Abu Dhabi is not going to crow publicly over Dubai’s troubles. But it will use the opportunity to assert control over its upstart neighbor. The price for Abu Dhabi’s help could be prize assets like airline Emirates. Dubai has little choice but to do what it is told.

Dubai is unable to service the $80 billion debt it has amassed during its meteoric rise to wannabe global financial hub. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi holds the political and financial trump cards. Not only is it the capital of the United Arab Emirates, its ruler is head of the UAE’s seven desert states — squeezed between Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Dubai’s success threatened the balance of power between the two emirates. Abu Dhabi has developed quickly, but not at the speed of Dubai, where until a year ago new skyscrapers popped out of the desert every few days.

A property market crash and the end of free-flowing credit have taken their toll. Abu Dhabi has already lent Dubai at least $10 billion and another $5 billion indirectly via two of its banks. That won’t be the end of it. Dubai has nowhere else to turn, particularly now it has alienated the international capital markets by admitting it can’t meet the debts of flagship holding company Dubai World. Abu Dhabi can afford to bail out Dubai, but it has not been immune to losses itself and won’t be signing blank checks.

Abu Dhabi won’t want to see its neighbor sink — after all they belong to the same country. But it will feel Dubai needs to be taught a lesson.

One particularly painful punishment would be to force Dubai to hand over control of its prized Emirates Airline through a merger with Abu Dhabi carrier Etihad Airways. Global ports operator DP World is another asset Abu Dhabi should think about laying its hands on. Indeed, ownership of such assets may already have changed hands without anyone other than the royal families knowing about it.

Other changes will be more subtle. Dubai has attracted overseas financial services companies with tax breaks and the relative freedom to do business in the way they are used to in Western countries.

Curbing some of the excesses which have accompanied this influx of people and money will also be on the agenda.

With the two cities an hour or so apart along the coast of the Persian Gulf, greater cooperation and coordination on development and direction should ultimately be beneficial to them both. Dubai’s moment in the sun has passed, now is Abu Dhabi’s chance to move out of its shadow.

Leading the charge is Paul Krugman. He exhorts us to borrow our way back to prosperity, but he doesn't acknowledge that his brand of Keynesian economics ignores debt's consequences. If you look at a chart of America's total debt burden, he's leading us over a cliff.

(Click chart to enlarge in new window)

The problem begins with the flawed way Krugman and other economists measure well-being. Primarily, they look at measures of activity, like GDP. These tell us how much people spend, but say nothing about where we get the money.

Every so often, we overextend ourselves, buying too much useless stuff with too much borrowed money. So we cut back, dumping the third family car and swapping the McMansion for a townhome.

But this is problematic for Krugman and other economists. Less spending means falling GDP. It means "recession."

They ride to the rescue with two blunt instruments -- monetary and fiscal policy -- that encourage more borrowing and thus more spending. More spending equals "growth" so economists congratulate themselves for engineering "recovery."

But if recessions never happen, bad businesses and unpayable debts are never washed away. They grow like cancer inside the system.

Since the mid-1980s, we've intervened whenever the economy hiccuped, so sectors that should have shrunk sharply -- like housing and finance -- never did. Feasting on easy credit, these sectors have exploded as a percentage of the economy.

Now, since individuals and corporations refuse to borrow more, the only way to grow spending is for the government to borrow.

According to George Cooper, author of The Origin of Financial Crises, "what is missing from today's debate is recognition that previous growth rates were artificially supported by an unsustainable credit binge, itself the result of the misapplication of Keynesian policy."

Cooper counts himself a Keynesian but says Keynesian policy has become "dangerously distorted."

"We should be using Keynesian stimulus only to arrest the rate of credit contraction not to reverse it. The harsh truth is that our economies desperately need a recession."

That's because they desperately need to de-lever. As you can see in the first chart, debt relative to GDP is at record highs.

If we want sustainable growth, spending that drives it must come from savings, not more borrowing. To get there, we must first pay old debts. And that means recession.

Krugman is clearly aware of the consequences of excessive borrowing.

"I'm terrified about what will happen to interest rates once financial markets wake up to the implications of skyrocketing budget deficits," he wrote in 2003, citing a $1.8 trillion 10-year deficit projection from the Congressional Budget Office.

Fast forward six years, total debt has jumped 70 percent relative to GDP and optimistic projections put the 10-year deficit at $9 trillion.

This time, however, Krugman dismisses deficit "hysteria," arguing that we can grow our way out of debt. "We did it during the Clinton administration," he told me when he visited Reuters last week.

But we didn't. While Clinton balanced the federal budget, Americans plowed through their savings. We kept growing because, in the aggregate, we were still accumulating debt.

(Click chart to enlarge in new window)

Krugman has also argued that we can handle larger deficits because we have in the past. After all, public debt peaked at 118 percent in 1945 compared with 65 percent today.

Two problems. First, the argument ignores tens of trillions of unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security, debt Krugman loudly lamented in his 2003 column.

It also ignores the higher private debt burden facing us today. According to economist Steve Keen, "Private sector debt accumulated in the 1920s was wiped out by the Depression, so in 1945 the private sector's debt burden was only 45 percent of GDP. In that situation it was easy to wind down public debt from levels reached to finance WWII."

Today, private debt is a suffocating 300 percent of GDP, making more public debt that much harder to pay down.

We know how this movie ends. Look at California -- or Argentina.

We chortle from afar -- "how did their budget get so out of whack?" -- yet our own profligacy puts us squarely on that path. Like them, we've shown no political will to deal with debt. And so it will deal with us.

But we can print our own currency, you say. If all else fails, the United States can inflate its way out of debt.

Nonsense. If we try, our foreign lenders will cut us off.

As Krugman warned in 2003: "My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the (fiscal) crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar."

Yet today Krugman is leading the march, arguing that we can borrow indefinitely as long as deflation remains a threat.

Tell that to the Chinese.

What happens when they stop buying our bonds? To Cooper's point, we'll need government intervention to cushion the blow of de-leveraging. But there's a difference between cushioning the blow and reinflating the bubble, which is what we're doing, wasting trillions propping up housing and banking.

The risk is that we'll have nothing left when we really need it, when the Great Leveraging becomes the Great De-Leveraging.

HOSTENTAL, Switzerland - How bad was Japan’s “lost decade”? As we look east for clues as to the possible fate of western economies, it is worth dwelling on what actually happened, and not just how it was reported.

Japan’s stock market bubble burst at the end of 1989, and house prices started to fall about a year later. Asset prices at the peak were wildly inflated. Stock prices were trading at ratios of well above 50 times boom-time earnings, while the total value of housing represented around 300 percent of GDP.

These bubbles had formed after decades of rapid growth and, critically, even more rapid credit expansion. Total bank credit to the private sector had risen to 200 percent of GDP, doubling over 20 years.

What dominated the following years was the private sector trying to deal with that debt. The result was soft demand, as surplus cash flows and wages were used to pay the debt down.

This led to frequent recessions. The amount of credit in the economy fell, because of a lack of demand and a reluctance on the part of weakened banks to lend. True, Japan’s predicament differed from our own in one big respect: it was Japanese companies, rather than consumers, that were excessively leveraged. But this still affected consumption through wages, asset prices and low or non-existent dividends.

Japanese policymakers, faced with such a dramatic change from the “Japan no.1″ they were used to, made serious mistakes. They failed to cut interest rates quickly enough. They got down to 0.5 percent only in 1995. More importantly, they took ages to get to grips with the devastating impact of falling asset prices on bank balance sheets. They allowed banks massively to under-report their non-performing loans and thus avoid recapitalizing themselves.

Only in 2002 did they finally tackle this. But policymakers did prop demand up by massive deficit spending. Gross public debt surged from 70 percent of GDP to 180 percent of GDP today. And a good portion of this expenditure was financed by the Bank of Japan — narrow money more that tripled between 1990 and 2008.

Meanwhile, the fact Japan’s society was aging, not reproducing much, and not open to immigration, meant that its workforce and population started to contract modestly. This contributed to weak demand growth and exacerbated the problem of overcapacity in the economy.

But although mistakes were made, the outcome was not the disaster it is often presented to be. The combination of the forces unleashed — deleveraging, excess capacity, zombie banks and companies, and the aging, closed society on the one hand; the huge stimulus packages, budget deficits and money-printing on the other — resulted in a dull but not disastrous reality.

Disinflationary forces reigned, leading to flat prices and the mild deflation of 1998-2005, when consumer prices fell a cumulative 3 percent. But real growth, incomes, and spending per capita — driven by the steady, hard-won productivity improvements — were decent, if not great.

Nominally Japan did poorly. In the chart below, 1990 GDP = 100:

The reason? Declining credit there; booming credit here. Claims on the private sector as a percentage of GDP:

But real output per working person was similar in each:

And consumption, too, except in the debt-guzzling UK. See real household expenditure per capita:

In other words, while the nominal record was indeed poor the real record was rather better. And it is the real outcome that counts. Who cares what the market value of a house is if you continue to live in it, are able to service the liabilities you took on to buy it and your income is modestly up?

Indeed, some would even argue that the experience has been good for Japanese society. An unhealthy obsession with growth-at-all-costs has given way to a renewed focus on quality of life. Many people, particularly the younger generation, have turned their back on the salary-man culture. Unemployment never soared.

What makes the example of Japan since 1990 so relevant to the west now is that we face a similarly sized debt mountains (c200 percent of GDP), built up over a similar period, and accompanied by big real estate bubbles.

What can we learn from Japan’s experience? The biggest lesson is that it is hard to generate nominal growth in an economy where debt is not growing because people are deleveraging — even if you chuck vast amounts of money at it.

Notwithstanding zero interest rates, rapid base money growth and big fiscal deficits, anaemic nominal growth can well be the outcome, made up largely of real growth (driven by productivity gains, not demand increases) and flat or even falling prices.

In short, the rapid credit expansion was what drove much of our nominal growth before 2008. Without it, nominally we’ll struggle, but really we should be all right.

And there are actually reasons to think that much of the West will fare better than Japan.

For the U.S., the housing bubble was smaller, peaking at 160-170 percent of GDP, and has adjusted much more quickly — it is now down to more normal 110 percent or so. Meanwhile its stock market was only modestly over-valued versus historic averages, rather than Japan’s crazy bubble. The policy response has been much more impressive too: rates were cut rapidly and the banks have been forced to recapitalise relatively swiftly.

Germany, and quite a lot of continental Europe, meanwhile never really experienced a bubble. And no western country suffers the same structural rigidities that Japan did (and largely still does).

That said, things look more worrying for the United Kingdom and the likes of Ireland and Spain. The policy response has again been much better, but the starting point was more closer to Japan’s: housing peaked in the UK at 260 percent of GDP and has declined only modestly so far. The departure of east Europeans and a rising nationalist backlash against immigrants means these countries could face a declining labour force.

Most importantly for Britain, North Sea oil and gas — a huge, if often overlooked, boon these last three decades — is declining rapidly, exacerbating future fiscal and trade deficits.

But even for the British, Irish and Spanish, where a Japanese outcome is more likely, this doesn’t mean the outcome will be disastrous. Instead, the likely nominal outcome is low or no inflation, slow nominal growth and flat or declining asset prices at home. But real output and income should be tolerable.

On the bright side — and there is one even for capitalists — rates should remain low, emerging markets should boom, and commodity prices with them.

The simple lesson from all this? Just as a borrowing binge leads to a boom — fast nominal growth, made up of rapid investment growth and some inflation — the inevitable subsequent bust brings with it mass deleveraging with low investment and inflation. But all the while, productivity growth — the main driver of progress over the decades — chugs along unless demand is allowed to completely collapse, 1930s-style.

With western governments following 1990s Japan in doing enough to avoid such a depression, a “dull” period of soft nominal but tolerable real growth is our probable fate.

Merely servicing the U.S. debt will cost more than America currently spends on either defense or social security.

But the yawning deficit can't be blamed on Obama -- or for that matter, on Bush or on the financial crisis. Instead the government's finances are locked on autopilot, with entitlement programs driving the country towards a fiscal crisis.

Spending on three giant programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- will account for three quarters of the extra borrowing over the coming decade. By 2019, it will more than double to $2.5 trillion -- more than the U.S. government expects in total tax revenues for next year.

Washington needs to address the deficit soon. To avoid pointless political wrangling, it is first important to make clear what is not causing the fiscal meltdown -- including the economic stimulus.

Even if you add in interest payments from the $789 billion recovery bill, the stimulus accounts for only a tenth of the rise in debt up to 2019, according to calculations by Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute.

Three years of weak tax receipts, courtesy of the recession, will cost the country about $1.3 trillion if interest costs are included. This represents just 15 percent of the borrowing binge.

And there is little the government can do with the other spending it has under its control. Indeed Obama is assuming that he will have little money to play with.

The White House forecasts have discretionary spending falling slightly in real terms from $1.26 trillion to $1.12 trillion. This includes a hefty real cut in defense from $687 billion to $559 billion in 2019. Spending on all other departments, including energy, education, labor and agriculture, is also set on a downward trajectory.

Failure to act could have a number of severe consequences. The first would be that debt servicing will swallow up an ever greater share of tax revenue. By the time current teenagers are working, around 36 cents for every dollar of income tax they pay will go to interest payments, according to White House figures. This compares with about 19 cents now.

Then there is the threat of a buyers strike on U.S. bonds. Berkeley economist David Romer argues that investors can quickly pivot from being eager to lend to governments at low rates of interest to being unwilling to buy Treasuries at any price. This may never happen, but the dangers increase along with the deficits.

Time is running out. Powerful as the United States is, the country continues to accumulate debt at this rate at its peril. The focus must be squarely on the real problems -- medical spending and social security.

On healthcare this means ensuring that the costs to Americans are no longer hidden by employer-provided schemes. A more transparent system would put the brakes on rising costs more effectively than any other measure.

On Social Security the United States should gradually start to ratchet up the retirement age until it reaches 70. Social security was not designed to cope with an average retirement that now lasts more than 20 years.

The first step to preventing a looming fiscal disaster is to have a non-partisan discussion about the source of the problem.

The financial crisis has brought forward crunch time. Political procrastination on entitlement reform is now even more dangerous.

LONDON, April 22 (Reuters) - The Treasury is the UK government's finance ministry. There are many other government departments, but in the years since 1997, all have been turned into subsidiaries of the Treasury, the power base of Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he was chancellor.
His ambition was to micro-manage in every one of them. Today we saw the true cost of this disastrous experiment. All major countries have serious problems with their government deficits, but the most entrenched of Britain's are home-made.
Britain's public finances, which had been deteriorating for years, are wrecked. Even on his successor's rose-tinted projections, they will not return to a balanced Budget for at least the next nine years.
Given that no Treasury projection for more than three or four years out bears any resemblance to reality, and given the there will have been at least two elections between now and then, this is a post-dated cheque drawn on the Bank of Fantasy.
Alistair Darling has learned at the feet of the master of obfuscation, double counting and footling detail. So we heard all about the green recovery, from a government that sees no contradiction between raising the cost of fuel and granting tax concessions to North Sea explorers. There may be more oil there, but for the state, this is now a dry well.
The Chancellor did not dare say what he and his advisers really think about the green-tinted scheme wished on them by Peter Mandelson, the Trade Secretary, to scrap your old banger for 2,000 pounds towards a new one.
At least they managed to limit the damage to a single year. If your car is not 10 years old by next March, it will be junked in the ordinary way.
Junk is what the last Treasury forecast has now become. It's barely five months since Darling's last emergency package. It looked like a work of fiction then, and now there's no doubt. In his Budget a year ago, he was expecting to borrow 43 billion pounds in 2008/09, crowing that the previous peak was much higher, at 7.8 percent of gross national product. The sum would come down after that.
By November, there was no crowing. The projected borrowing requirement was 78 billion pounds, and was going up, to 118 billion in the following year, not down. Even those horrible figures have now been left far behind. Last year he needed 90 billion pounds, and in 2009/10, he says, it will be 175 billion pounds, or 12.4 percent of GNP.
The forecast is then for a fall, although not by much. In 2010/11 he - or his successor - will still be 173 billion pounds short of balancing the books.
So in three years the government will have borrowed 5,600 pounds for every man, woman and child in the country. That's over 20,000 pounds for what the prime minister routinely calls the average hard-working family.
In any business, from a corner shop to a multi-national, this arithmetic would be immediately fatal to those who had put it forward. Their credit would be ruined, and the business's credit could not be restored while they were still in charge.
Britain's credit is ultimately expressed in the external value of sterling, as Brown himself has said. The pound has already been devalued informally by a greater amount than the two previous formal devaluations in 1967 and 1992.
The short-term effects have been mostly benign, but the possibility of a flight from the currency is always there. This Budget makes it a little more likely.
In this context, everything else is detail. The biggest detail is the attack on what Darling describes as "those who gained the most". This is a sop to his fractious party in parliament.
From next April anyone earning over 150,000 pounds a year will be paying 51.5 percent on every extra pound earned, the highest rate in Britain for 21 years. They will also lose their tax-free allowances and half the tax relief on their pension contributions.
The small print betrays that the government is relying on these measures to bring in 7 billion a year, sometime in the middle distance. This looks as unconvincing a forecast as any in Darling's portfolio. Well-paid labour is highly mobile nowadays, and will go where the prospects are high and the taxes low.
Nothing else in the 250 pages of the Budget Report is worth a row of green beans. Even the Treasury can't put a price on the measure to reduce VAT on children's car seat bases.
Despite its name, "enhanced capital allowances" will actually raise more money -- 10 million pounds, or enough to run the government machine for about eight minutes.
Thrashing around for something cheerful to say, Darling kept telling us how much worse off other people were. To assert that "we and other countries have been battling against a succession of shocks which have hit the world economy" suggests that our luckless planet had crossed orbits with a large economic meteorite.
The former chancellor, now prime minister, assumed the sun would shine forever, and that he had somehow managed to suspend the usual rules of economics -- or as he himself put it, "no more boom and bust." In recent years, he produced growth by borrowing, pouring the money into the public services for ever-decreasing returns.
Each time he borrowed more than he had forecast. Now the bill has arrived, and it's plain that neither he nor his successor has the slightest idea of what to do. Marc Ostwald of Monument Securities summed it up within minutes: "a Budget of tinkering with the public sector financial sector meltdown, with no substance or obvious strategy whatsoever."
One day the Treasury will remember how to mind its own business, under a chancellor who grasps that until the public finances are put in order, nothing else will go right. The longer the wait, the worse will be the reckoning.

While both governments experiment with quantitative easing, bad banks to absorb non-performing loans, and state guarantees to restart bank lending, the only real way out is some combination of widespread corporate default, debt write-downs and inflation to reduce the burden of debt to more manageable levels. Everything else is window-dressing.

To understand the scale of the problem, and why it leaves so few options for policymakers, take a look at Chart 1 (https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT1.pdf), which shows the growth in the real economy (measured by nominal GDP) and the financial sector (measured by total credit market instruments outstanding) since 1952.

In 1952, the United States was emerging from the Second World War and the conflict in Korea with a strong economy, and fairly low debt, split between a relatively large government debt (amounting to 68 percent of GDP) and a relatively small private sector one (just 60 percent of GDP).

Over the next 23 years, the volume of debt increased, but the rise was broadly in line with growth in the rest of the economy, so the overall ratio of total debts to GDP changed little, from 128 percent in 1952 to 155 percent in 1975.

The only real change was in the composition. Private debts increased (7.8 times) more rapidly than public ones (1.5 times). As a result, there was a marked shift in the debt stock from public debt (just 37 percent of GDP in 1975) towards private sector obligations (117 percent). But this was not unusual. It should be seen as a return to more normal patterns of debt issuance after the wartime period in which the government commandeered resources for the war effort and rationed borrowing by the private sector.

From the 1970s onward, however, the economy has undergone two profound structural shifts. First, the economy as a whole has become much more indebted. Output rose eight times between 1975 and 2007. But the total volume of debt rose a staggering 20 times, more than twice as fast. The total debt-to-GDP ratio surged from 155 percent to 355 percent.

Second, almost all this extra debt has come from the private sector. Take a look at Chart 2 (https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT2.pdf). Despite acres of newsprint devoted to the federal budget deficit over the last thirty years, public debt at all levels has risen only 11.5 times since 1975. This is slightly faster than the eight-fold increase in nominal GDP over the same period, but government debt has still only risen from 37 percent of GDP to 52 percent.

Instead, the real debt explosion has come from the private sector. Private debt outstanding has risen an enormous 22 times, three times faster than the economy as a whole, and fast enough to take the ratio of private debt to GDP from 117 percent to 303 percent in a little over thirty years.

For the most part, policymakers have been comfortable with rising private debt levels. Officials have cited a wide range of reasons why the economy can safely operate with much higher levels of debt than before, including improvements in macroeconomic management that have muted the business cycle and led to lower inflation and interest rates. But there is a suspicion that tolerance for private rather than public sector debt simply reflected an ideological preference.

THE DEBT MOUNTAIN

The data in Table 1 (https://customers.reuters.com/d/graphics/USDEBT3.pdf) makes clear the rise in private sector debt had become unsustainable. In the 1960s and 1970s, total debt was rising at roughly the same rate as nominal GDP. By 2000-2007, total debt was rising almost twice as fast as output, with the rapid issuance all coming from the private sector, as well as state and local governments.

This created a dangerous interdependence between GDP growth (which could only be sustained by massive borrowing and rapid increases in the volume of debt) and the debt stock (which could only be serviced if the economy continued its swift and uninterrupted expansion).

The resulting debt was only sustainable so long as economic conditions remained extremely favorable. The sheer volume of private-sector obligations the economy was carrying implied an increasing vulnerability to any shock that changed the terms on which financing was available, or altered the underlying GDP cash flows.

The proximate trigger of the debt crisis was the deterioration in lending standards and rise in default rates on subprime mortgage loans. But the widening divergence revealed in the charts suggests a crisis had become inevitable sooner or later. If not subprime lending, there would have been some other trigger.

WRONGHEADED POLICIES

The charts strongly suggest the necessary condition for resolving the debt crisis is a reduction in the outstanding volume of debt, an increase in nominal GDP, or some combination of the two, to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio to a more sustainable level.

From this perspective, it is clear many of the existing policies being pursued in the United States and the United Kingdom will not resolve the crisis because they do not lower the debt ratio.

In particular, having governments buy distressed assets from the banks, or provide loan guarantees, is not an effective solution. It does not reduce the volume of debt, or force recognition of losses. It merely re-denominates private sector obligations to be met by households and firms as public ones to be met by the taxpayer.

This type of debt swap would make sense if the problem was liquidity rather than solvency. But in current circumstances, taxpayers are being asked to shoulder some or all of the cost of defaults, rather than provide a temporarily liquidity bridge.

In some ways, government is better placed to absorb losses than individual banks and investors, because it can spread them across a larger base of taxpayers. But in the current crisis, the volume of debts that potentially need to be refinanced is so large it will stretch even the tax and debt-raising resources of the state, and risks crowding out other spending.

Trying to cut debt by reducing consumption and investment, lowering wages, boosting saving and paying down debt out of current income is unlikely to be effective either. The resulting retrenchment would lead to sharp falls in both real output and the price level, depressing nominal GDP. Government retrenchment simply intensified the depression during the early 1930s. Private sector retrenchment and wage cuts will do the same in the 2000s.

BANKRUPTCY OR INFLATION

The solution must be some combination of policies to reduce the level of debt or raise nominal GDP. The simplest way to reduce debt is through bankruptcy, in which some or all of debts are deemed unrecoverable and are simply extinguished, ceasing to exist.

Bankruptcy would ensure the cost of resolving the debt crisis falls where it belongs. Investor portfolios and pension funds would take a severe but one-time hit. Healthy businesses would survive, minus the encumbrance of debt.

But widespread bankruptcies are probably socially and politically unacceptable. The alternative is some mechanism for refinancing debt on terms which are more favorable to borrowers (replacing short term debt at higher rates with longer-dated paper at lower ones).

The final option is to raise nominal GDP so it becomes easier to finance debt payments from augmented cashflow. But counter-cyclical policies to sustain GDP will not be enough. Governments in both the United States and the United Kingdom need to raise nominal GDP and debt-service capacity, not simply sustain it.

There is not much government can do to accelerate the real rate of growth. The remaining option is to tolerate, even encourage, a faster rate of inflation to improve debt-service capacity. Even more than debt nationalisation, inflation is the ultimate way to spread the costs of debt workout across the
widest possible section of the population.

The need to work down real debt and boost cash flow provides the motive, while the massive liquidity injections into the financial system provide the means. The stage is set for a long period of slow growth as debts are worked down and a rise in inflation in the medium term.

For previous columns by John Kemp, click here.

Unless global responses are made to the current economic crisis, the biggest threat to international security will be the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people, leading to radical and violent social movements that will be met with force, resulting in still greater conflict.

Oxford Research Group’s 2008 International Security Report, The Tipping Point?, published on 13 November, points to some improvements in security in Iraq in the past year as well as the potential for major changes in US policy in South West Asia with an incoming Obama administration.  It also finds that the recent deterioration in East West relations after the Russian intervention in Georgia in August can be reversed, but its main conclusion is that it is the global financial crisis that is now the most dangerous threat to international security.

With the G20 meeting due in Washington on 15 November, all the indications are that the response to the crisis of the most powerful states will be to focus narrowly on immediate issues, with calls for improvements in international financial cooperation involving:

•    An effective early warning system.

•    A more effective framework for transnational responses.

•    An independent “college of supervisors” to provide systematic monitoring of the world’s major companies and financial institutions.

These may well be useful responses to the immediate crisis but they have little or no relevance to the wider global predicament.  Instead, the opportunity should be taken to introduce fundamental economic reforms which reverse the wealth-poverty divisions that have got so much worse in the past three decades.

Most of the benefits of these decades of economic growth have been concentrated in the hands of a trans-global elite community of about 1.2 billion people, mainly in the countries of the Atlantic community and the West Pacific, but with elite communities in the tens of millions in countries such as China, India and Brazil.   At the same time, improvements in education, literacy and communications in recent decades have increased the awareness of many marginalised people of this unjust distribution of wealth.

On present trends many hundreds of millions of people among the poorest communities across the world will suffer most.  This is likely to lead to the rise of radical and violent social movements, which will be controlled by force, further increasing the violence.   The intensifying Naxalite rebellion in India and the substantial problems of social unrest in China are early indicators.  Responding to the crisis in a manner which places emphasis on improving emancipation and reversing the widening of the global socio-economic divide is therefore the most important task for the next twelve months.

Trade reform aimed at improving the economies of third world states, coupled with debt cancellation and substantial aid for sustainable development are all required as a matter of urgency if we are to avoid a much more divided global system in which the majority of the world’s population is marginalised, and increasingly resentful and bitter.

We can either respond as a global community or as a narrow group of rich and powerful countries.  The choice we make in the next few months will do much decide whether the world becomes more or less peaceful over the next ten years.

There are two ways of viewing this debt crisis. One is that it is simply a temporary dislocation in the credit markets and a liquidity problem. The second is that it is a crisis triggered by subprime lending, accentuated because most people still can’t afford their houses, and compounded because almost every bad loan was highly leveraged. If it is the second type of crisis, one should remember: if trapped in a ditch full of debt, quit digging.

We are piling debt on debt. U.S. consumers are tapped out. Net household savings have gone negative. Corporate debt, particularly derivatives exposure, has reached truly dangerous levels. (Outstanding derivatives exceed $655 trillion. The U.S. economy is around $13 trillion). Government indebtedness is also approaching levels that exceed even those reached in the Depression and World War II. Add these three sources of debt together and the U.S. already owes almost four times its GDP. Now we are adding trillions in bailouts and face rocket-fueled mandatory spending programs. These trends may end up being fatal if we do not act. Right now.

For years, many have been warning, pleading, threatening. Now the crisis really is upon us. And because the numbers are so large, the Obama administration has a very narrow window, say thirty to sixty days, to send ten very clear signals and buy itself some financial breathing room.

First and foremost, Obama has to focus on the dollar. There is ever more pressure on rating agencies to question whether the U.S. remains a triple AAA credit risk given the current debt overhang. If U.S. debt is downgraded then a whole series of institutions could not hold T Bills and short sellers would begin to hunt. Maybe some of the same ones that brought down the British pound.

We have to send a very clear signal that we are going to begin to live within our means, spend what we earn, eventually begin to save. This requires a bipartisan program that makes both Democrats and Republicans most unhappy as we begin to restructure our debt.

We cannot save every dying whale. Everyone wants a handout. Some are essential. But we simply cannot afford most bailouts. We cannot spend a few hundred billion more, every week, without major consequences. Some banks, some major companies, cannot be saved.

All entitlements must be fair game. They were going to exceed all government revenues by 2030. The current bailout, guarantees, and supports accelerate this reckoning by five to ten years. We are out of time. So if you are 60 to 65 you probably just lost a good chunk of your nest egg. You get a free pass. 55 to 60? We need a year’s more work out of you before retirement and benefits. Under 55? We will need at least three more years. This is fair given that benefits like Social Security were provided when being 65 was considered old and life expectancy was 68.

The U.S. cannot simply pull out of all military commitments overnight; we already saw the consequences of this in Afghanistan in the 1990s. And even if we did pull out, there are enormous cost overhangs in veteran care and benefits that have to be respected. But at the same time, we cannot afford to maintain the military we have. So there has to be a commitment to cut military spending by 2-3% per year for a decade. If we can do this in the context of mutual disarmament treaties with China and Russia, so much the better.

The greatest single threat to the budget is medical spending and benefits. We currently spend about 17% of GDP but the trends are horrific. And we only spend one out of seven dollars directly on doctors and nurses. There is much to be cut, much to be rationalized. So let’s commit to capping medical costs at 20% of GDP (it is 17% today). Begin by covering essential services first so we do not end up in budget games like: “if you wish, I’ll just shut the emergency room.”

Which brings up the matter of budget transparency… CEOs who exceeded a budget by as much, or hid as much debt, as most governments routinely do would, at best, be fired. More likely they would be jailed. We need to apply a simplified Sarbanes Oxley to business and to state and federal government. We also need to apply some transparency to unregulated markets, like derivatives.
While cutting in some places, the U.S does have to keep fast-growing start ups alive. Venture backed companies invested about 0.2% of U.S. GDP to create close to 18% of the economy. This is where you generate most of the jobs, not in the Fortune 500.

As a last, and perhaps the most important commandment and priority, the financial crisis will pass. But the long term survival of the country depends on treating education like a varsity sport. If you want to play varsity you have to put in the twice daily practices, summer training, hire the best coaches, move the incompetent aside, and build large organizations of committed parents and boosters. Not everyone can, or even wants to, play varsity, but those who choose to compete should get extraordinary resources.

If the U.S. lets people know it is serious about getting its financial house in order, we will survive and thrive. The alternative that was followed by so many others is just to keep spending, which is why the last thing most great empires do is drive themselves into bankruptcy.

This essay is adapted from a talk that Enriquez gave at the Pop!Tech conference in October. View the video below.

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from Pop!Tech on Vimeo