MacroScope

Economist Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College has stirred up a bit of a fuss by concluding in some academic research that it was France, not the United States, that was most to blame for The Great Depression.

Irwin’s theory, in a paper posted here by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is that France created an artificial shortage of gold reserves when it increased its share from 7 percent to 27 percent between 1927 and 1932.  Because major currencies at the time were backed by gold under the Gold Standard, this put other countries under enormous deflationary pressure.

To prove his point, Irwin ran a model looking at what would have happened without the French move. The results:

Counterfactual simulations indicate that world prices would have increased slightly between 1929 and 1933, instead of declining calamitously.

All this runs counter to the traditional finger-pointing for The Great Depression, which has it that the U.S Federal Reserve tipped the world into the economic abyss by tightening monetary policy.

The title of this post is taken from two sources. One was a headline in British tabloid, The Sun, in January 1979, when then-prime minister James Callaghan denied that strike-torn Britain was in chaos. The second was the title of a 1975 album by prog rock band Supertramp that famously showed someone sunbathing amidst the grey awfulness of the declining industrial landscape.

Are we now getting blasé about the latest crisis? Not so long ago, perfectly respectable economists and financial analysts were talking about a new Great Depression. The world was on the brink, it was said. Now, though, consensus appears to be that it is all over bar the shouting. The world is safe.

Wealth managers at Barclays have gone as far as telling their clients to get over it.

It took some time, and a lot of downward corrections to IMF GDP forecasts, before the current global economic downturn won the title of ‘worst since the Great Depression’.

Why settle for second worst though?

This one is in at least three ways just as bad if not even worse than 1929-30, economists Barry Eichengreen (University of California, Berkeley) and Kevin O’Rourke (Trinity College,
Dublin) argue. 

Look at global industrial output, world stock markets, and global trade volumes. Map the nine months after April 2008 against the period following June 1929 and the story you see is the following:

Neil Dwane, fund firm RCM‘s chief investment officer in Europe, has an interesting take on the current spat between Germany and the United States over printing money to get out of trouble. You can see Juergen Stark for the latest volley.

Dwane reckons it is all a matter of history. The American psyche, he says, is scarred by the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is up there with the Civil War. Think John Steinbeck or John Boy Walton.

For Germans, however, the 1930s mean something else. It was the era that the Nazis took over, leading to the country’s great nightmare. But that, the German psyche has it, was bred in the 1920s when incompetent government led to hyperinflation and worthless money. Think one trillion marks to the dollar. Think wheelbarrows.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a name. We are living through “The Great Recession”. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, used the term to describe our current angst on a trip to Africa this week. He may not have been the first to use it — we have found other citations, including JPMorgan — but the guessing here is that it may  stick with him because of his role.

It’s a pretty neat moniker, actually. It resonates, of course, with “Great Depression” but without the soup lines and Hoovervilles. At the same time, it differentiates between the severe contraction now under way and run-of-the-mill economic misery. It also has the snappiness that media folks like — hence this post.

The Bretton Woods duo of IMF and World Bank have been underlining how bad things are. Strauss-Kahn, for example, tells Reuters that delays in bank restructuring could mean economic recovery is not on the cards even in 2010 (which sounds a long way off, but is only next year). Then comes Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who opines to Britain’s Daily Mail that global growth will probably fall about 1 to 2 percent this year.

Will President Barack Obama attend the summit of the Group of 20 rich and emerging countries in early April, hosted by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to tackle the financial and economic crisis?

The working assumption is he will, on one of his first foreign trips as president. But there is still no official confirmation.

At the G20 summit in Washington on Nov. 15, Obama’s transition team stuck strictly to the rule: “There is only one president at a time”, and the president-elect did not meet any of the foreign summiteers.

In the late 1990s, when the Asian Financial Crisis was in full swing, Time Magazine dubbed then Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy Lawrence Summers and then Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan as “The Committee to Save the World.”

On Saturday, a new committee convened in Washington, only this time the crisis is global, and now there are 20 members. Leaders from the 20 richest countries came together and backed a 10-page plan for the global economic crisis, agreeing on the need for measures to spur growth, better financial market rules and more say for emerging countries.

Sexy stuff, right?

Here’s a sample paragraph:

“Regulators should develop enhanced guidance to strengthen banks’ risk management practices, in line with international best practices, and should encourage financial firms to reexamine their internal controls and implement strengthened policies for sound risk management. * Regulators should develop and implement procedures to ensure that financial firms implement policies to better manage liquidity risk, including by creating strong liquidity cushions. * Supervisors should ensure that financial firms develop processes that provide for timely and comprehensive measurement of risk concentrations and large counterparty risk positions across products and geographies. * Firms should reassess their risk management models to guard against stress and report to supervisors on their efforts. * The Basel Committee should study the need for and help develop firms’ new stress testing models, as appropriate. * Financial institutions should have clear internal incentives to promote stability, and action needs to be taken, through voluntary effort or regulatory action, to avoid compensation schemes which reward excessive short-term returns or risk taking. * Banks should exercise effective risk management and due diligence over structured products and securitization.”