Over the past year the global economy has experienced a massive contraction, the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this spring, economists started talking of “green shoots” of recovery and that optimistic assessment quickly spread to Wall Street. More recently, on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke officially blessed this consensus by declaring the recession is “very likely over”.
The future is fundamentally uncertain, which always makes prediction a rash enterprise. That said there is a good chance the new consensus is wrong. Instead, there are solid grounds for believing the US economy will experience a second dip followed by extended stagnation that will qualify as the second Great Depression. Some indications to this effect are already rolling in with unexpectedly large US job losses in September and the crash in US automobile sales following the end of the “Cash-for-Clunkers” program.
That rosy scenario thinking has returned to Wall Street should be no surprise. Wall Street profits from rising asset prices on which it charges a management fee, from deal making on which it earns advisory fees, and from encouraging retail investors to buy stock which boosts transaction fees. Such earnings are far larger when stock markets are rising, which explains Wall Street’s genetic propensity to pump the economy.
As for mainstream economists, their theoretical models were blind-sided by the crisis and only predict recovery because of the assumptions in the models. According to mainstream theory, it is assumed that full employment is a gravity point to which the economy is pulled back.
Empirical econometric models are equally questionable. They too predict gradual recovery but that is driven by patterns of reversion to trends found in past data. The problem, as investment professionals say, is “past performance is no guide to future performance”. The economic crisis represents the implosion of the economic paradigm that has ruled US and global growth for the past thirty years. That paradigm was based on consumption fuelled by indebtedness and asset price inflation, and it is done.
There is a simple logic to why the economy will experience a second dip. That logic rests on the economics of deleveraging which inevitably produces a two step correction. The first step has been worked through, and it triggered a financial crisis that caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. The second step has only just begun.
Deleveraging can be understood through a metaphor in which a car symbolizes the economy. Borrowing is like stepping on the gas and accelerates economic activity. When borrowing stops, the foot comes off the pedal and the car slows down. However, the car’s trunk is now weighed down by accumulated debt so economic activity slows below its initial level.
With deleveraging, households increase saving and re-pay debt. This is the second step and it is like stepping on the brake, which causes the economy to slow further akin to a double dip. Rapid deleveraging, as happening now, is equivalent to hitting the brakes hard. The only positive is it reduces debt, which is like removing weight from the trunk. That helps stabilize activity at a new lower level, but it does not speed up the car as economists claim.
Unfortunately, the car metaphor only partially captures current conditions as it assumes the braking process is smooth. Yet, there has already been a financial crisis and the real economy is now infected by a multiplier process causing lower spending, massive job loss, and business failures. That plus deleveraging creates the possibility of a downward spiral which would constitute a depression.
Such a spiral is captured by the metaphor of the Titanic, which was thought to be unsinkable owing to its sequentially structured bulkheads. However, those bulkheads had no ceilings, and when the Titanic hit an iceberg that gashed its side, the front bulkheads filled with water and pulled down the bow. Water then rippled into the aft bulkheads, causing the ship to sink.
The US economy has hit a debt iceberg. The resulting gash threatens to flood the economy’s stabilizing mechanisms, which the economist Hyman Minsky termed “thwarting institutions”.
Unemployment insurance is not up to the scale of the problem and is expiring for many workers. That promises to further reduce spending and aggravate the foreclosure problem.
States are bound by balanced budget requirements and they are cutting spending and jobs. Consequently, the public sector is joining the private sector in contraction.
The destruction of household wealth means many households have near-zero or even negative net worth. That increases pressure to save and blocks access to borrowing that might jump-start a recovery. Moreover, both the household and business sector face extensive bankruptcies that amplify the downward multiplier shock and also limit future economic activity by destroying credit histories and access to credit.
Lastly, the US continues to bleed through the triple hemorrhage of the trade deficit that drains spending via imports, off-shoring of jobs, and off-shoring of new investment. This hemorrhage was evident in the cash for clunkers program in which eight of the top ten vehicles sold were foreign brands. Consequently, even enormous fiscal stimulus will be of diminished effect.
The financial crisis created an adverse feedback loop in financial markets. Unparalleled deleveraging and the multiplier process have created an adverse feedback loop in the real economy. That is a loop which is far harder to reverse, which is why a second Great Depression remains a real possibility.
The United States is undergoing a major globalization shift (outsourcing and shrinking manufacturing sector) while experiencing serious economic trauma brought about from the lack of regulation that ensured that the FIRE industries would support the economy, not undermine it. The reason why the United States was severely profitable prior to the boom was its over-reliance on self-policing, or the insane idea that self-policing can peacefully co-exist with self-interest. The problem with this concept is that 3rd party checks on a system costs about as much (if not more) than direct policing (by gov). But the industry got carried away and the system allowed the regulatory infrastructure to be infiltrated by romantic market theorists on the verge of proving something that was never proven before.
Markets and the regulatory structure that guide it are both imperfect, and both need to evolve in order to survive, not necessarily expand or contract just for the sake of it.
I enjoy your blog very much.
Can I ask what policies Post-Keynesians would recommend for the US now?
Would a post-Keynesian solution involve:
(1) a return to effective financial regulation, perhaps even a commercial banking sector run like public utilities?
(2) debt write offs or re-structuring of debt
(3) full employment polices
(4) Industrial policy that deals with the massive trade deficit and out-sourcing of jobs and production
Also if fiscal policies stimulate demand and consumption won’t this just make the trade deficit worse?
Totally agree: (G-T) = (S-I) + (M-X).
Clearly, internal leakages (S-I) will necessarily take place to repair private sector balance sheets; and, evidently, the latter will depend, among other things, on the degree of liquidity preference of the various non-government institutional sectors (mainly households, banks and firms), and the stock-flow norms determining their expectations and behavior.
Yet, external leakages – net imports (M-X) – will depend not only on imports and exports demand-exchange rate and income elasticities, but also on politics, the regulation of oil prices (speculation), and the design of political incentives to induce some reserve earning economies to appreciate their currencies, persuading them, above all, to increase their growth rates of government expenditures; the goal is to increase their imports from reserve issuing economies (mainly the US, the EU, the UK and Japan) sufficiently so as to reduce the foreign debt of the latter (i.e. the stock of foreign currency reserves of the former).
Yet, even if external leakages are largely reduced in the US, fiscal deficits will still be required so as to increase the net financial wealth of the private sector (particularly households and banks). But here, multiple equilibriums exist: (i) the fiscal deficit becomes large mainly because of the increased savings of the private sector (passive endogenous component); or (ii) the fiscal deficit becomes large not only because of the latter but also because of the implementation of additional fiscal stimuli (a second, third round of fiscal stimuli – active exogenous component).
Simply, in case (i) the crisis will last longer than in case (ii); and, independently of (i) and (ii), the crisis will last less if some reserve earning economies (notice, not all can) spend their foreign currency reserves in (preferably labor-demanding) products (rather than T-bills and bonds) exported by the US, the EU, Japan and the UK, a situation which is only possible if reserve earning economies appreciate their currencies and, above all, increase their government expenditures.
One thing is clear, though: to avoid a long-lasting depression, both, reserve issuing (RIEs) and reserve earning economies (REEs) must run large fiscal deficits. This is because the problem is one of both local and foreign currency liquidity preference (i.e. local currency in the case of RIEs and both local and foreign currency in the case of REEs); however, it is in the nature of the international monetary system that not all reserve earning economies can run large fiscal deficits, as they must preserve a minimum stock of foreign currency reserves because their local currencies do not circulate abroad – put differently, being able to run large fiscal deficits in REEs is not only a matter of exchange rate flexibility, for at least a minimum stock of foreign currency reserves must be held; Keynes was right: the problem is liquidity preference both in local and foreign currency)
Best!
Angel
PD: “Essays on Money, and the Asymmetries of the International Monetary System” (http://www.angelgarciabanchs.com/phd-thesis.html)
Dr. Palley, my attention is caught by your sentence “The economic crisis represents the implosion of the economic paradigm that has ruled US and global growth for the past thirty years.” If I understand you correctly, you believe this recession is different. Would you mind expanding on this? What are the premises by which you make this statement?
Please forgive me if I am being pedantic. I am not trained as an economist and as such may be overlooking some obvious details. I intuitively believe over-consumption (no matter how it was fueled) is finished. I am looking to rationally explain why this is so.