"The Way Forward" – Who Paid for the Study?

Global Economic Intersection Article of the Week

Editor's note: This is the first of two related articles. The second is here.

A friend whose judgment I respect said the just-published study on US economic policies moving forward by Alpert, Hockett, and Roubini, was a MUST READ. This was confirmed by Joe Nocera, the NYT financial writer who said: "Its analysis of our problems is sobering. Its proposed solutions are far more ambitious than anything being talked about in Washington." So I read it. Their omission of what caused the world's economic problems and what should be done about it is so glaring that I wonder who paid for the study.

Follow up:

Summary of Study The authors do an excellent job of detailing today's global economic problems:

• High unemployment and the threat of renewed recession.

• The possibility that the European sovereign debt problem will spiral into a full-fledged global banking crisis.

• The hoped-for demand boost from emerging market countries is fading as policies to control inflation and credit-creation kick in.

Albert, Hockett and Roubini (AHR) conclude:

"Even if a return to negative growth rates is somehow avoided, there will remain a real and present danger that Europe and the United States alike fall into an indefinitely lengthy period of negligible growth, high unemployment and deflation, much as Japan has experienced over the past 20 years…." Their solutions - "3 Pillars":

• Pillar 1 - a $1.2 trillion five-to-seven year public investment program;
• Pillar 2 - a national debt-restructuring program focusing on "banking and real-estate sectors in particular;
• Pillar 3 - global reforms.

I have absolutely no problem with "Pillar 1". For some time, I have argued further monetary stimuli will add little and an additional fiscal stimulus program is needed. And of course, I am not alone in making this argument. More on the other two "Pillars" later.

Diagnosis AHR say the world got into this mess as the result of 2 related factors:

• The "worst credit-fueled asset-price bubble and burst since the late 1920s";

• "The steady entry into the world economy of successive waves of new export-oriented economies, beginning with Japan and the Asian tigers in the 1980s and peaking with China in the early 2000s, with more than two billion newly employable workers. The integration of these high-savings, lower wage economies into the global economy, occurring as it did against the backdrop of dramatic productivity gains rooted in new information technologies and the globalization of corporate supply chains, decisively shifted the balance of global supply and demand. In consequence, the world economy now is beset by excess supplies of labor, capital, and productive capacity".

1. The Asset Price Bubble Few would disagree with AHR on pointing to the Asset Bubble as a key ingredient leading to the global recession. But AHR argue that a main source of the bubble were the massive capital inflows into the US from emerging market countries that kept US interest rates artificially low and the US dollar artificially strong. I have looked carefully the role of capital inflows and see little reason to attribute much of asset price bubble to them.

But this gets us to the major omission in the AHR study as to both the cause and ultimate solution to the global economic woes. What causes a bubble? Someone buying to the point that the price is ridiculously high. In short, irrational, excessive buying. What do the US mortgage bubble and the European sovereign debt bubble have in common? They both involved a risky asset that banks bought in excess.

Why did US banks buy up so many mortgages knowing there is a real estate cycle that goes down as well as up? Why were European banks buying Greek debt back in 2007 knowing from published data what horrible shape the government accounts were in? The answer in both cases is the same. The banks saw a way to make money:

• buy up these risky assets;

• package them;

• in some cases insure them, and

• sell them off for a commission.

In the US, this went on until one day, the bubble burst and there was no market for asset-backed securities. The result was a bank collapse that caused a worldwide panic. And as I have reported, this panic resulted in stock market and real estate losses of $50 trillion (to put this in context, 2008 GDP $61 trillion). And the "wealth effect" of those losses led to the reduction in spending worldwide that launched the global recession.

And what has just happened in Europe? Banks created a bubble in sovereign debt. They bought too much of it, packaged it, insured it, and sold it off. The bubble has already burst, and another global panic has only been averted by massive purchases of sovereign debt "vehicles" by the European central bank and others.

Large bubbles only occur when there are buyers of an overpriced asset. Banks were the buyers of mortgages and government debt. Their continued buying of these assets contributed significantly to the bubbles. And when they burst, it appears there is more concern about bank survival than anything else. Why is this? Because we don't want to lose our deposits: let the odd private equity firm/hedge fund collapse, but we don't want to lose our deposits. We have seen panic recently, but that panic would pale relative to a major run on our depository institutions.

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