enough to believe he could eradicate them completely, Ariely does think conflicts of interest can be dramatically reduced.