The Great Debate

Four years ago world leaders, meeting in the G20 crisis session, agreed they would all work to move from recession to growth and prosperity.  They agreed to a global growth compact to be delivered by combining national growth targets with coordinated global interventions. It didn’t happen. After the $1 trillion stimulus of 2009, fiscal consolidation became the established order of the day, and so year after year millions have continued to endure unemployment and lower living standards.

Only now are there signs that the long-overdue shift in national macro-economic policies may be taking place. The new Japanese government is backing up a “minimum inflation target” with a multi-billion-dollar stimulus designed to create 600,000 jobs. In what some call the “reverse Volcker moment,” Ben Bernanke has become the first head of a central bank for decades to announce he will target a 6 percent level of unemployment alongside his inflation objective. And the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has told us that “when policy rates are stuck at the zero lower bound, there could not be a more favorable case for Nominal GDP targeting.” Side by side with this shift in policy, in every area but the Euro, there is also policy progress in China. It may look from the outside as if November’s Communist Party Congress simply re-announced their all-too-familiar but undelivered wish to re-balance the economy from exports to domestic consumption, but this time the promise has been accompanied by a time-specific commitment: to double average domestic income per head by 2020.

The intellectual case for change is obvious. A chronic shortage of demand has developed for two reasons. First, as the IMF announced at the end of 2012, the adverse impact of fiscal consolidation on employment and demand has been greater than many people expected. Secondly, the effectiveness of quantitative easing has almost certainly started to wane. As former BBC chief Gavyn Davies has put it, “the supply potential of the economy is in danger of becoming dependent on, or ‘endogenous to,’ the weakness of domestic demand. …With demand constrained in this way for such a lengthy period of time, supply potential is beginning to downsize to fit the low level of demand.” It is a new equilibrium that can be reversed only by boosting demand.

But why is there so little optimism when the paradigm shift sought in 2009 is finally starting to materialize? Why do experts continue to downgrade their forecasts for 2013 and even 2014, while discussion so often drifts toward talk of a lost decade? It is, I suggest, because while countries are today adopting national growth strategies, they have missed out on the other part of the 2009 decision — the necessity of coordinated global intervention. And the big question is whether the momentum for growth can be sustained by national initiatives alone in the absence of global action or will instead melt away once again under the pressure of narrow, self-defeating national policies.

There is depressing testimony to stagnation produced by a lack of global demand. Olivier Blanchard, the IMF chief economist, has deployed devastating figures to demonstrate how fiscal consolidation has depressed the Western economy. Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research underlines the point: Austerity in one country reduces demand in the next and vice versa. ”The hit to output in Germany is now 2%. In the UK it is 5%; and in Greece 13%,” he wrote. Still more shocking is the impact on debt-to-GDP ratios. As Portes points out, fiscal consolidation was supposed to improve fiscal sustainability; instead, it makes matters worse. “This isn’t true just in extreme cases like Greece – fiscal consolidation across the EU has raised debt-to-GDP ratios in Germany and the UK as well. In both the UK and the euro area as a whole, the result of coordinated fiscal consolidation is a rise in the debt-GDP ratio of approximately five percentage points. For the UK, that means a debt-GDP ratio of close to 75% in 2013 instead of about 70%. We are not running to stand still; we are determinedly heading in the wrong direction.”

G20 finance ministers are gathering in Mexico City this weekend to prepare for the fourth G20 Leaders’ Summit since the Group of 20 declared itself the premier forum for international economic cooperation at its 2009 Pittsburgh summit. Birthed to coordinate a response to the global financial crisis, the informal body of the world’s richest countries has seen its agenda balloon over the past four years to encompass everything from green growth (Mexico’s pet initiative) to commodity price volatility (the agenda of the French, who hosted last year) to anti-corruption.

As workstreams proliferate, consuming an ever-increasing amount of communiqué paper and government staffers’ time, the question must be asked: Does the G20 matter? Or, more precisely, what should the G20’s role be on the global stage, and what reforms (if any) are required to allow the body to fulfill this role effectively?

The informal group was elevated from finance ministers to heads of state to quickly coordinate a decisive response in the face of the global economic crisis in 2008; and effective action required a forum that included China and other important emerging economies, as the former G7/8 club could no longer really call the shots. In its important initial mission the G20 mostly succeeded, forming the Financial Stability Board and taking other critical measures to stabilize the economy. Now the G20, at a leaders’ level, is de facto the premier forum for international dialogue and cooperation on a whole range of critical global issues that have been unable to find resolution in other contexts.

This week’s Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Mexico City needs to take concrete actions to support global growth and job creation, revive credit growth by the private financial sector, guard against a rise in trade protectionism and reduce financial market uncertainties.

The scope for long-overdue G20 actions on budget deficits and payments imbalances, including currency misalignments, is limited this year given presidential and legislative elections in France, South Korea, the U.S., and Mexico, and given the emergence of a new leadership team in China, a once-in-a-decade event. Politicians may well want to avoid taking unpopular measures right now, even if they’re necessary. However, there is still significant scope now for concrete G20 measures that strengthen the forces for growth and confidence-building in the short term.

Over the last two years, a euro sovereign crisis has been building in which many of the lessons that should have been learned from past debt crises in Latin America and Asia have been ignored. These include the risks of contagion, the dangers of delaying tough decisions, and the excessive focus on imposing austerity on debtor countries. The latter undermines debtor nations’ political leaders and their crucial task of building public support for tough reforms, ultimately creating the opportunity to grow their way out of their difficulties.

By Gordon Brown
The views expressed are his own.

Next week’s 2011 G20 meeting has the power to write a new chapter in the response to the economic downturn. But every day, as nations announce currency controls, capital controls, new tariffs and other protectionist measures, the G2O’s room for maneuver is being significantly narrowed. Already the cumulative impact of a wave of mercantilist measures is threatening to turn decades of globalization into reverse, returning us to the economic history of the 1930s, and condemning at least the western parts of the world to a decade of low growth and high unemployment.

Three years ago when the financial crisis first hit, the G2O communiqués were explicit in warning of the dangers of a new protectionism. Led by the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy, we embarked on a forlorn attempt to use the crisis to deliver a world trade deal — and were frustrated by an irresoluble dispute on agricultural imports between two countries, India and the USA. But now, in the absence of any co-ordinated global action, member countries have been retreating into their national silos — and the trickle of protectionist announcements threatens to become a flood. Switzerland led costly action to protect its overvalued currency and has been followed by currency interventions in Japan (with perhaps more to come), India, Indonesia, and South Korea. Brazil, which had itself warned of currency wars, then imposed direct tariffs on manufactured imports — a hefty car tax designed to protect its own native auto industry against emerging market imports. Other countries are now considering mimicking them. Capital controls are also now in vogue, and of course the U.S. Senate has just voted to label China a “currency manipulator.”

The 2011 WTO report, just published, warns of divergences in regulatory frameworks in preferential trade agreements. And in the next few days the WTO will release its submission to the G20.  It will note  a  rise in  trade-restrictive measures and describe the outlook ahead as “less restraint in the adoption of new trade-restrictive measures and less determination to dismantle existing ones.” Perhaps as worrying  is the growing resort to what I call “home country bias.” Today French banks are selling off their foreign assets and focusing their large portfolios on France itself. French banks have 8 trillion euros in total assets and if the plan is to run them down at 5 percent a year, then by 2014 we will see a 1.2 trillion-euro reduction in investments outside France. European bank liabilities are on the order of 32 trillion euros and when, as we can expect, the same mercantilist approaches to liquidating assets spreads to Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond, growth will be put at risk.

By Gordon Brown
The views expressed are his own.

It was said of European monarchs of a century ago that they learned nothing and forgot nothing.  For three years, as a Greek debt problem has morphed into a full blown euro area crisis, European leaders  have been behind the curve, consistently repeating the same mistake of doing too little too late. But when they meet on Sunday, the time for small measures is over. As the G20 found when it met in London at the height of the  2009 crisis, only a demonstration of policy intent that shows irresistible force will persuade the markets that leaders will do what it takes. An announcement on a new Greek package will not be enough. Nor will it be sufficient to recapitalize the banks. European leaders will have to announce a comprehensive — around 2 trillion euro — finance facility; set out a plan to fundamentally reform the euro; and work with the G20 to agree on a coordinated plan for growth.

For three years it has suited leaders across Europe to disguise Europe’s banking problems and, citing the blatant profligacy of Greece, they have defined the European problem as simply a public sector debt problem. And it has suited Europe’s leaders to call for austerity (and if that fails, more austerity) and forget how the inflexibility of the euro is itself dampening prospects for growth, keeping unemployment unacceptably high and weakening Europe’s competitive position in the world today. Indeed, Europe’s share of world output has now fallen to just 18 percent.  And it is a measure of how it is losing out in the growth markets of the future that just 7.5 percent of Europe’s exports go to the emerging markets that are responsible for 70 percent of the world’s growth.

When I attended the first ever meeting of the euro group of leaders in October 2008 there was astonishment when I reported that Europe’s banks had bought half America’s subprime mortgages and there was incredulity when I said that European banks were far more at risk than U.S. banks because they were far more highly leveraged. Since 2008, as American banks have tackled their toxic assets, they have written off 4 percent of their loans and raised the equivalent of another 4 percent in new equity.  But euro area banks have written off just 1 percent of their loans, and have raised their capital base by only 0.7 percent, leaving them highly vulnerable even before their exposure to sovereign debt has become a central issue.  Their vulnerability is increased because they have always been far more dependent for their funding on the short term and confidence-dependent wholesale markets, and  countries within the euro zone are able to do far less in the face of capital flight than, say, Britain.

Manoj Pradhan, left, a global EM economist, is an executive director at Morgan Stanley. Alan M. Taylor, right, a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley, is a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are their own.

Policymakers have fretted about global imbalances for nearly a decade, but little consensus or clarity has emerged. Some saw problems created by surplus countries, others deficit countries. Many feared a fiscal-cum-balance of payments crisis in the U.S., but the crisis we got reflected private/financial failures. G20 proposals for collective action remain a work in progress. Uncoordinated policy actions triggered talk of currency wars.

As these debates drone on, there may be less cause for concern about global imbalances. Emerging market-developed market (EM-DM) relationships may revert to a more typical historical pattern. We highlight key areas of global adjustment in this scenario: shifts in capital flows, exchange rates and real interest rates.

It may be folly or it may be prudence, but the move to fiscal austerity and restraint will be deflationary, will be bad for risky asset prices and will raise further the threat of protectionism.

The weekend’s meeting of the Group of 20 wealthy nations in Korea ended in a muddle of policies, with the final communique appearing to praise fiscal retrenching, expansionary policy, tighter regulation and slower implementation of that tighter regulation all at the same time, and all in the same impenetrable thicket of euphemism, buzzwords and consultant-speak.

To wit:

“The recent events highlight the importance of sustainable public finances and the need for our countries to put in place credible, growth-friendly measures, to deliver fiscal sustainability, differentiated for and tailored to national circumstances. Those countries with serious fiscal challenges need to accelerate the pace of consolidation. We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions. Within their capacity, countries will expand domestic sources of growth, while maintaining macroeconomic stability,” the communique issued at the conclusion of the meeting read.

If you want less of something, tax it.

That truism is often used as an argument against a tax on profits, or health benefits, or employment, but in the case of the rents extracted from the economy by the financial services industry here’s hoping it proves more of a promise than a threat.

The International Monetary Fund has put forward two new taxes on banks to pay the costs of future rescues, one of which is a fairly conventional “Financial Stability Contribution,” with an initial flat levy on all banks, to be refined later into something with more precise institutional and systemic risk adjustments.

More interestingly, the IMF is also proposing a “Financial Activities Tax,” (FAT) a tax on bank pay and profits which, if correctly designed, could serve as a tax on rents — the unwarranted spoils — of the financial sector.

(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Stocks and other risky assets are rallying around the world this week because the Group of 20 nations said on the weekend they would keep the economic stimulus flowing, a state of events which illustrates where we are and what a very strange place it is.

The G20, the only group of big hitters that matters because it is the only group which includes the Chinese, met in Scotland over the weekend and, as is the way of these things, did very little with immediate consequences for anybody.

In the communique they issued, the Group of 20 finance ministers, after congratulating themselves on the recovery, more or less admitted that the measures we once thought of as heroic are in the process of becoming commonplace.

– Robert Bench, a former Deputy Comptroller of the Currency in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law. The views expressed are his own. –

Financial Institutions inherently are fragile, simply because they are intermediaries exposed to both exogenous and endogenous forces.

Externally, they are vulnerable to wars, weather, or worn-out economic conditions. Internally, they always are susceptible to excessive risk takings as well as inadequate controls over operations.