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History of Casino Capitalism

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"During my whole career at Goldman Sachs - 1967 to 1991 - I never owned a foreign stock or emerging market bonds. Now I have hundreds of millions of dollars in Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and I worry constantly about the dollar-yen rate. Every night before I go to bed I call in for the dollar-yen quote, and to find out what the Nikkei is doing and what the Hang Seng Index is doing. We have bets in all these markets. Right now Paul [one of my traders] is long [on] the Canadian dollar. We have bets all over the place. I would not have worried about any of these twenty years ago. Now I have to worry about all of them."

Leon Coopermann, hedge fund manager1

Economic globalization is probably the most fundamental transformation of the world's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Decisions made in one part of the world more and more affect people and communities elsewhere in the world. Sometimes the consequences of globalization are positive, liberating inventive and entrepreneurial talents and accelerating the pace of sustainable development. But at other times they are negative, as when many people, especially in less-developed countries, are left behind without a social safety net. Globalization undermines the ability of the nation to tax and to regulate its own economy. This weakens the power of sovereign nations relative to that of large transnational corporations and distorts how social and economic priorities are chosen.

Economic globalization is most often associated with rapid growth in the flow of goods and services across international borders. Indeed, the economic "openness" of a nation is often measured by the value of its exports, imports, or their sum when compared to the size of its economy. Economic globalization also involves large investments from outside each nation, often by transnational corporations. These corporations often combine technology and know-how with their investments that enhance the productive capacity of a nation. Previous position papers of the Mobilization, contained in Speaking of Religion & Politics: The Progressive Church Tackles Hot Topics2, have dealt with globalization primarily in these terms.

But international trade and investment are only part of the openness that has come to be called globalization. Another part, and arguably the most important, is the quickening flow of financial assets internationally. While a small portion of this flow is directly associated with the "real" economy of production and exchange, its vast majority is composed of trades in the "paper" economy of short-term financial markets. This paper economy is enormous: The value of global financial securities greatly exceeds the value of annual world output of goods and services. Moreover, the paper economy often contributes to crises in the real economy. Thus it is important to the well being of humanity and the planet as a whole, yet it is little understood by most people. This essay undertakes to provide a basic understanding of this paper economy, especially as its more speculative features have multiplied during the last two or three decades, so that Christians and others concerned about what is happening in our world can join in an intelligent discussion of how the harmful consequences of financial markets can be controlled.

Financial markets 101

To better understand this paper economy, one first needs to know something about foreign exchange markets, international money markets, and "external" financial markets.

In an open economy, domestic residents often engage in international transactions. American car dealers, for example, buy Japanese Toyotas and Datsuns, while German computer companies sell electronic notebooks to Mexican businessmen. Similarly, Australian mutual funds invest in the shares of companies all over the world, while the treasurer of a Canadian transnational corporation parks idle cash in 90-day Bank of England notes. Most of these transactions require one or more participants to acquire a foreign currency. If an American buys a Toyota and pays the Japanese Toyota dealer in dollars, for example, the latter will have to exchange the dollars for yens in order to have the local currency with which to pay his workers and local suppliers.

The foreign exchange market is the market in which national currencies are traded. As in any market, a price must exist at which trade can occur. An exchange rate is the price of a unit of domestic currency in terms of a foreign currency. Thus, if the exchange rate of the dollar in terms of the Japanese yen increases, we say the dollar has depreciated and the yen has appreciated. Similarly, a decrease in the dollar/yen exchange rate would imply an appreciation of the dollar and a depreciation of the yen.

Foreign exchange markets can be classified as spot markets and forward markets. In spot markets currencies are bought and sold for immediate delivery and payment. In forward markets, currencies are bought or sold for future delivery and payment. A U.S. music company, say, enters into a contract to buy British records for delivery in 30 days. To guard against the possibility of the dollar/pound exchange rate increasing in the meantime, the company buys pounds forward, for delivery in 30 days, at the corresponding forward exchange rate quoted today. This is called hedging.

Of course, there has to be a counterpart to the music company's forward purchase of pounds. Who is the seller of those pounds? The immediate seller would be a commercial bank, as in the spot market. But the bank only acts as an intermediary. The ultimate seller of forward pounds may be another hedger, like the music company, but with a position just its opposite. Suppose, for example, that an American firm or individual has invested in 30-day British securities that it wants to convert back into dollars after the end of 30 days. The investor may decide to sell the pound proceeds forward in order to assure itself of the rate at which the pounds are to be converted back into dollars after 30 days.

Another type of investor may be providing the forward contract bought by the music company. This is the speculator, who attempts to profit from changes in exchange rates. Depending on their expectations, speculators may enter the forward market either as sellers or as buyers of forward exchange. In this particular case, the speculator may have reason to believe that the dollar/pound exchange rate will decrease in the next 30 days, permitting him to obtain the promised pounds at a lower price in the spot market 30 days hence.

The main instruments of foreign exchange transactions include electronic bank deposit transfers and bank drafts, bills of exchange, and a whole array of other short-term instruments expressed in terms of foreign currency. Thus, foreign exchange transactions do not generally involve a physical exchange of currencies across borders. They generally involve only changes in debits and credits at different banks in different countries. Very large banks in the main financial centers such as New York, London, Brussels and Zurich, account for most foreign exchange transactions. Local banks can provide foreign exchange by purchasing it in turn from major banks.

Although the foreign exchange market is dispersed in many cities and countries, it is unified by keen competition among the highly sophisticated market participants. A powerful force keeping exchange rate quotations in different places in line with each other is the search on the part of market participants for foreign exchange arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of a commodity or financial asset in different markets with the purpose of obtaining a profit from the differential between the buying and selling price.

When foreign exchange is acquired in order to engage in international transactions involving the purchase or sale of goods and services, it is said that international trade has taken place in the real economy. When international transactions involve the purchase or sale of financial assets, they are referred to as international financial transactions. They constitute the paper economy.

Financial markets are commonly classified as capital markets or money markets. Capital markets deal in financial claims that reach more than one year into the future. Such claims include shares of stock, bonds, and long-term loans, among others. Money markets, on the other hand, deal in short-term claims, with maturities of less than one year. These include marketable government securities (like Treasury bills), large-denomination certificates of deposit issued by banks, commercial paper (representing short-term corporate debt), money market funds, and many other kinds of short-term, highly liquid (easily transferable) financial instruments. It is these short-term money market securities that account for most of the instability in the global paper economy.

Buying or selling a money market security internationally involves the same kind of foreign exchange risk that plagues buyers or sellers of merchandise internationally. If one wishes to guard against the possibility of an increase or decrease in the foreign exchange rate, one can insure against such fluctuations by "covering" in the forward market. By the same token, the decision about whether to own domestic or foreign money market securities is not simply a comparison of the rates of interest paid on otherwise comparable securities, because one must also take into account the gain (or loss) from purchasing foreign currency spot and selling it forward. Thus, choosing the security with the highest return does not necessarily imply the one with the highest interest rate.

People who trade in international money markets, moreover, need to take into account many other variables, including the costs of gathering and processing information, transaction costs, the possibility of government intervention and regulation, other forms of political risk, and the inability to make direct comparisons of alternative assets. Speculating in international money markets is a risky proposition.

International money markets involve assets denominated in different currencies. External financial markets involve assets denominated in the same currency but issued in different political jurisdictions. Eurodollars, for example, are dollar deposits held outside the United States (offshore), such as dollar deposits in London, Zurich, or even Singapore banks. The deposits may be in banks owned locally or in the offshore banking subsidiaries of U.S. banks. Deutsche mark deposits in London banks or pound sterling deposits in Amsterdam banks also are examples of external deposits. They are referred to as eurocurrency deposits. (The advent of a new common currency in the European Community - the Euro - will require the development of new nomenclature for external financial markets)

External banking activities are a segment of the wholesale international money market. The vast majority of eurocurrency transactions fall in the above $1 million value range, frequently reaching the hundreds of millions (or even billion) dollar value. Accordingly, the customers of eurobanks are almost exclusively large organizations, including multinational corporations, government entities, hedge funds, and international organizations, as well as eurobanks themselves. Like domestic banks, eurobanks that have excess reserves may make loans denominated in eurocurrencies, expanding the supply of eurocurrency deposits. The eurocurrency market funnels funds from lending countries to borrowing countries. Thus, it performs an important function as global financial intermediator.

Early history

The origins of what Karl Polanyi3 called haute finance can be traced to Renaissance Italy, where as early as 1422 there were seventy-two bankers or bill-brokers in or near the Mecato Vecchio of Florence.4 Many combined trade with purely financial business. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Medici of Florence had opened branches in Bruges, London and Avignon, both as a means of financing international trade and as a way of marketing new kinds of financial assets. Many banking terms and practices still in use today originated in the burgeoning financial centers of Renaissance Europe.

By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and East India Companies began issuing shares to the public in order to fund imperial enterprises closely linked to Holland and Britain. Their shares were made freely transferable, permitting development of a secondary financial market for claims to future income. Amsterdam opened a stock exchange in 1611, and shortly thereafter, the British government began issuing lottery tickets, an early form of government bonds, to finance colonial expansion, wars and other major areas of state expenditure. A lively secondary market in these financial instruments also emerged.5

Throughout these early years, financial markets were anything but riskless and stable. Consider the famous Dutch tulip mania of 1630, for example. This speculative bubble saw prices of tulip bulbs reach what seemed like absurd levels, yet "the rage among the Dutch to possess them [tulips] was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected." Some investors in Britain and France shared this "irrational exuberance," though it was centered mostly in Holland. Then, not unlike speculative bubbles of more recent vintage, prices crashed6, pushing the economy into a depression and leaving many investors angry and confused.

Paris developed into an early financial center in the eighteenth century, but the Revolution of 1789 dissipated its power. The New York Stock Exchange was formally organized in 1792 and the official London Stock Exchange opened in 1802. The expansion westward of the railroads in the U.S. offered the financial community opportunity to sell railway shares and bonds that quickly became dominant in the financial markets. Indeed, the bond markets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam were vehicles for collecting massive amounts of European savings and transferring it at higher returns to the emerging markets of the U.S., Canada, Australia, Latin America and Russia in the century preceding World War I.

Forward markets soon developed, especially in the U.S., in order to counter the impact of long distances and unpredictable weather. As capital and money markets expanded, other new financial instruments came into use. Joint stock companies were formed, enabled by legislation that clarified the distinction between the owners and managers of corporations. This, in turn, helped stimulate the growth of the American stock market in the late nineteenth century. To be sure, financial markets did not grow continuously in the nineteenth century. Lending to the emerging markets was interrupted by defaults in the 1820s, 1850s, 1870s and 1890s, but each wave of default was confined to a relatively small number of countries, permitting growth of financial flows to resume.7

In the four decades leading up to World War I, a truly worldwide economy was forged for the first time, extending from the core of Western Europe and the U.S. to latecomers in Eastern Europe and Latin America and even to the countries supplying raw materials on the periphery. Central to this expansion of trade and investment was an expanding system of finance that girded the globe. The amount was enormous: between 1870 and 1914 something like $30 billion,8 the equivalent in 2002 dollars of $550 billion, was transferred to recipient countries, in a world economy perhaps one-twelfth as large as today's.

During this "Gilded Age" of haute finance, the risks of participating in international trade and investment were generously shared with governments and the banking system. The reason is that foreign exchange rates were kept reasonably stable by the commitment of most governments to the "high" gold standard. In this way, businesses and individuals engaging in international transactions were reasonably certain that the value of their contracts was not going to change before they matured. Their exchange risk was shared with government by its willingness to buy or sell gold in order to keep the exchange rate constant. Because of this assurance, financial flows were reasonably free of regulation.

They were not immune from crises, however. When the sources of financial capital temporarily dried up, capital-importing countries occasionally found they could not expand export earnings sufficiently to avoid suspending interest payments on their debts or abandoning gold parity. On two occasions, the United States faced this possibility. The first was in 1893, when it switched in a sharp economic downturn to bimetallism (which caused William Jennings Bryan to denounce the "cross of gold"), and the second was in 1907, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, handing to the government the function of lender of last resort previously carried out by Wall Street banks under the tutelage of J. Pierpont Morgan.

In his magisterial book The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi reflected on the pervasive influence of haute finance on the policies of nations even in this "Gilded Age." The globalising financial markets and the gold standard, according to Polanyi, left very little room for states, especially smaller ones, to adopt monetary and fiscal policies independent of the new international order. "Loans, and the renewal of loans, hinged upon credit, and credit upon good behavior. Since, under constitutional government ..., behavior is reflected in the budget and the external value of the currency cannot be detached from the appreciation of the budget, debtor governments were well advised to watch their exchanges carefully and to avoid policies which might reflect upon the soundness of budget positions." Thus, even one hundred years ago the then-dominant world power, Great Britain, speaking as it did so often through the voice of the City of London, "prevailed by the timely pull of a thread in the international monetary network.9

Following World War I, the United States emerged not merely as a creditor country but as the primary source of new international financial flows. At first, the principal borrowers were the national governments of the stronger countries, but as the boom in security underwriting developed in the U.S, numerous obscure provinces, departments and municipalities found it possible to sell their bonds to American investors.10 Just as domestic construction, land, and equity markets went through speculative rises in the 1920s, so too did the U.S. experience a speculative surge in foreign investment. In the aftermath of successive defaults by foreign debtors in 1932, the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency concluded:

The record of the activities of investment bankers in the flotation of foreign securities is one of the most scandalous chapters in the history of American investment banking. The sale of these foreign issues was characterized by practices and abuses that violated the most elementary principles of business ethics.11

Speculation in the stock markets leading up to 1929 offers still another window on the instability of short-term financial flows. A speculative market can be defined as one in which prices move in response to the balance of opinion regarding the future movement of prices rather than responding normally to changes in the demand for and supply of whatever is priced. Helped by the willingness of Wall Street to allow people to buy stocks on margin, people were only too ready to bet prices would rise as long as others thought so too. Day after day and month after month the price of stocks went up in 1927. The gains by later standards were not large, but they had an aspect of great reliability. Then in 1928, the nature of the boom changed. "The mass escape into make-believe, so much a part of the true speculative orgy, started in earnest.12

Following World War I, the gold standard itself took on new form. Nations were allowed to hold their international reserves in either gold or foreign exchange. This worked for a while in the 1920s, but as speculation mounted and balances of payments disequilibria grew, fears of devaluation led central banks to try to replace their foreign-exchange holdings with specie in a "scramble for gold." The worldwide result of these shifts in central bank portfolios was an overall contraction of the supply of money and credit that sapped aggregate demand and forced prices to fall and output levels to shrink. Thus, it can be argued - persuasively in our view - that the Great Depression of the 1930s was as much, if not more, the result of mismanagement of money and credit as it was the result of protectionist policies. Protectionist policies were more likely the result of slowed growth and stalled trade. Countries that broke with the gold-exchange standard early, such as Britain in 1931, and pursued more expansionary monetary policies fared somewhat better.

The Bretton Woods system

During the darkest days of World War II, a radically new economic architecture was designed for the postwar world at a New Hampshire ski resort called Bretton Woods. With the competitive devaluation and protectionist policies of the 1930s still fresh in their minds, the mostly British and American delegates to the conference wanted most of all to design a system with fixed exchange rates that did not rely on national gold hoards to keep exchange rates stable. They decided to depend instead on strict controls of international financial movements. In this way, they hoped to allow countries to pursue full-employment policies through appropriate monetary (money and credit) and fiscal (tax and spending) policies without some of the anxieties associated with open financial markets. The role of monetary and financial stabilizer was given to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was provided with modest funds to assist nations to adjust imbalances in their external payments obligations. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, later the World Bank) assumed the task of helping to finance post-war reconstruction.13

The IMF as it emerged from Bretton Woods had inadequate reserves to advance money for the long periods that many countries require for "soft-landings" from big current-account deficits. It would make only short-term loans. To make sure that borrowing nations were constrained, "conditionality" attached to IMF loans became standard practice, even in the early years of the Fund's operation. Policy limitations and "performance targets" tied to credit lines advanced under "standby agreements" began in the middle 1950s and were universal by the 1960s, long before the notions of "stabilization" and "structural adjustment" came into common parlance.

The Bretton Woods agreement also imposed a foreign exchange standard by which exchange rates between major currencies were fixed in terms of the dollar, and the value of the dollar was tied to gold at a U.S. guaranteed price of thirty-five dollars per ounce. By devising a system that controlled financial movements and assisted with the adjustment of countries' balances of payments, the new system succeeded in keeping exchange rates remarkably stable. They were changed only very occasionally, e.g., as when the value of sterling relative to the dollar was reduced in 1949 and again in 1966. This meant that companies doing business abroad did not need to worry constantly about the risk of exchanging one currency for another.

Among the reasons for this remarkable stability was the willingness of the central banks of other countries to hold an increasing proportion of their official reserves in the form of U.S. dollars. It was an essential part of the system that the dollars held by other countries would be seen as IOUs backed by the U.S. offer to exchange them for gold at a fixed pre-war price. But as the balance-of-payments of the U.S. moved more deeply into deficits in the 1960s, there were more and more U.S. dollars held by other countries, and this so-called "dollar overhang" became disturbingly large.15 General de Gaulle called it "the exorbitant privilege," meaning that the Americans were paying their bills - for defense spending to fight the Vietnam War among other things - with IOUs instead of real resources in the form of exports of goods and services.

Strict control over financial movements began to weaken as early as the 1950s, when the first eurodollar (later eurocurrency) deposits were made in London. At first a trickle, limited originally to Europe, these offshore banking operations soon expanded worldwide. The American "Interest Equalization Tax" (IET) instituted in 1963 raised the costs to banks of lending offshore from their domestic branches.16 The higher external rates led dollar depositors such as foreign corporations to switch their funds from onshore U.S. institutions to eurobanks. Thus, the real effect of the IET was to encourage the dollar to follow the foreigners abroad, rather than the other way around. Eurobanks paid higher interest rates on deposits and loaned eurocurrencies at lower rates than U.S. banks could at home. Still another large inflow of eurodeposits occurred in 1973-74 as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began "recycling" their surplus dollar earnings through eurobanks. Because of their existence, a country such as Brazil could arrange within a reasonably regulation-free environment to obtain multimillion-dollar loans from a consortium of offshore American, German and Japanese banks and thereby finance its oil imports. Net eurocurrency deposit liabilities that amounted to around $10 billion in the mid-1960s, grew to $500 billion by 1980.

These eurocurrency transactions taught the players in financial markets how to shift their deposits, loans, and investments from one currency to another whenever exchange rates or interest rates were thought to be ready to change. Even the ability of central banks to regulate the supply of money and credit was undermined by the readiness of commercial banks to borrow and lend offshore. Hence, the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms that had been put in place to implement the Bretton Woods agreement - interest rate ceilings, lending limits, portfolio restrictions, reserve and liquidity requirements - gradually eroded as offshore transactions started to balloon.

The world economy developed at unprecedented rates during the roughly twenty-five years immediately following World War II. Growth and employment rates during these years were at historic highs in most countries. Productivity also advanced rapidly in most developing countries as well as in the technological leaders. These facts suggest that the system devised at Bretton Woods worked reasonably well, despite occasional adjustments. To be sure, it helped to sow the seeds of its own destruction by failing to retain operational control of international financial flows. But the twenty-five years of its survival leading up to August 15, 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window, have nonetheless come to be called by some economic historians the "Golden Years."

Controlling private risk

Fixed exchange rates did not last long after the U.S. stopped exchanging gold for claims on the dollar held by foreign central banks. The pound sterling was allowed to float against the dollar in July, 1972. Japan set the yen free to float in February, 1973, and most European currencies followed suit shortly thereafter. The Bretton Woods gold-dollar system was doomed.

The fact that exchange rates no longer were fixed meant that companies doing business in different countries had to cope with the day-to-day shifts in the dollar's rate of exchange with other currencies. The risks of unexpected changes in the value of international contracts suddenly had shifted from the public to the private sector. Corporate finance officers now had to hedge against possible exchange losses by buying a currency forward and investing the equivalent in the short-term money market, or by investing in the eurocurrency market. The corporations' banks, in turn, tried to match each foreign currency transaction with another contrary transaction in order not to leave each of the banks exposed to foreign exchange risk overnight. Since no single bank was likely to balance its foreign exchange positions exactly, the need arose to swap deposits in different currencies in order to match corporate hedging transactions and to square the bank's books.

The price of this forward cover on inter-bank transactions - that is to say, the premium or discount on a currency's spot value - has tended to accord with the differences between interest-rates offered for eurocurrency deposits in different currencies. This is the connection between the foreign exchange market and the short-term credit markets, between exchange rates and interest rates. Whenever exchange rates move up or down, therefore, their influence is immediately transmitted through the eurocurrency markets to the credit markets.

It is this scramble to avoid private risk that accounted for the dramatic rise in international financial movements following the demise of the Bretton Woods system. By 1973, daily foreign exchange trading around the world varied between $10 and $20 billion per day. This amount was approximately twice the value of world trade at the time. Bank of International Settlements data suggests that the daily average of foreign exchange trading had climbed by 1980 to about $80 billion, and that the ratio between foreign exchange trading and international trade was more nearly ten to one. The data for 1992 was $880 billion and fifty to one, respectively; for 1995, $l,260 billion and seventy to one; and for 2000, almost $1,800 and ninety to one.

There is very little doubt, therefore, that the lion's share of international financial flows is relatively short-run. Indeed, about eighty percent of foreign exchange transactions are reversed in less than seven business days. Only a very small proportion is used to finance international trade and direct foreign investment. The vast majority must be used with the expectation of gain or to avoid losses that may result from changes in the value of financial assets. In general terms, they are speculative, made in hope of capital gain or to hedge against potential capital loss, or to seek the gains of arbitrage based on slight differences in rates of return in different financial centers.

The power of financial actors17

Foreign exchange markets and markets for money and credit seem remote and abstract to most people. This section introduces the real institutions that operate these markets and assesses the nature of their power.

Commercial banks

They take deposits, lend money, and create credit to the extent their capitalization allows. In Europe, they tend to combine commercial and investment banking services, but in the U.S. and Japan they are still kept at least partially separate by regulation. The foreign exchange trading facilities of the largest commercial banks, e.g. Citibank and J.P.Morgan/Chase in the U.S., tend to dominate the market. The banking industry as a whole represents the largest pool of world financial capital.

Investment banks

They facilitate international payments, manage new issues of stocks and bonds, advise on mergers and acquisitions in all industries, and engage in securities and foreign exchange trading as allowed by law. Investment banks (previously called merchant banks in the U.K.) have specialized in particular kinds of derivative products. Derivatives are financial contracts whose value is based upon the value of other underlying financial assets such as stocks, bonds, mortgages or foreign exchange.

Brokerage houses

They handle the bulk of stock exchange transactions and a major part of foreign exchange transactions. Investment banks recently have acquired several of the main brokerage houses in the U.S. The development of investor-friendly methods of buying and selling securities, e.g., over-the-counter markets and electronic brokerage, also have diminished the role of independent brokerage houses.

Mutual funds

They are pools of funds provided by clients that are run by professional investment managers. These collective investments are held in portfolios with various mixes of money-market instruments, bonds and equities. Mutual funds account for the second largest pool of global financial capital.

Hedge funds

They resemble mutual funds, but they are much less restricted in investment activities and techniques. Their customers are high net-worth individuals and large institutional investors. They specialize in complex financial instruments and tend to take significant speculative positions, especially on expected future changes in macroeconomic conditions. They exploit arbitrage opportunities embedded in the relative prices of related securities. They frequent offshore centers and tax havens.

Tax havens

Offshore centers and tax havens shelter perhaps $10 trillion of wealth from capital and income taxation. The British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Dublin and Luxembourg are among the most important. Many hedge funds are registered there.

Wealthy individuals

They are an important source of funds, as many of them invest their liquid funds in financial markets. They account for about eighty percent of hedge fund investors.

Private pension funds

They function like annuities, receiving funds today in return for a promise to pay future benefits. With large pools of funds to invest, they tend to depend on investment banks, mutual funds or hedge funds to supervise placement of their assets in global financial markets.

Insurance companies

They pool risks by selling protection against the loss of property, income, or life. Since the risks they insure have various durations, they call for varied investment strategies. A portion of their funds is invested in short-term financial instruments, often through mutual and hedge funds.

Transnational corporations

They produce and sell goods and services in a number of countries. Their finance departments seek the best ways to raise and transfer funds across borders, and administer the transfer prices18 of international trade conducted within the corporation. Some even have in-house corporate banks.

According to recent work by political scientists, the power of these financial actors is based in part on a complicated "process of multiplication" of loans, assets and transactions. Many investors in financial markets buy financial instruments on very thin margins, based on loans obtained by pledging the assets as collateral. This is called "leverage" in the jargon of financial markets. In turn, the borrowed funds are invested in other financial assets, multiplying the demand for credit and financial assets. As demand rises, more sophisticated financial assets are invented, including many forms of financial derivatives. A major portion of the accumulated debt remains serviceable only as long as the prices of most assets will rise or at least remain relatively stable. If prices turn down, they easily can lead to a chain-reaction. If investors respond instinctively like a herd, they will bring a far-reaching collapse that constitutes a crisis.

As the flow of financial assets climbs, some bankers, brokers, and managers of financial institutions become prominent players in the competition for investor dollars. Some become known for picking profitable places to invest and for promoting their selections successfully. This can influence markets if people have confidence in their advice. A notorious example of the influence of prominent players was the attack on British sterling in 1992 by George Soros' Quantum Fund. Believing that sterling was overvalued, the Fund quietly established credit lines that allowed it to borrow $15 billion worth of sterling and sell it for dollars at the then "overvalued" price. Its purpose, of course, was to pay back the loan with cheaper pounds after they had depreciated. Having gone long on dollars and short on sterling, Soros decided to speak up noisily. He publicized his short-selling and made statements in newspapers that the pound would soon be devalued. It wasn't long before sterling was devalued; he made $1 billion in profit.

The point can be made more generally: financial markets are subject to manipulation because they have become socially structured. Market leaders and financial gurus are admired and followed (at least until very recently). The heavyweights thus dominate the business. An obvious consequence of this is that there is a strong tendency in financial markets for further concentration of resources.

Another source of the power of financial actors is their obvious affinity for the rampant free-market philosophy of neo-liberalism. The freedom with which they move financial capital around depends, of course, on the market-friendly policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.19 As long as they are seen as part of the governing coalition, they derive special powers to regulate themselves rather than be controlled by an independent government agency or civil society. Their power also is reinforced by the activities of several collective associations of financial actors,20 which lobby on their behalf.

One more source of power for the financial actors is their knowledge that if they are big enough and sufficiently interlaced with other financial actors, then the "system" will keep them from failing. Consider the case of Long-term Capital Management, a hedge fund partnership started in 1994. It was able to borrow from various banks the equivalent of forty times its capitalization in order to make bets on changes in the relative prices of bonds in the U.S. and abroad. When the Russian government announced a devaluation and debt moratorium in August, 1998, it produced losses that the fund could not sustain. Nor could some of the banks that had loaned large amounts to the fund. Accordingly, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fearful that the risk to the entire system was too high, orchestrated a private rescue operation by fourteen banks and other financial institutions, which re-capitalized the company for $3.5 billion.

Financial actors also have the power indirectly to influence non-financial actors such as firms or states. By providing economic incentives to gamble and speculate on financial instruments, global financial markets divert funds from long-term productive investments. In all probability, they also encourage banks and financial institutions to maintain a regime of higher real interest rates that reduce the ability of productive enterprises to obtain credit. The volatility of global financial markets, moreover, brings uncertainty and volatility in interest rates and exchange rates that are harmful to various sectors of the real economy, particularly international trade.

The above stories about George Soros and Long-term Capital Management are good illustrations of the consequences for non-financial actors of actions by financial actors. Both episodes are examples of games that are basically zero-sum, at least in the short-run. Nothing new was produced; no new values were created. In the 1992 case about speculating against sterling, the Quantum Fund's profits were at the expense of the British government, especially the Bank of England, and British taxpayers. In 1998, the losses suffered by Long-term Capital Management came out of the pockets of the stockholders of the banks that bailed it out, as the stock-market value of their shares depreciated. Hence, the financial system tends to feed itself by drawing more resources from other sectors of the economy, undermining the vitality of the real economy.

Consequences of global financial flows

The dominant economic ideology of the last twenty-five years has been embodied in the so-called Washington Consensus. It is a "market-friendly" ideology that traces its roots to longstanding policies of the IMF that encourage macroeconomic "stabilization;" to adoption by the World Bank of ideas in vogue in Washington early in the Reagan period concerning deregulation and supply-side economics; to the zeal of the Thatcher government in England for privatizing public enterprises; and perhaps most of all to the neo-liberal tendencies of the business community and the economics profession in the U.S. The implementation of these policies of economic "reform," by first "stabilizing" the macro-economy and then "adjusting" the market so that it can perform more efficiently, are supposed to pay off in the form of faster output growth and rising real incomes

Among these policy prescriptions is financial liberalization in both the developed and the developing countries. Domestically it is achieved by weakening or removing controls on interest and credit and by diluting the differences between banks, insurance and finance companies. International financial liberation, on the other hand, demands removal of controls and regulations on both the inflows and outflows of financial instruments that move through foreign exchange markets. It is the implementation of these reforms that is perhaps the single most important cause of the surge in global financial flows. To be sure, the influence of technological advances has broken the natural barriers of space and time for financial markets as twenty-four hour electronic trading has grown. The fact that throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s the developed countries suffered from over-capacity and overproduction in manufacturing may also have led the owners of financial capital to look for alternative profit opportunities.

It now is time to ask whether the implementation of all these reforms, on balance, has produced good or bad results. The focus of this section will be mostly on the consequences of large and expanding international financial flows. After all, they are the main concern of this essay. But first, we should ask whether or not the policies of growth and rising real incomes promoted by the Washington Consensus have borne fruit.

Growth and income

There is little doubt that the introduction of the Washington Consensus' policy mix expanded the volume of international trade. As a result, trade in goods and services has grown at more than twice the rate of global gross domestic product (GDP), and developing countries' share of trade has risen from 23 to 29 percent. Increasing numbers of firms from developing countries, like their industrial-country counterparts, engage in transnational production and adopt a global perspective in structuring their operations. The flow of foreign direct investments and foreign portfolio investments has multiplied even more rapidly than trade, despite the financial instability experienced in Asia, Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere in recent years.

The effects of liberalization have not been uniformly favorable, however. After at least ten full years of experience with the Washington Consensus, several recent studies have begun to assess the consequences for developing countries of this experiment in more open markets.21 Except for the years of crisis in a number of the countries studied, most developing countries achieved moderate growth rates of gross domestic product in the 1990s - considerably higher than in the l980s in Africa and Latin America during the debt crisis, but remarkably unchanged in most other regions. Moreover, average annual growth in the 1990s was slightly lower than in the twenty-five years preceding the debt crisis when a strategy of substituting domestic production for imports was in fullest use. When population growth rates are taken into consideration, the growth rate of per capita income in the developing countries studied during the 1990s also was somewhat lower than in the 1960s and 1970s. Toward the end of the 1990s, growth tapered off in many countries due to emerging domestic financial crises or external events. There is little evidence in these figures, therefore, to suggest the strategy of liberalization boosted growth rates appreciably.

Nor did the distribution of income improve in most developing countries in the 1990s. On the contrary, virtually without exception the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers rose with liberalization. The reasons for this varied widely among countries, but one of the most important reasons was the fact that the number of relatively well-paid jobs in sectors of the economy involved with international trade, though growing, was insufficient to absorb available workers, forcing many workers into more precarious and poorly paid employment in the non-traded, informal trade, and service sectors or where traditional agriculture served as a sponge for the labor market. Between the mid-1960s and the late-1990s, the poorest 20 percent of the world population saw its share of income fall from 2.3 to 1.4 percent. Meanwhile, the share of the wealthiest quintile increased from 70 to 85 percent.22

Risk and reward

While all markets are imperfect and subject to failure, financial markets are more prone than others to fail because they are plagued with three particular shortcomings: asymmetric information, herd behavior and self-fulfilling panics. Asymmetric information is a problem whenever one party to an economic transaction has insufficient information to make rational and consistent decisions. In most financial markets where borrowing and lending take place, borrowers usually have better information about the potential returns and risks associated with the investments to be financed by the loans than do the lenders. This becomes especially true as financial transactions disperse across the globe, often between borrowers and lenders of widely different cultures.

Asymmetric information leads to adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection occurs when, say, lenders have too little information to choose from among potential borrowers those who are most likely to use the loans wisely. The lenders' gullibility, therefore, attracts more unworthy borrowers. Moral hazard occurs when borrowers engage in excessively risky activities that were unanticipated by lenders and lead to significant losses for the lender. Yet another form of moral hazard occurs when lenders indulge in lending indiscriminately because they assume that the government or an international institution will bail them out if the loans go awry.

A good illustration of asymmetric information is the story of bank lending following OPEC's large increase in oil prices following 1973. Awash in cash, the oil exporters deposited large amounts in commercial banks that then perfected the Euro-currency loan for developing countries. Eager to put excess reserves to use, the banks spent little time discriminating among potential borrowers, in part because they believed host governments or international agencies would guarantee the loans. At the same time, developing countries found they could readily borrow not only to import oil, but also to increase other kinds of expenditures. This meant they could use borrowed funds to maintain domestic spending rather than be forced to adjust to the new realities of higher prices for necessary imports. There is considerable evidence that moral hazard also was present in the Mexican crises in 1982 and 1994, and in the Southeast Asian crises in 1997-8.

Yet another illustration of asymmetric information is the tendency of financial firms, especially on Wall Street and in the City of London, to invent ever more complex derivatives to shift risk around the financial system. The market for these products is growing rapidly, both on futures and options exchanges (two of the several places where derivatives are traded). A financial engineer, for example, can take the risk in, say, a bond and break it down into a series of smaller risks, such as that inflation will reduce its real value or that the borrower will default. These smaller risks can then be priced and sold, using derivatives, so that the bondholder keeps only those risks he wishes to bear. But this is not a simple task, particularly when it involves assets with risk exposures far into the future and which are traded so rarely that there is no good market benchmark for setting the price. Enron, for instance, sold a lot of these sorts of derivatives, booking profits on them immediately even though there was a serious doubt about their long-term profitability. Stories of huge losses incurred in derivative trading are legion. The real challenge before central banks and regulatory bodies is to curb speculative behavior and bring discipline in derivative markets.

A second source of risk in financial markets is the tendency of borrowers and lenders alike to engage in herd behavior. John Maynard Keynes, writing in the 1930s, suggested that financial markets are like "beauty contests." His analogy was to a game in the British Sunday newspapers that asked readers to rank pictures of women according to their guess about the average choice by other respondents. The winner, therefore, does not express his own preferences, but rather anticipates "what average opinion expects average opinion to be." Accordingly, Keynes thought that anyone who obtained information or signals that pointed to swings in average opinion and to how it would react to changing events had the basis for substantial gain. Objective information about economic data was not enough. Rather, simple slogans "like public expenditure is bad," "lower unemployment leads to inflation," "larger deficits lead to higher interest rates," were then the more likely sources of changes in public opinion. What mattered was that average opinion believed them to be true, and that advance knowledge of, say, more public spending, lower unemployment, or larger deficits, respectively, offered the speculator a special advantage.

A financial market that operates as a beauty contest is likely to be highly unstable and prone to severe changes. One reason for this is that people trading in financial assets, even today, know very little about them. People who hold stock know little about the companies that issued them. Investors in mutual funds know little about the stocks their funds are invested in. Bondholders know little about the companies or governments that issued the bonds. Even knowledgeable professionals are often more concerned with judging how swings in conventional opinion might change market values rather than with the long-term returns on investments. Indeed, since careful analysis of risks and rewards is costly and time consuming, it often makes sense for fund managers and traders to follow the herd. If they decide rationally not to follow the herd, their competence may be seriously questioned. On the other hand, if fund managers follow the herd and the herd suffers losses, few will question their competence because others too suffered losses. When financial markets are operated like a beauty contest, everyone wants to sell at the same time and nobody wants to buy.

The financial markets behaved as predicted shortly after several industrial countries, including the U.S. and Germany, abolished all restrictions on international capital movements in 1973. The new system proved to be highly volatile, with exchange rates, interest rates, and financial asset-prices subject to large short-term fluctuations. The markets also were susceptible to contagion when financial tremors spread from their epicenter to other countries and markets that seemingly had little connection with the initial problem. In less than five years, it already was clear that both the surpluses and the deficits on the major countries' balance of payments were getting larger, not smaller, despite significant changes in the exchange rates.

In some cases, a financial crisis can be self-fulfilling. A rumor can trigger a self-fulfilling speculative attack, e.g. on a currency, that may be baseless and far removed from the economic fundamentals (unlike the Soros story above). This can cause a sudden shift in the herd's intentions and lead to unanticipated market movements that create severe financial crises. Consider, for example, the succession of major financial crises that have pock-marked the recent history of international financial markets, including Latin America's Southern Cone crisis of 1979-81, the developing-country debt crisis of 1982, the Mexican crisis of 1994-95, the Asian crisis of 1997-98, the Russian crisis of 1998, the Brazilian crisis of 1999, and the Argentine crisis of 2001-02.

Perhaps the Asian crisis of 1997-98 is the most interesting in this regard, for there were relatively few signals beforehand of impending crisis. All the main East Asian economies displayed in 1994-96 low inflation, fiscal surpluses or balanced budgets, limited public debt, high savings and investment rates, substantial foreign exchange reserves and no signs of deterioration before the crisis. This background has led many analysts to suppose that the crisis was a mere product of the global financial system. But what could have triggered the herd to stampede out of Asian currencies? No doubt several factors were at work. Before the crisis that started in the summer of 1997, there was a rise in short-term lending to Asians by Western and Japanese banks with little or no premiums, a fact that the Bank for International Settlement raised questions about. Alert investors, especially hedge funds, also noticed that substantial portions of East and Southeast Asian borrowings were going into non-productive assets and real estate that often were linked to political connections. In fact, some of the funds pouring into non-productive assets were coming out of the productive sector, mortgaging the longer-term viability of some real economies. Information about the structure and policies of financial sectors was opaque. Thus, opinions began to change among key lenders about the regulation of financial sectors in several Asian countries and their destabilizing lack of transparency. Suddenly, several important hedge funds reduced their exposure by shorting currency futures, followed quickly by Western mutual funds. The calling of loans led quickly to deep depression in several Asian countries. It has been estimated that the Asian crisis and its global repercussions cut global output by $2 trillion in 1998-2000.

Loss of government autonomy

Both economic theory and the experience of managing the external financial affairs of nations tell us that it is virtually impossible to maintain (1) full financial mobility, (2) a fixed exchange rate, and (3) freedom to seek macro-economic balance (full employment with little inflation) with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Only two of these policy objectives can be consistently maintained. If the authorities try to pursue all three, they will sooner or later be punished by destabilizing financial flows, as in the run up to the Great Depression around 1930 and in the months before sterling's collapse 1992. If a government tries to stimulate its economy with lax monetary policy, for example, and players with significant market power like George Soros sense that at a fixed exchange rate, foreigners will be unwilling to lend enough to finance the country's current account deficit, they will begin to flee the home currency in order to avoid the capital losses they will suffer if and when there is a devaluation. If reserve losses accelerate and more players follow suit, crisis ensues. The authorities are forced to devalue, interest rates soar, and the successful attackers sit back to count their profits.

For nations wishing to retain reasonably independent monetary and fiscal authority in order to cater to domestic needs, the solution is to allow the exchange rate to move up or down as conditions in the foreign exchange markets dictate, or to establish some sort of control over the movement of financial instruments in and out of the country, or to devise some combination of these two adjustment mechanisms. The debate over whether fixed or flexible exchange rates is the wiser policy continues to rage in academic quarters and in finance ministries all over the world. For the most part, the international business community prefers reasonably fixed exchange rates in order to minimize their costs of hedging foreign currency positions. Thus instituting some form of control over speculative financial movements may be an appropriate solution to the "trilemma."

The capacity of a nation to levy enough taxes to finance needed public expenditures is another important reason to retain independent authority. A central function of government has been to insulate domestic groups from excessive market risks, particularly those originating in international transactions. This is the way governments have maintained domestic political support for liberalizing trade and finance throughout the postwar period. Yet many governments are less able today to help citizens that are injured by freer markets with unemployment compensation, severance payments, and adjustment assistance because the slightest hint of raising taxes to pay for these vital public services leads to capital flight in a world of heightened financial mobility.

This is a dilemma. Increased integration into the world economy has raised the need of governments to redistribute tax revenues or implement generous social programs in order to protect the vast majority of the population that remains internationally immobile. At the same time, governments find themselves less able to maintain the safety nets needed to preserve social stability. It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that doing things that will bolster the ability of governments to levy sufficient taxes - curbing tax avoidance by transnational corporations, controlling offshore tax havens, regulating capital flight - would help make globalization slightly more democratic.

Winners and losers

The people who benefit from speculative financial movements are, for the most part, better educated and wealthier than the vast majority of fellow citizens. They are the elites, whatever the country. As noted above, they have fewer connections to the real economy of production and exchange than most people. And their purpose in trading financial assets, again for the most part, is to make a profit quickly rather than wait for an investment project to mature.

People who do not participate directly in the buying and selling of short-term financial instruments are nonetheless influenced indirectly by the macroeconomic instability and contagion that often accompany interruptions in financial market flows. This is true for people both in developed and developing countries. In developed countries, the voracious appetite of financial markets for more and more resources saps the vitality of the real economy - the economy that most people depend upon for their livelihood. It has been shown that real interest rates rise as a result of the expansion of speculative financial markets. This rise in real interest rates, in turn, dampens real investment and economic growth while serving to concentrate wealth and political power within a growing worldwide rentier class (people who depend for their income on interest, dividends, and rents).23 Rather, the long-term health of the economy depends upon directing investable funds into productive investments rather than into speculation.

In developing countries, attracting global investors' attention is a mixed blessing. Capital market inflows provide important support for building infrastructure and harnessing natural and human resources. At the same time, surges in money market inflows may distort relative prices, exacerbate weakness in a nation's financial sector, and feed bubbles. As the 1997 Asian crisis attests, financial capital may just as easily flow out of as into a country. Unstable financial flows often lead to one of three kinds of crises:

Although these three types of crises sometimes appear singly, they more often arrive in combination because external shocks or changed market expectations are likely to occur simultaneously in the market for government bonds, the foreign exchange market, and the markets for bank assets. Approximately sixty developing countries have experienced extreme financial crises in the past decade.24

The vast majority of people in the developing world suffer from these convulsive changes. They are tired of adjusting to changes over which they exercise absolutely no control. Most people in these countries view Western capitalism as a private club, a discriminatory system that benefits only the West and the elites who live inside "the bell jars" of poor countries. Even as they consume the consumer goods of the West, they are quite aware that they still linger at the periphery of the capitalist game. They have no stake in it, and they believe that they suffer its consequences. As Hernando deSoto puts it, "Globalization should not be just about interconnecting the bell jars of the privileged few."25

Social solidarity

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation sought to explain how the "liberal creed" contributed to the catastrophes of war and depression associated with the first half of the twentieth century. Polanyi's central argument, which in fact can be traced back to Adam Smith, is that markets do indeed promote efficiency and change, but that they achieve this through undermining social coherence and solidarity. Markets must therefore be embedded within social institutions that mitigate their negative consequences.

The evidence of more recent times suggests that the global spread of free-market policies has been accompanied by the decline of countervailing institutions of social solidarity. Indeed, a main feature of the introduction of market-friendly policies has been to weaken local institutions of social solidarity. Consider, for example, the top-down policy prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank during the developing world's debt crisis in the 1980s. These policies evolved into an intricate web of expected behaviors by developing countries. In order for developing countries to expect private businesses and financial interests to invest funds within their borders and to boost the growth potential of domestic economies, they needed to drop the "outdated and inefficient" policies that dominated development strategies for most of the postwar period and adopt in their place policies that are designed to encourage foreign trade and freer financial markets. Without significant adjustments in the ways economies were managed, it was suggested, nations soon would be left behind.

The list of Washington Consensus requirements was long and daunting:

In a provocative article, Ute Pieper and Lance Taylor point out that market outcomes often conflict with other valuable social institutions. In addition, they emphasize that markets function effectively only when they are "embedded" in society. The authors then look carefully at the experience of a number of developing countries as they struggled to comply with the policy prescriptions of the IMF and the Fund. In almost every case, they demonstrate conclusively that the impact of these efforts was to make society an "adjunct to the market."26

An appropriate balance is not being struck between the economic and non-economic aspirations of human beings and their communities. Indeed, the evidence is mounting that globalization's trajectory can easily lead to social disintegration - to the splitting apart of nations along lines of economic status, mobility, region, or social norms. Globalization not only highlights and exacerbates tensions among groups; it also reduces the willingness of internationally mobile groups to cooperate with others in resolving disagreements and conflicts.

Policy options

History confirms that free-markets are inherently volatile institutions, prone to speculative booms and busts. Overshooting, especially in financial markets, is their normal condition. To work well, free markets need not only regulation, but active management. During the first half of the post-war era, world markets were kept reasonably stable by national governments and by a regime of international cooperation. Only lately has a much earlier idea been revived and made an orthodoxy - the idea adopted by the Washington Consensus that, provided there are clear and well-enforced rules-of-the-game, free markets can be self-regulating because they embody the rational expectations that participants form about the future.

On the contrary, since markets are themselves shaped by human expectations, their behavior cannot be rationally predicted. The forces that drive markets are not mechanical processes of cause and effect, as assumed in most of economic theory. They are what George Soros has termed "reflexive interactions."27 Because markets are governed by highly combustible interactions among beliefs, they cannot be self-regulating.

The question before us then, is what could be done to better regulate financial markets and to bring active management back into the task of "embedding" markets in society, rather than the other way around? Monetary authorities such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S. and the central banks of other countries were formed long ago in order to dampen the inherent instabilities of financial market in their home countries. But the evolution of an international regulatory framework has not kept pace with the globalization of financial markets. The International Monetary Fund was not designed to cope with the volume and instability of recent financial trends.

Capital controls

Given the problems outlined above about short-term speculative financial transactions, one might wonder why national policy-makers have not insulated their financial markets by imposing some sort of control over financial capital. The answer, of course, is that some have continued trying to do so despite discouragement from the IMF. For example, some have put limitations on the quantity, conditions, or destinations of financial flows. Others have tried to impose a tax on short-term borrowing by national firms from foreign banks. This is said to be "market-based" because it operates by altering the cost of foreign funds. If such transactions were absolutely prohibited, they would be called "non-market" interventions.

A more extreme form of financial capital controls, one that controls movement of foreign exchange across international borders, also has been tried in a number of countries. This form of control requires that some if not all foreign currency inflows be surrendered to the central bank or a government agency, often at a fixed price that differs from that which would be set in free market. The receiving agency then determines the uses of foreign exchange. The absence of exchange controls means that currencies are "convertible."

The neo-liberal argument opposing financial capital controls asserts that their removal will enhance economic efficiency and reduce corruption. It is based on two basic propositions in economic theory that depend for their proof on perfectly competitive markets in the real economy and perfectly efficient gatherers and transmitters of information in financial markets. Neither assumption is realistic in today's world. Indeed, a number of empirical studies have reported the effectiveness of capital controls in controlling capital flight, curbing volatile capital flows and protecting the domestic economy from negative external developments.

Developing countries have only recently abandoned, or still maintain, a variety of control regimes. Latin American countries traditionally have used market-based controls, putting taxes and surcharges on selected financial capital movements or tying them up in escrow accounts. Non-market based restrictions were more common in Asia until the early 1990s. Many commentators believe that their sudden removal in the early 1990s was a contributing cause to the Asian financial crises in 1997-8. The experience of two countries, Malaysia and Chile, with capital controls is especially instructive.

Malaysia, unlike its Asian neighbors, was reluctant to remove its restrictions on external borrowing by national firms unless they could show how they could earn enough foreign exchange to service their debts. Then when the Asian crises hit, its government imposed exchange controls, in effect making its local currency that was held outside the country inconvertible into foreign exchange. After the ringget was devalued, exporters were required to surrender foreign currency earnings to the central bank in exchange for local currency at the new pegged rate. The government also limited the amount of cash nationals could take abroad, and it prohibited the repatriation of earnings on foreign investments that had been held for less than one year. Thus, Malaysia's capital controls were focused mostly on controlling the outflow of short-term financial transactions. Happily, the authorities were able to stabilize the currency and reduce interest rates, leading to a degree of domestic recovery.28

Chile, on the other hand, tried to limit the inflow of short-term financial transactions. It did so by imposing a costly reserve requirement on foreign-owned capital held in the country for less than one year. Despite attempts to stimulate foreign direct investment of the funds, most of the reserve deposits were absorbed in the form of increased reserves at the central bank. In turn, this created a potential for expanding the money supply, which the government feared would lead to inflation. Rather than allow this to happen, the government "sterilized" the inflows by selling government bonds from its portfolio. But this pushed down the prices of bonds and pushed up the interest rates on them, discouraging business investment. Finally, when prices of copper (Chile's primary export) fell sharply in 1998, the control regime was scrapped.29

The tobin tax

A global tax on international currency movements was first proposed by James Tobin, a Yale University economist, in 1972.30 He suggested that a tax of one-quarter to one percent be levied on the value of all currency transactions that cross national borders. He reasoned that such a tax on all spot transactions would fall most heavily on transactions that involve very short round-trips across borders. In other words, it would be speculators with very short time-horizons that the tax would deter, rather than longer-term investors who can amortize the costs of the tax over many years. For example, the yearly cost of a 0.2 percent round trip tax would amount to 48 percent of the value of the traded amount if the round trip were daily, 10 percent if weekly and 2.4 percent if monthly. Since at least eighty percent of spot transactions in the foreign exchange markets are reversed in seven business days or less, the tax could have a profound effect on the costs of short-term speculators.

Of course, for those who believe in the efficiency of markets and the rationality of expectations, a transactions tax would only hinder market efficiency. They argue that speculative sales and purchases of foreign exchange are mostly the result of "wrong" national monetary and fiscal policies. While we readily admit that national policies sometimes do not accord with desired objectives, they nonetheless have little relevance for speculators focused on the next few seconds, minutes or hours.

Tobin did not intend for his proposal to involve a supranational taxation authority. Rather, governments would levy the tax nationally. In order to make the tax rate uniform across countries, however, an international agreement would have to be entered into by at least the principal financial centers. The revenue obtained from the tax could be designated for each country's foreign exchange reserve for use during periods of instability, or it could be directed into a common global fund for uses like aid to the poorest nations. In the latter case, the feasibility of the tax also would depend on an international political agreement. The revenue potential is sizeable, and could run as high as $500 billion annually.

There are two other advantages often cited by proponents of the Tobin tax. Tobin's original rationale for a foreign exchange transactions tax was to enhance policy autonomy in a world of high financial capital mobility. He argued that currency fluctuations often have very significant economic and political costs, especially for producers and consumers of traded goods. A Tobin tax, by breaking the condition that domestic interest rates may differ from foreign interest rates only to the extent that the exchange rate is expected to change (see p. 10), would allow authorities to pursue different policies than those prevailing abroad without exposing them to large exchange rate movements. More recent research suggests that this is only a very modest advantage.31

An additional advantage of the tax is that it could facilitate the monitoring of international financial flows. The world needs a centralized data-base on all kinds of financial flows. Neither the Bank for International Settlements nor the IMF has succeeded in providing enough information to monitor them all. This information should be regularly shared among countries and international institutions in order to collectively respond to emerging issues.

The feasibility issues raised by the Tobin tax are more political than technical. One of the issues is about the likelihood of evasion. All taxes suffer some evasion, but that has rarely been a reason for avoiding them. Ideally all jurisdictions should be a party to any agreement about a common transactions tax, since the temptation to trade through non-participating jurisdictions would be high. Failing that, one could levy a penalty on transactions with "Tobin tax havens" of, say, double the normal tax rate. Moreover, one could limit the problem of substituting untaxed assets for taxed assets by applying the tax to forwards, swaps and possibly other contracts.

Tobin and many others have assumed that the task of managing the tax should be assigned to the IMF. Others argue that the design of the tax is incompatible with the structure of the IMF and that the tax should be managed by a new supranational body. Which view will prevail depends upon the resolution of other outstanding issues. The Tobin tax is an idea that deserves careful consideration. It should not be dismissed as too idealistic or too impractical. It addresses with precision the problems of excessive instability in the foreign exchange markets, and it yields the additional advantage of providing a means to assist those in greater need.

Reforming the IMF

The IMF was established in 1944 to provide temporary financing for member governments to help them maintain pegged exchange rates during a period of internal adjustment. With the collapse of the pegged exchange rate regime in 1971, that responsibility has been eclipsed by its role as central arbiter of financial crises in developing countries. As noted above (p. 20), these crises may be of three different kinds: fiscal crises, foreign exchange crises, and banking crises.

Under current institutional arrangements, a nation suffering a serious fiscal crisis that could easily lead to default must seek temporary relief from its debts from three different (but interrelated) institutions: the IMF, which is sometimes willing to renegotiate loans in return for promises to adopt more stringent policies (see above); the so-called Paris Club that sometimes grants relief on bilateral (country to country) credits; and the London Club that sometimes gives relief on bank credits. This is an extremely cumbersome process that fails to provide debtor countries with standstill protection from creditors, with adequate working capital while debts are being renegotiated, or with ways to ensure an expeditious overall settlement. The existing process often takes several years to complete.

There is a growing consensus that this problem is best resolved with creation of a new international legal framework that provides for de facto sovereign bankruptcy. This could take the form of an International Bankruptcy Code with an international bankruptcy court, or it could involve a less formal functional equivalent to its mechanisms: automatic standstills, priority lending, and comprehensive reorganization plans supported by rules that do not require unanimous consent. Jeffrey Sachs recommends, for example, that the IMF issue a clear statement of operating principles covering all stages of a debtor's progression through "bankruptcy" to solvency. A new system of emergency priority lending from private capital markets could be developed, he suggests, under IMF supervision. He also feels that the IMF and member governments should develop model covenants for inclusion in future sovereign lending instruments that allow for priority lending and speedy renegotiation of debt claims.32

At the Joint Meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in September, 2002, the policy committee directed the IMF staff to develop by April, 2003, a "concrete proposal" for establishing an internationally recognized legal process for restructuring the debts of governments in default. It also endorsed efforts to include "collective action" clauses in future government bond issues to prevent one or two holdout creditors from blocking a debt-restructuring plan approved by a majority of creditors. The objective of both proposals is to resolve future debt crises quickly and before they threaten to destabilize large regions, as happened in Southeast Asia in 1997-98.

Member countries rarely receive support from the IMF any longer to maintain a particular nominal exchange rate. Because financial capital is so mobile now, pegged exchange rates probably are unsupportable. But there are special times when the IMF still might give such support during a foreign exchange crisis. International lending to support a given exchange rate is legitimate if the government is trying to establish confidence in a new national currency, or if its currency is recovering from a severe bout of hyperinflation. Ordinarily the foreign exchange should be provided from an international stabilization fund supervised by the IMF.

National central banks usually supervise and regulate the domestic banking sector. Thus, banking crises normally are handled by domestic institutions. This may not be possible, however, if the nation's banks hold large short-term liabilities denominated in foreign currencies. If the nation's central bank has insufficient reserves of foreign currencies to fund a large outflow of foreign currencies, there may be circumstances when the IMF or other lenders may wish to act as lenders-of-last-resort to a central bank under siege. Nations like Argentina that have engaged in "dollarization" are learning about the downside risks of holding large liabilities denominated in foreign currencies. The best way to avoid this problem is for governments and central banks to restrict the use of foreign currency deposits or other kinds of short-term foreign liabilities at domestic banks.

Overall, what is most needed is the availability of more capital in developing countries and much quicker responses, amply funded, to emerging financial crises.. George Soros has argued powerfully that the IMF needs to establish a better balance between crisis prevention and intervention.33 The IMF has made some progress in prevention by introducing Contingency Credit Lines (CCLs). The CCL rewards countries that follow sound policies by giving them access to IMF credit lines before rather than after a crisis erupts. But CCL terms were set too high and there have been no takers. Soros also has recommended the issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that developed-countries would donate for the purpose of providing international assistance. Its proceeds would be used to finance "the provision of public goods on a global scale as well as to foster economic, social, and political progress in individual countries."34

A growing number of civil society institutions, however, oppose giving more money to the IMF unless it is basically reformed. They point out that it is a committed part of the Washington Consensus, the application of whose policies have made societies adjuncts of the market. They see the IMF as an instrument of the U.S. government and its corporate allies. The conditions it attaches to loans for troubled countries often do more to protect the interests of first world investors than to promote the long-term health of the developing countries. The needed chastening of speculative investors does not occur under these circumstances. There is evidence that in several major crises, IMF requirements for assisting nations have in fact worsened the situation and protracted the crises. The IMF opposed the policies that enabled Malaysia to weather the crisis in Southeast Asia, for example, while it urged the failed policies of other Southeast Asian nations. The vast literature cited by Pieper and Taylor (p. 22) is a convincing chronicle of earlier missteps. For such reasons as these, some civil society institutions argue that, unless IMF policies are changed, giving the institution more money will do more harm than good.

Fortunately, the IMF's policies are beginning to change, partly as a result of criticisms by civil society institutions, but more through recognition of the seriousness of the problems with the present system. In the wake of recent financial crises, leaders in the IMF as well as the World Bank are looking for ways to reform the international financial architecture. Arguably, their emphasis is shifting away from slavish devotion to the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus and toward more state intervention in financial markets. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate who has been particularly critical of the IMF, nonetheless acknowledges that its policy stances are improving.35

The IMF has begun to recognize the importance of at least functional public interventions in markets and the need to provide more supporting revenues. It has realized that controls on external financial movements and prudent regulation can help contain financial crises. It has abandoned the doctrine, long the backbone of structural adjustment policies, that raising the local interest rate will stimulate saving and thereby growth. Both the IMF and the World Bank have rolled over or forgiven the bulk of official debt owed by the poorest economies.

Whether these and other promising changes in IMF thinking and policy formation are sufficient to assure that its future responses to crises will be benign still is not clear. While celebrating what they view as belated improvements, many critics of the IMF among civil society institutions are not convinced that they are sufficiently basic. Even if the IMF avoids repeating some of its more egregious mistakes, some believe that it is likely to continue to function chiefly for the benefit of the international financial community rather than the masses of people. Rather, they believe that, at least in the long term, it would be much better for control over international finance to reside in new institutions under a restructured United Nations. They favor the U.N. because it has a broader mandate, is more open and democratic, and, in its practice, has given much greater weight to human, social, and environmental priorities.

Many civil society institutions want the primary focus of reform to be on taming speculation, restoring the control of their economies to nations, and embedding economies in the wider society. They believe that if these policies are adopted there will be less need for large funding to deal with financial crises. There remains, however, the fact that such crises are occurring and will continue to occur for some time. The IMF is the only institution positioned to respond to these crises. Hence, even for those who sympathize with the goals of the civil society institutions, there is a strong argument for more financing for the IMF.

A world financial authority

A variety of public and private citizens and institutions have recently proposed the establishment of a World Financial Authority (WFA) to perform in the domain of world financial markets what national regulators do in domestic markets. Some believe it should be built upon the foundation of global financial surveillance and regulation that have already been laid by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Others regard it as a natural extension of the activities of the IMF. Still others are less interested in the precise institutional form it would take than in the clear delineation of the tasks that need to be done by someone.

Its first task probably should be to provide sufficient and timely financial assistance during crises to avert contagion and defaults. This requires a lender-of-last-resort with sufficient resources and authority to disperse rescue money quickly. Perhaps the best example to date is the bailout loan to Mexico by the U.S. Treasury and the IMF at the end of 1994. It supplied sufficient liquidity for Mexico to make the transition back to stability and to pay back the loans ahead of time. The management of the Asian crises in 1997-8, on the other hand, was badly handled. The bailout packages offered by the IMF were not only significantly smaller than in the Mexico case; they also were constrained with so many conditions that a year later only twenty percent of the funds had been disbursed. This slow response to the crisis probably worsened the contagion. Surprisingly, the error was repeated in the Russian crisis in 1998 and the Brazilian crisis in 1999.

A World Financial Authority also should provide the necessary regulatory framework within which the IMF or a successor institution can develop as a lender-of-last-resort. As long as domestic regulatory procedures function properly, there will be no need for a world authority to be involved, any more than to certify that domestic regulatory procedures are effective. In countries where domestic financial regulation is unsatisfactory, the WFA would assist with regulatory reform. In this way, the WFA could aid financial reconstruction, reduce the likelihood of moral hazard, and give confidence to backers of the operation.

There is little appetite today, especially in Washington, to create a new international bureaucracy. This fact gives support to the idea of building the WFA from the existing infrastructure of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The BIS is a meeting place for national central bankers who have constructed an increasingly complicated set of norms, rules and decision-making procedures for handling and preventing future crises. Its committees and cooperative cross-border regulatory framework enjoy the confidence of governments and of the financial community. It may well be the best place to govern an international regulatory authority at the present time.

Theological and ethical considerations

While Christian theology cannot provide us with detailed recommendations on how to correct the adverse consequences of speculative financial movements, it can provide us with an empowering perspective or worldview. Our theological expressions of the faith describe the source of our spiritual energy and hope. They betray our ultimate values and the source of our ethical norms. They shape how we perceive and judge the "signs of the times."

God's world and human responsibilities

Nothing in creation is independent of God. "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and all those who live in it." (Ps. 24:1 NRSV) Thus, no part of the creation - whether human beings, other species, the elements of soil and water, even human-made things - is our property to use as we wish. All is to be treated in accord with the values and ground rules of a loving God, their ultimate owner, who is concerned for the good of the whole creation. All of God's creation therefore deserves to be treated with appropriate care and concern, no matter how remote from one's daily consciousness or existence.

The doctrine of creation reminds us that our ultimate allegiance is not to the nationalistic and human-centered values of our culture, but rather to the values of the loving Maker of heaven and earth. When we seek plenty obsessively, consume goods excessively, compete against others compulsively, or commit ourselves to Economic Fate, we are worshiping false gods. Modern idolatries are often encountered in economic forms, just as in the New Testament's warnings about the spiritual perils of prosperity in the parables of the rich, hoarding fool (Luke 12:15-21) and the rich youth (Matt. 19:16-24 and Luke 18:18-25).

The fact that so much of financial speculation is divorced from the real economy of production and exchange suggests that its paper transactions are more like bets in a casino than an essential component of God's real economy, which seeks the good of all creation. It is wrong to subject people to the effects of wholesale gambling. The fact that the practice of financial speculation is secretive, compulsively competitive, and frequented by lone rangers, moreover, hints at a cult of false idols. Its practitioners, including especially day-traders, seem interested only in exceedingly short-term personal financial advantage, unconcerned about the long-term consequences of their actions or their impact on others. This also indicates a degree of idolatry that contradicts the doctrine of creation.

Image of God

The conviction that human beings have a God-given dignity and worth (Gen. 1:26-28) unites humanity in a universal covenant of rights and responsibilities - the family of God. All humans are entitled to the essential conditions for expressing their human dignity and for participation in defining and shaping the common good. These rights include satisfaction of basic biophysical needs, environmental safety, full participation in political and economic life, and the assurance of fair treatment and equal protection of the laws. These rights define our responsibilities in justice to one another, locally, nationally and - because they are human rights - internationally.

Financial speculation often leads to unmanageable floods of funds into and out of host societies, creating unwanted bubbles and panics. Financial speculators normally ignore the human consequences of their activities on the rights of people in host societies, where economic adjustments are shared widely and painfully. Their primary interest is short-term personal financial gain. The absence of a sense of covenantal unity with their brothers and sisters of the developing world is a sad commentary on the governing ethic of speculators in the capital markets. Their arrogance calls for some form of control over foreign exchange and financial capital markets.

Justice in covenant

The rights and responsibilities associated with the image of God are inextricably tied to the stress on justice in Scripture and tradition. We render to others their due because of our loving respect for their God-given dignity and value. The God portrayed in Scripture is the "lover of justice" (Ps. 99:4, 33:5, 37:28, 11:7; Isa. 30:18, 61:8; Jer. 9:24). Justice is at the ethical core of the biblical message. Faithfulness to covenant relationships, moreover, demands a justice that recognizes special obligations, "a preferential option" to widows, orphans, the poor, and aliens, which is to say the economically vulnerable and politically oppressed. Hence, the idea of the Jubilee Year (Lev. 25) was meant to prevent unjust concentrations of power and poverty. Jesus' ministry embodies concern for the rights and needs of the poor; He befriended and defended the dispossessed and the outcasts.

The fact that the liberalization of trade and finance has failed to improve the distribution of incomes, indeed, that it has widened the gap between rich and poor in virtually every country, is not a sign of distributive justice but of its opposite. The standard of living for the least skilled, least mobile, and poorest citizens of many developing countries has declined absolutely. This, too, is an unjust result of a broken system. The fact that governments that wish to assist the vulnerable and weak of their societies are less able to do so, in part because they no longer can levy sufficient taxes on foreign interests, is a violation of justice in community.

Sin and judgment

Sin is a declaration of autonomy from God, a rebellion against the sovereign source of our being. It makes the self and its values the center of one's existence, in defiance of God's care for all. Sin tempts us to value things over people, measuring our worth by the size of our wealth and the quantity of goods we consume, rather than by the quality of our relationships with God and with others. Sin involves injustice because its self-centeredness defies God's covenant of justice, grasping more than one's due and depriving others of their due.

Sin is manifested not only in individuals, but also in social institutions and cultural patterns. These structural injustices are culturally acceptable ways of giving some individuals and groups of people advantage over others. Because they are pervasive and generally invisible, they compel our participation. They benefit some and harm many others. Whether or not we deserve blame as individuals and churches for these social sins depends in part on whether we defend or resist them, tolerate or reject them.

The fact that the freeing of financial markets has permitted financial speculators to engage in high-risk gambles without regard to the consequences for others is abundant evidence of both individual and institutional sin. The policies of the Washington Consensus frequently lead to adverse consequences for the poor and the environment, even as its proponents gain advantages from the implementation of such policies. They are another serious expression of social sin in our time. These policies inevitably increase the concentration of economic power in fewer hands. The fact that the global spread of free-market policies has led to the decline of countervailing institutions of

social solidarity means that it is easier for the centers of economic power to corrupt governments, control markets, alienate neighbors, manipulate public opinion, and contribute to a sense of political impotency in the public.

The Church's mission and hope

The church is called to be an effective expression of the Reign of God, which Jesus embodied and proclaimed. This ultimate hope is a judgment on our deficiencies

and a challenge to faithful service. God's goal of a just and reconciled world is not simply our final destiny but an agenda for our earthly responsibilities. We are called to be a sign of the Reign of God, on earth as it is in heaven, to reflect the coming consummation of God's new covenant of shalom to the fullest extent possible.

A new financial architecture

In her path-breaking book, Casino Capitalism,36 Susan Strange likens the Western financial system to a vast casino. As in a casino,

"the world of high finance today offers the players a choice of games. Instead of roulette, blackjack, or poker, there is dealing to be done - the foreign-exchange market and all its variations; or in bonds, government securities or shares. In all these markets you may place bets on the future by dealing forward and by buying or selling options and all sorts of other recondite financial inventions. Some of the players - banks especially - play with very large stakes. There are also many quite small operators. There are tipsters, too, selling advice, and peddlers of systems to the gullible. And the croupiers in this global finance casino are the big bankers and brokers. They play, as it were, "for the house.' It is they, in the long run, who make the best living."

She goes on to observe that the big difference between ordinary kinds of gambling and speculation in financial markets is that one can choose not to gamble at roulette or poker, whereas everyone is affected by "casino capitalism." What goes on in the back offices of banks and hedge funds "is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives."

It is this volatility, this instability in financial markets that has given rise to recurring financial crises. They must be tamed. In the wake of recent financial crises, people are beginning to look for ways to reform the international financial architecture. Although it is difficult to move from general theological convictions to specific proposals, we offer the following suggestions for consideration by Christians and other persons of good will.

Of these recommendations, perhaps the most controversial is that more funds be given to the IMF. We noted above that much of the criticism of the IMF is justified. We also acknowledged that the IMF is improving its policies. We hope that these improvements will continue. Meanwhile, there is no other viable candidate to serve as lender-of-last-resort - an absolutely essential feature of any new financial architecture.

The major reason some civil society institutions resist funding the IMF further is its history of misguided structural adjustment policies, policies that are now widely recognized to have caused widespread suffering. We hope that recent changes will improve this situation as well and enable the IMF to perform the important role we recommend for it.

Along with the World Bank, it is beginning to contextualize its performance criteria and conditionalities, taking much more seriously the unique circumstances of particular economies. It is listening more and nitpicking less. To be sure, the IMF is not likely to abandon its policy of making its loans conditional on the adoption by borrowing countries of mutually agreed economic policies. Even so, there is considerable evidence that when it has had more resources on hand, conditionality has been correspondingly wiser and less draconian.

The IMF now recognizes that it can leave more decisions to developing countries partly because these have better informed and more sophisticated employees than was once the case. Certainly in Latin America and Asia and increasingly in Africa, country economic teams are better qualified technically than the lower rung Ph.D.s from American and European universities to whom the IMF and World Bank entrust their missions. Local economists can do financial programming and standard macroeconomic modeling as well as or better than the people from Washington can; they also know how to do investment project analysis. To be sure, decisions about financial and project plans must include input from many other elements of a society.

We can encourage the IMF (and World Bank) to reverse the typical procedure in setting conditions for multilateral loans. Instead of waiting for it to specify the policies that must be followed to justify additional financing, country economic teams, in consultation with other agencies of their government, should be allowed to propose economic programs to the IMF. Disagreements between Washington staff assessments and the local teams could be resolved directly or by third-party arbitration. The scope of economic conditionality could also be restricted, for example, just to a balance-of-payments target, while the country could pursue its own agenda regarding inflation, income distribution, and growth.

What Christians can do

A primary part of the "principalities and powers" referred to in the Bible is composed of the political-economic institutions and processes that govern how people relate economically to each other and to God's whole creation. The church has a stake in their design. Yet many church members feel powerless to change basic political-economic reality. They think either that the economic conditions of society result "naturally" from the forces of markets that are only marginally within the power of human control, or that economic conditions result from powerful interests that are beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. Thus, there's nothing that can be done about it, or there's nothing we can do about it.

On the contrary, Mobilization for the Human Family believes that the political economy is shaped by deliberate social policy decisions; that conditions at any given time are the result of those decisions; that conditions can be changed by human decisions; and that the will of a nation's and the world's citizens about what the commitments and purposes of the nation and the world should be can be expressed in the political economy through the framework of democratic process provided in our national and transnational polity. Accordingly, we offer below some suggestions for action that may be taken by individual Christians and by our churches and their denominations to correct some correctable flaws of financial globalization.

Actions by individual Christian

Actions by churches and denominations

Want to know more?

Globalization is a vast topic. For a general introduction, see Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Field Guide to the Global Economy (New York: New Press, 2000) and Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). A classic introduction to the financial side of globalization is Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, (New York: Mnchester University Press, 1986). See also Kavaljit Singh, The Globalisation of Finance: A Citizen's Guide (London: Zed Books, 1999) and John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, Global Finance at Risk: The Case for International Regulation (New York: The New Press, 2000). The best introduction to the Tobin Tax is Mahbub ul Haq et al (eds), The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For how church people might react, see Pamela Brubaker, Globalization at What Price? (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001).

Questions For Discussion

  1. How have the linkages and interconnections of international finance impacted your life? On balance, do you regard them as advantages or disadvantages for a healthy Christian life?
  2. The frequency and severity of recent financial crises have fueled calls for a radical redesign of the rules of global finance. If you were the advisor to an international commission asked to design "A New International Financial Architecture," what would you recommend?
  3. Do you favor allowing sovereign nations to declare bankruptcy? What Christian traditions might be invoked to support or deny such an action?
  4. A growing number of civil society institutions oppose giving more money to the IMF. They point out that it is part of the Washington Consensus, the application of whose policies have made societies adjuncts of the market. Yet this paper suggests that the IMF needs more money. As a committed Christian, which view do you favor?
  5. Is it too late to expect justice in a globalizing world? Since much of the direction the global economy has taken is irreversible, how can a balance between market and society be negotiated? How might Christians play a role in those negotiations?

Notes

1. Reported by Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Staus Giroux, 1999) p.101.

2. John B. Cobb, Jr., (ed), (Claremont, CA: Mobilization for the Human Family, 2000)

3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957/1944)

4. Denys Hay (ed), The Age of the Renaissance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967) p.22.

5. Heikki Patomaki, Democratising Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2001) p.40.

6. Peter Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). The quotation is from Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Bentley, 1841) p.142.

7. For a summary of the vast literature on pre-World War I foreign lending, see Albert Fishlow, "Lessons from the Past: Capital Markets in the 19th Century and the Interwar Period," in M. Kahler (ed), The Politics of International Debt (Ithaca: Cornell, 1985).

8. Ibid, p.90.

9. Polanyi, op. cit. p.14.

10. J. T. Madden et al, America's Experience as a Creditor Nation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1937), p.74.

11. Reprinted in Madden et al, p.205.

12. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), p.16.

13. For a helpful summary of the British and American plans at Bretton Woods, see Raymond F. Mikesell, The Bretton Woods Debates: A Memoir (Princeton: IFC Essays in International Finance no.192, 1994)

14. Jacques J. Polak, The Changing Nature of IMF Conditionality (Princeton: IFS Essays in International Finance, no. 184, 1991.

15. Robert Triffin, Gold and the Dollar Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

16. The IET taxed foreign borrowings in the U.S. with the intention of reducing the acquisition of dollars by foreigners; the U.S. government thought the dollar "overhang" was getting too large.

17. This section draws upon Heikki Patomaki, Democratizing Globalization: The Leverage of the Tobin Tax, (New York: Zed Books, 2001), chap. 2.

18. The prices a company charges itself for goods or services purchased from one of its entities and sold by another. Multinational corporations with business operations in many different countries try to charge prices that minimize their overall tax liabilities.

19. Roughly, a consensus between the U.S. Treasury, the IMF, the World Bank, and the business community about the policies most likely to achieve free trade and rapid growth: fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation, and free movement of financial capital.

20. International Organization of Securities Commissions, the Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, and the Institute of International Finance..

21. See, for example, Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Lance Taylor (ed), External Liberalization, Economic Performance and Social Policy.(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dani Rodrik, The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries: Making Openness Work. (Washington: Overseas Development Council, 1999); Enrique Ganuza, Lance Taylor, and Rob Vos (eds), Economic Liberalization and Income Distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean. (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2000).

22. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

23. David Felix, "Asia and the Crisis of Financial Globalization," in Dean Baker et al., (eds) Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp.163-91.

24. Jeffrey D. Sachs, "Alternative Approaches to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets," in Miles Kahler (ed), Capital Flows and Financial Crises (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1998)

25. The Mystery of Capital, (New York: Basic Books, 2000) p.207.

26. "The Revival of the Liberal Creed: the IMF, the World Bank, and Inequality in a Globalized Economy," in Dean Baker op cit., pp. 37-63.

27. See his Underwriting Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1991), part 3, and his On Globalization (New York: Public Affairs, 2002) ch. 4.

28. For additional details, see K. S. Jomo (ed), Malaysian Eclipse: Economic Crisis and Recovery, (New York: Zed Books, 2001)

29. For more information, see Kavaljit Singh, Taming Global Financial Flows New York: Zed Books, 2000) pp. 158-78. See also Carmen & Vincent Reinhart, "Some Lessons for Policy Makers Who Deal with the Mixed Blessing of Capital Inflows," Miles Kahler (ed), Capital Flows and Financial Crises (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998) pp. 93-124.

30. Given in 1972 at Princeton University and published subsequently as "A Proposal for International Monetary Reform," Eastern Economic Journal 4 (July-October, 1978) pp 153-9.

31. Mahbub ul Haq et al (eds), The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) passim.

32. Jeffrey Sachs, "Alternative Approaches to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets," in Kahler, op. cit., pp. 256-59.

33. George Soros, On Globalization, op cit, ch. 4.

34. Ibid, appendix.

35. Joseph E. Stiglitz,, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)

36. (Manchester, U.K: Manchester University Press, 1986)

 

The 'Hundred Days' of F.D.R.
April 10, 1983
The 'Hundred Days' of F.D.R.
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.

Exactly half a century ago, the Republic plunged into the Hundred Days - that time of tumultuous change when a flood of legislation swept away venerable market p ractices and gave the American economic system a new contour.

In the frenzied weeks from March to June 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent 15 messages to Congress and steered 15 major laws to enactment: among them, central planning for industry and for agriculture, new regulation for banking and for the securities exchanges, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and a national system of unemployment relief.

''At the end of February,'' Walter Lippmann wrote when the special session adjourned, ''we were a con-geries of disorderly panicstricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.''

The Hundred Days were only the start of a process that ended by transforming American society. Who can now imagine a day when America offered no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, no food stamps, no Federal guarantee of bank deposits, no Federal supervision of the stock market, no Federal protection for collective bargaining, no Federal standards for wages and hours, no Federal support for farm prices or rural electrification, no Federal refinancing for farm and home mortgages, no Federal commitment to high employment or to equal opportunity - in short, no Federal responsibility for Americans who found themselves, through no fault of their own, in economic or social distress?

These social changes have won general approval. Even the Reagan counterrevolution, for all its 19th-century laissez-faire and Social Darwinist passions, shrinks from abolishing the framework of social protection -the ''safety nets'' - created by the New Deal.

But what of the narrowly economic results? How effective was the New Deal in reducing unemployment, promoting economic growth and altering the distribution of income? And does the experience of half a century ago offer any guidance to the nation in its economic perplexities today?

The technique of the New Deal was improvisation and experiment. ''It is common sense to take a method and try it,'' F.D.R. said in the 1932 campaign: ''If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.''

Except for that part about admitting failure frankly, this continued the rule for Roosevelt's 12 years in the White House. In the intellectual circumstances of the time, there was really no alternative to experiment. The Hundred Days found the country in a state of invincible ignorance. No one knew the causes of the Depression. No one knew the cure. Business leaders and academic economists alike were analytically baffled and impotent.

A fortnight before Roosevelt took office, the Senate Finance Committee summoned a procession of business leaders to testify on the crisis. ''I have nothing to offer, either of fact or theory,'' said John W. Davis, the head of the American bar. ''There is no panacea,'' said W.W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Economists had been so wrong in the recent past and were in such hot disagreement in the urgent present that no non-economist could take the profession seriously.

In its detail, New Deal experimentation was often chaotic and not seldom contradictory. But it was unified by F.D.R.'s definite conviction about the ends of economic policy - ends prescribed not only by the miseries of the Great Depression but by the President's alert, resourceful and generous-hearted personality.

Born in the Hudson River aristocracy, he inherited a sense of obligation to land and to community. He was indeed, as John T. Flynn labeled him in a once famous polemic, a country squire in the White House. The Republic was Hyde Park writ large, and he saw himself as trustee for a national estate that required vigilant protection and cultivation.

There was more than a touch of paternalism and noblesse oblige in all this, but there was also a vivid feeling of responsibility for the national community as a whole, especially its most defenseless members.

F.D.R. had had a reasonable exposure to the economic thought of his time. At Harvard he had taken more credits in economics than in any field except history and English. His teachers -William Z. Ripley, A. Piatt Andrew, O.M.W. Sprague - were in the reformist school that hoped to mitigate laissez-faire by regulation.

In the 1920's he had been active in the business self-regulation movement. As Governor of New York, he had pioneered in regional planning, conservation, electric power development and welfare legislation.

The President-elect emerged from this varied experience with a patrician disdain for business wisdom and a curiosity about economists. ''This nation asks for action, and action now,'' he said in his inaugural address.

He looked first to national planning, ''a fair and just concert of interests,'' with business, labor, agriculture and consumers working together under government leadership. Each unit ''must think of itself as a part of a greater whole; one piece in a large design.''

This integrative approach sprang from his sense of the nation as a great community. It found particular expression in the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. These mechanisms of negotiation and coordination soon arrested the fall in production and prices and brought about a measure of re-employment.

But they also encountered difficulties. N.R.A. especially tried to run too much; and, though it gave new status to organized labor, business used its dominating position in many industrial codes to fix prices and restrict production. In the end, the laws fell afoul of the Supreme Court.

The Second New Deal After 1935 Roosevelt embarked on a new tack: leftward in rhetoric, rightward in policy. Instead of seeking business partnership in the reorganization of economic institutions, the Second New Deal embraced the theory of a competitive economy and strove for recovery through a three-pronged reform campaign.

One prong, which naturally outraged those businessmen who endorsed competition in principle but hated it in practice, was a campaign against the ''economic royalists'' and the concentration of private economic power. The thesis, Roosevelt said in 1938, ''is not that the system of free private enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried.''

A second prong aimed at the stimulus of the economy through deficit spending. Keynes in his 1936 book ''The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money'' gave compensatory fiscal policy its classic rationale.

But the New Deal came to public spending earlier and for its own reasons. It created deficits to combat human suffering, and it found its early justification in the arguments of the Utah banker Marriner Eccles, whom Roosevelt made chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

He took his ideas from two now forgotten American economic writers, William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, whose irreverent critique of Say's Law in the 1920's had demonstrated the perils of oversaving, concluding with the brisk injunction: ''When business begins to look rotten, more public spending.''

F.D.R. had scrawled in his copy of the Foster-Catchings book ''The Road to Plenty'' (1928), ''Too good to be true - You can't get something for nothing.'' Very likely he continued to prefer structural to fiscal remedies. But ''above all, try something.''

The third prong in the Second New Deal was targeted attention to weak sectors in the economy - the South, the West, housing, railroads. Here the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, headed by a Texas banker, Jesse Jones, played a key role. The R.F.C., and later its wartime subsidiary, the Defense Plant Corporation, liberated the colonial South and West from the New York capital market and used government money to lay the foundation for the postwar boom in the Sun Belt.

(The Sun Belt today repays Washington's initiative by opposing, in the sacred name of free enterprise, government intervention on behalf of other parts of the country, as, for example, the decaying industrial heartland of the Middle West and Northeast.)

All this Rooseveltian hyperactivity brought the country through the worst of the Depression. By 1940 the gross national product was higher than in 1929 and over 60 percent higher than in 1933.

As has been often noted, the New Deal did not solve the problem of unemployment. By 1940 the jobless rate had been cut by nearly twothirds, to 9.3 percent of the labor force from 25.2 percent in 1933. Still five million people lacked jobs.

So much re-employment in half a dozen years was a not inconsiderable accomplishment, as Reagan economists, faced with their own problems of reducing unemployment, will perhaps agree.

A Budget Balancer The reason the New Deal did not do even better was that Roosevelt, though much denounced at the time as a profligate spender, remained at heart a budget-balancer and a planner. In any event, the hysterical opposition of businessmen to public spending for anyone but themselves made it politically impossible for him to spend very much.

The largest peacetime deficit the big spender produced was a feeble $3.5 billion in 1936. The increase in public debt through the 1930's hardly offset the contraction in private debt. It was not until war legitimized really effective deficits - $18 billion in 1942, $54 billion in 1943 - that unemployment disappeared; proving incidentally how right Eccles and Keynes were.

The New Deal, aided by wartime full employment, also had some impact on the distribution of income. The top fifth of American families received only 46 percent of aggregate personal income in 1946, down from 54.4 percent in 1929, while the share of the lowest two-fifths rose to 16 percent from 12.5 percent.

This was not a great change. But it was the only reversal in the trend of income distribution in American history before or since (except for a brief moment in the 1960's), and is thereby an achievement.

The Inflation Legacy Roosevelt was concerned not only with getting out of the Depression but with preventing new depressions in the future. For the Great Depression was a traumatic experience. Mass unemployment, doubt whether democratic institutions could master economic crisis, the waiting specters of Communism and fascism - all this gave democratic society such a scare in the 1930's that a primary New Deal goal was to make the American economy depression-proof.

Before the New Deal, in those glorious days of the gold standard and the unregulated marketplace, the nation had gone through a bad depression every 20 years or so - 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1921, 1929. The New Deal now moved to equip the economy with built-in stabilizers designed to protect individuals against unemployment, businesses against bankruptcy and society as a whole against the roller coaster of boom-and-bust.

This effort to make the economy depression-proof was remarkably successful - as proven by the fact that, for the first time in American history, the nation has gone 40 years without a major depression. If we avoid such a depression today, it will be not because of voodoo economics, but because of the stabilizers that Franklin Roosevelt built into the economy.

The drive to secure the economy against depression had, however, one unforeseen consequence. The traditional cure for inflation had been to put the whole economy through the wringer. Denied that ancient remedy, the post-New Deal economy has experienced a chronic propensity to inflation, before which businessmen and economists appear as analytically impotent as they were before the chronic propensity to depression half a century ago.

By making the economy relatively depression-proof, we made it at the same time inflation-prone.

A Third New Deal? In dealing with the problems of our time, have we anything to learn from the brilliant experiments of the 1930's? In so far as New Deal issues remain, like mass unemployment, regional poverty, conservation and income distribution, it does no harm to consider New Deal remedies. Felix Rohatyn has long called for a resurrection of the R.F.C. The House of Representatives recently voted to establish an American Conservation Corps. Secretary Watt's effort to deliver the public domain to private greed has revitalized the conservation cause.

But what about problems unknown to the 1930's, like inflation? Here we may note the changing light that the rush of years casts on New Deal policies. For a long time historians condemned Roosevelt's First New Deal, with its focus on structure, negotiation and planning, as a bad turn on a wrong road. This judgment prevailed so long as fiscal and monetary fine-tuning appeared to contain the solution to our economic dilemmas.

But we have come to understand that, in an economy dominated by market power concentrated in large corporations and unions, fiscal and monetary policy can restrain inflation only by very crude-tuning - to put it bluntly, by inducing mass unemployment.

The economic logic of N.R.A. was perhaps not so irrelevant as conventional critics have assumed. Perhaps it was the Second New Deal that made the bad turn down the wrong road when it sought to revive the pure competitive model in an economy whose commanding heights had been seized by concentrated market power.

The First New Deal aimed to replace the institutionalized warfare of government against business, labor against management, by negotiation and coordination under government direction: instead of the adversarial cockpit, social partnership. The institutions of the early 1930's were too sketchy and improvised, too sweeping in their reach, too distorted by special interests, too confused by melodrama, to attain effective coordination.

But what is experiment, after all, but trial and error? The First New Deal at least operated in terms of a realistic model of the market.

If N.R.A. and A.A.A. could stop prices from plummeting in the 1930's, it is not beyond possibility that they may conceivably offer some clues as to how to stop prices from soaring in the 1980's. Nor will we ever get high employment, high utilization of plant and steady expansion if our only remedy for inflation continues to be recession.

We must evolve an incomes policy that effectively relates wage rates and profit margins to productivity growth - and we can only do that through experiment, through trial and error.

In the search for such a policy and for other pressing reasons - the deterioration of our infrastructure, the decline of Smokestack America, the global redivision of labor - we can no longer reject the idea of a concert of interests that F.D.R. affirmed in the 1932 campaign nor dodge the challenge of coordination he set out to explore in the Hundred Days.

There may also be something of value in the moral philosophy that animated the Hundred Days. We all recall from F.D.R.'s first inaugural that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

While magnificent rhetoric, that line isn't much help now. It didn't really make great sense even then. We had quite a number of things to fear in 1933 besides fear itself. Nor would the rejection of fear have sent our troubles away.

Rereading the inaugural today, one is struck by a different passage - by Roosevelt's stinging indictment of the ethic of the ''money changers'' who, ''stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership ... have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.''

The time had come, Roosevelt said, to ''restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. ... These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.''

Perhaps our nation will be more united, more equitable and more prosperous, too, if we abandon the current program of cutting taxes for the rich and social programs for the poor and recall the proposition Roosevelt set forth in his second inaugural:

''The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at City University of New York, is now working on the fourth volume of The Age of Roosevelt.

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009

By Amartya Sen

1.

2008 was a year of crises. First, we had a food crisis, particularly threatening to poor consumers, especially in Africa. Along with that came a record increase in oil prices, threatening all oil-importing countries. Finally, rather suddenly in the fall, came the global economic downturn, and it is now gathering speed at a frightening rate. The year 2009 seems likely to offer a sharp intensification of the downturn, and many economists are anticipating a full-scale depression, perhaps even one as large as in the 1930s. While substantial fortunes have suffered steep declines, the people most affected are those who were already worst off.

The question that arises most forcefully now concerns the nature of capitalism and whether it needs to be changed. Some defenders of unfettered capitalism who resist change are convinced that capitalism is being blamed too much for short-term economic problems—problems they variously attribute to bad governance (for example by the Bush administration) and the bad behavior of some individuals (or what John McCain described during the presidential campaign as "the greed of Wall Street"). Others do, however, see truly serious defects in the existing economic arrangements and want to reform them, looking for an alternative approach that is increasingly being called "new capitalism."

The idea of old and new capitalism played an energizing part at a symposium called "New World, New Capitalism" held in Paris in January and hosted by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, both of whom made eloquent presentations on the need for change. So did German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who talked about the old German idea of a "social market"—one restrained by a mixture of consensus-building policies—as a possible blueprint for new capitalism (though Germany has not done much better in the recent crisis than other market economies).

Ideas about changing the organization of society in the long run are clearly needed, quite apart from strategies for dealing with an immediate crisis. I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of "new capitalism" rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a "new world"—to use the other term mentioned at the Paris meeting—that would take a different form?

The second question concerns the kind of economics that is needed today, especially in light of the present economic crisis. How do we assess what is taught and championed among academic economists as a guide to economic policy—including the revival of Keynesian thought in recent months as the crisis has grown fierce? More particularly, what does the present economic crisis tell us about the institutions and priorities to look for? Third, in addition to working our way toward a better assessment of what long-term changes are needed, we have to think—and think fast—about how to get out of the present crisis with as little damage as possible.

2.

What are the special characteristics that make a system indubitably capitalist—old or new? If the present capitalist economic system is to be reformed, what would make the end result a new capitalism, rather than something else? It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?

All affluent countries in the world—those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others—have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.

Also, the market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services—some of which have taken people well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions—publicly funded education, medical care, and mass transportation are just a few of many—that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.

Underlying this issue is a more basic question: whether capitalism is a term that is of particular use today. The idea of capitalism did in fact have an important role historically, but by now that usefulness may well be fairly exhausted.

For example, the pioneering works of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century showed the usefulness and dynamism of the market economy, and why—and particularly how—that dynamism worked. Smith's investigation provided an illuminating diagnosis of the workings of the market just when that dynamism was powerfully emerging. The contribution that The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made to the understanding of what came to be called capitalism was monumental. Smith showed how the freeing of trade can very often be extremely helpful in generating economic prosperity through specialization in production and division of labor and in making good use of economies of large scale.

Those lessons remain deeply relevant even today (it is interesting that the impressive and highly sophisticated analytical work on international trade for which Paul Krugman received the latest Nobel award in economics was closely linked to Smith's far-reaching insights of more than 230 years ago). The economic analyses that followed those early expositions of markets and the use of capital in the eighteenth century have succeeded in solidly establishing the market system in the corpus of mainstream economics.

However, even as the positive contributions of capitalism through market processes were being clarified and explicated, its negative sides were also becoming clear—often to the very same analysts. While a number of socialist critics, most notably Karl Marx, influentially made a case for censuring and ultimately supplanting capitalism, the huge limitations of relying entirely on the market economy and the profit motive were also clear enough even to Adam Smith. Indeed, early advocates of the use of markets, including Smith, did not take the pure market mechanism to be a freestanding performer of excellence, nor did they take the profit motive to be all that is needed.

Even though people seek trade because of self-interest (nothing more than self-interest is needed, as Smith famously put it, in explaining why bakers, brewers, butchers, and consumers seek trade), nevertheless an economy can operate effectively only on the basis of trust among different parties. When business activities, including those of banks and other financial institutions, generate the confidence that they can and will do the things they pledge, then relations among lenders and borrowers can go smoothly in a mutually supportive way. As Adam Smith wrote:

When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.[1]

Smith explained why sometimes this did not happen, and he would not have found anything particularly puzzling, I would suggest, in the difficulties faced today by businesses and banks thanks to the widespread fear and mistrust that is keeping credit markets frozen and preventing a coordinated expansion of credit.

It is also worth mentioning in this context, especially since the "welfare state" emerged long after Smith's own time, that in his various writings, his overwhelming concern—and worry—about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith's economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.

Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has been responsible for some misunderstandings of Smith's assessment of the market mechanism by many who would claim to be his followers. For example, Smith's defense of the food market and his criticism of restrictions by the state on the private trade in food grains have often been interpreted as arguing that any state interference would necessarily make hunger and starvation worse.

But Smith's defense of private trade only took the form of disputing the belief that stopping trade in food would reduce the burden of hunger. That does not deny in any way the need for state action to supplement the operations of the market by creating jobs and incomes (e.g., through work programs). If unemployment were to increase sharply thanks to bad economic circumstances or bad public policy, the market would not, on its own, recreate the incomes of those who have lost their jobs. The new unemployed, Smith wrote, "would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities," and "want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail...."[2] Smith rejects interventions that exclude the market—but not interventions that include the market while aiming to do those important things that the market may leave undone.

Smith never used the term "capitalism" (at least so far as I have been able to trace), but it would also be hard to carve out from his works any theory arguing for the sufficiency of market forces, or of the need to accept the dominance of capital. He talked about the importance of these broader values that go beyond profits in The Wealth of Nations, but it is in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published exactly a quarter of a millennium ago in 1759, that he extensively investigated the strong need for actions based on values that go well beyond profit seeking. While he wrote that "prudence" was "of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual," Adam Smith went on to argue that "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others."[3]

Smith viewed markets and capital as doing good work within their own sphere, but first, they required support from other institutions—including public services such as schools—and values other than pure profit seeking, and second, they needed restraint and correction by still other institutions—e.g., well-devised financial regulations and state assistance to the poor—for preventing instability, inequity, and injustice. If we were to look for a new approach to the organization of economic activity that included a pragmatic choice of a variety of public services and well-considered regulations, we would be following rather than departing from the agenda of reform that Smith outlined as he both defended and criticized capitalism.

3.

Historically, capitalism did not emerge until new systems of law and economic practice protected property rights and made an economy based on ownership workable. Commercial exchange could not effectively take place until business morality made contractual behavior sustainable and inexpensive—not requiring constant suing of defaulting contractors, for example. Investment in productive businesses could not flourish until the higher rewards from corruption had been moderated. Profit-oriented capitalism has always drawn on support from other institutional values.

The moral and legal obligations and responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace, thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments. A subprime lender who misleads a borrower into taking unwise risks can now pass off the financial assets to third parties—who are remote from the original transaction. Accountability has been badly undermined, and the need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger.

And yet the supervisory role of government in the United States in particular has been, over the same period, sharply curtailed, fed by an increasing belief in the self-regulatory nature of the market economy. Precisely as the need for state surveillance grew, the needed supervision shrank. There was, as a result, a disaster waiting to happen, which did eventually happen last year, and this has certainly contributed a great deal to the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today. The insufficient regulation of financial activities has implications not only for illegitimate practices, but also for a tendency toward overspeculation that, as Adam Smith argued, tends to grip many human beings in their breathless search for profits.

Smith called the promoters of excessive risk in search of profits "prodigals and projectors"—which is quite a good description of issuers of subprime mortgages over the past few years. Discussing laws against usury, for example, Smith wanted state regulation to protect citizens from the "prodigals and projectors" who promoted unsound loans:

A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.[4]

The implicit faith in the ability of the market economy to correct itself, which is largely responsible for the removal of established regulations in the United States, tended to ignore the activities of prodigals and projectors in a way that would have shocked Adam Smith.

The present economic crisis is partly generated by a huge overestimation of the wisdom of market processes, and the crisis is now being exacerbated by anxiety and lack of trust in the financial market and in businesses in general—responses that have been evident in the market reactions to the sequence of stimulus plans, including the $787 billion plan signed into law in February by the new Obama administration. As it happens, these problems were already identified in the eighteenth century by Smith, even though they have been neglected by those who have been in authority in recent years, especially in the United States, and who have been busy citing Adam Smith in support of the unfettered market.

4.

While Adam Smith has recently been much quoted, even if not much read, there has been a huge revival, even more recently, of John Maynard Keynes. Certainly, the cumulative downturn that we are observing right now, which is edging us closer to a depression, has clear Keynesian features; the reduced incomes of one group of persons has led to reduced purchases by them, in turn causing a further reduction in the income of others.

However, Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes's rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes's time. Pigou was much more concerned than Keynes with economic psychology and the ways it could influence business cycles and sharpen and harden an economic recession that could take us toward a depression (as indeed we are seeing now). Pigou attributed economic fluctuations partly to "psychological causes" consisting of

variations in the tone of mind of persons whose action controls industry, emerging in errors of undue optimism or undue pessimism in their business forecasts.[5]

It is hard to ignore the fact that today, in addition to the Keynesian effects of mutually reinforced decline, we are strongly in the presence of "errors of...undue pessimism." Pigou focused particularly on the need to unfreeze the credit market when the economy is in the grip of excessive pessimism:

Hence, other things being equal, the actual occurrence of business failures will be more or less widespread, according [to whether] bankers' loans, in the face of crisis of demands, are less or more readily obtainable.[6]

Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. Other businesses also continue to fail, partly in response to already diminished demand (the Keynesian "multiplier" process), but also in response to fear of even less demand in the future, in a climate of general gloom (the Pigovian process of infectious pessimism).

One of the problems that the Obama administration has to deal with is that the real crisis, arising from financial mismanagement and other transgressions, has become many times magnified by a psychological collapse. The measures that are being discussed right now in Washington and elsewhere to regenerate the credit market include bailouts—with firm requirements that subsidized financial institutions actually lend—government purchase of toxic assets, insurance against failure to repay loans, and bank nationalization. (The last proposal scares many conservatives just as private control of the public money given to the banks worries people concerned about accountability.) As the weak response of the market to the administration's measures so far suggests, each of these policies would have to be assessed partly for their impact on the psychology of businesses and consumers, particularly in America.

5.

The contrast between Pigou and Keynes is relevant for another reason as well. While Keynes was very involved with the question of how to increase aggregate income, he was relatively less engaged in analyzing problems of unequal distribution of wealth and of social welfare. In contrast, Pigou not only wrote the classic study of welfare economics, but he also pioneered the measurement of economic inequality as a major indicator for economic assessment and policy.[7] Since the suffering of the most deprived people in each economy—and in the world—demands the most urgent attention, the role of supportive cooperation between business and government cannot stop only with mutually coordinated expansion of an economy. There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion. Families threatened with unemployment, with lack of medical care, and with social as well as economic deprivation have been hit particularly hard. The limitations of Keynesian economics to address their problems demand much greater recognition.

A third way in which Keynes needs to be supplemented concerns his relative neglect of social services—indeed even Otto von Bismarck had more to say on this subject than Keynes. That the market economy can be particularly bad in delivering public goods (such as education and health care) has been discussed by some of the leading economists of our time, including Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. (Pigou too contributed to this subject with his emphasis on the "external effects" of market transactions, where the gains and losses are not confined only to the direct buyers or sellers.) This is, of course, a long-term issue, but it is worth noting in addition that the bite of a downturn can be much fiercer when health care in particular is not guaranteed for all.

For example, in the absence of a national health service, every lost job can produce a larger exclusion from essential health care, because of loss of income or loss of employment-related private health insurance. The US has a 7.6 percent rate of unemployment now, which is beginning to cause huge deprivation. It is worth asking how the European countries, including France, Italy, and Spain, that lived with much higher levels of unemployment for decades, managed to avoid a total collapse of their quality of life. The answer is partly the way the European welfare state operates, with much stronger unemployment insurance than in America and, even more importantly, with basic medical services provided to all by the state.

The failure of the market mechanism to provide health care for all has been flagrant, most noticeably in the United States, but also in the sharp halt in the progress of health and longevity in China following its abolition of universal health coverage in 1979. Before the economic reforms of that year, every Chinese citizen had guaranteed health care provided by the state or the cooperatives, even if at a rather basic level. When China removed its counterproductive system of agricultural collectives and communes and industrial units managed by bureaucracies, it thereby made the rate of growth of gross domestic product go up faster than anywhere else in the world. But at the same time, led by its new faith in the market economy, China also abolished the system of universal health care; and, after the reforms of 1979, health insurance had to be bought by individuals (except in some relatively rare cases in which the state or some big firms provide them to their employees and dependents). With this change, China's rapid progress in longevity sharply slowed down.

This was problem enough when China's aggregate income was growing extremely fast, but it is bound to become a much bigger problem when the Chinese economy decelerates sharply, as it is currently doing. The Chinese government is now trying hard to gradually reintroduce health insurance for all, and the US government under Obama is also committed to making health coverage universal. In both China and the US, the rectifications have far to go, but they should be central elements in tackling the economic crisis, as well as in achieving long-term transformation of the two societies.

6.

The revival of Keynes has much to contribute both to economic analysis and to policy, but the net has to be cast much wider. Even though Keynes is often seen as a kind of a "rebel" figure in contemporary economics, the fact is that he came close to being the guru of a new capitalism, who focused on trying to stabilize the fluctuations of the market economy (and then again with relatively little attention to the psychological causes of business fluctuations). Even though Smith and Pigou have the reputation of being rather conservative economists, many of the deep insights about the importance of nonmarket institutions and nonprofit values came from them, rather than from Keynes and his followers.

A crisis not only presents an immediate challenge that has to be faced. It also provides an opportunity to address long-term problems when people are willing to reconsider established conventions. This is why the present crisis also makes it important to face the neglected long-term issues like conservation of the environment and national health care, as well as the need for public transport, which has been very badly neglected in the last few decades and is also so far sidelined—as I write this article—even in the initial policies announced by the Obama administration. Economic affordability is, of course, an issue, but as the example of the Indian state of Kerala shows, it is possible to have state-guaranteed health care for all at relatively little cost. Since the Chinese dropped universal health insurance in 1979, Kerala—which continues to have it—has very substantially overtaken China in average life expectancy and in indicators such as infant mortality, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. So there are opportunities for poor countries as well.

But the largest challenges face the United States, which already has the highest level of per capita expenditure on health among all countries in the world, but still has a relatively low achievement in health and has more than forty million people with no guarantee of health care. Part of the problem here is one of public attitude and understanding. Hugely distorted perceptions of how a national health service works need to be corrected through public discussion. For example, it is common to assume that no one has a choice of doctors in a European national health service, which is not at all the case.

There is, however, also a need for better understanding of the options that exist. In US discussions of health reform, there has been an overconcentration on the Canadian system—a system of public health care that makes it very hard to have private medical care—whereas in Western Europe the national health services provide care for all but also allow, in addition to state coverage, private practice and private health insurance, for those who have the money and want to spend it this way. It is not clear just why the rich who can freely spend money on yachts and other luxury goods should not be allowed to spend it on MRIs or CT scans instead. If we take our cue from Adam Smith's arguments for a diversity of institutions, and for accommodating a variety of motivations, there are practical measures we can take that would make a huge difference to the world in which we live.

The present economic crises do not, I would argue, call for a "new capitalism," but they do demand a new understanding of older ideas, such as those of Smith and, nearer our time, of Pigou, many of which have been sadly neglected. What is also needed is a clearheaded perception of how different institutions actually work, and of how a variety of organizations—from the market to the institutions of the state—can go beyond short-term solutions and contribute to producing a more decent economic world.

—February 25, 2009

Notes

[1]Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Clarendon Press, 1976), I, II.ii.28, p. 292.

[2]Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, I.viii.26, p. 91.

[3]Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 189–190.

[4]Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, II.iv.15, p. 357.

[5]A.C. Pigou, Industrial Fluctuations (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 73.

[6]Pigou, Industrial Fluctuations, p. 96.

[7]A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920). Current works on economic inequality, including the major contributions of A.B. Atkinson, have been to a considerable extent inspired by Pigou's pioneering initiative: see Atkinson, Social Justice and Public Policy (MIT Press, 1983).

Bush: bank buyout needed 'to preserve free market'
(CHS note: talk about Orwellian doublespeak!)

"Government owning a stake in any private US company is objectionable to most Americans, me included," Mr Paulson said today.

"Yet, the alternative of leaving businesses and consumers without access to financing is totally unacceptable. When financing isn’t available, consumers and businesses shrink their spending, which leads to businesses cutting jobs and even closing up shop."

In the long sad history of contradictions this has to be catapulted to the top of the list. Essentially Paulson is saying that capitalism is good as long as it breathes in -- it must never breathe out.

The alternative he finds so objectionable is the very nature of capitalism. (emphasis added, CHS)

We must remind ourselves of where the crisis originated. Ironically, Paulson, in the second paragraph of the above statement encapsulates the entirety as well as the absurdity of the situation. People and businesses must borrow and spend regardless of their needs at exponentially increasing rates or the system collapses.

Conventional wisdom would have it, incorrectly so, that people trade labor for wages and those wages provide the means through which consumption of necessary and discretionary goods and services is made possible.

But as I have stated, this is incorrect. Why? First, stagnant wages. Allow me to digress. There is nothing wrong with stagnant wages -- as long as purchasing power remains constant. The hidden tax of inflation steals purchasing power because it devalues the currency. Let us not engage in semantics, stagnant wages combined with a consistent decline in purchasing power is in effect a decline in wages. So as long as the current economic paradigm persists I will call stagnant wages declining wages.

Wages haven't remained stagnant for a generation they have effectively declined. This is why it takes two wage earners in a household to accomplish the equivalent of one wage earner 30 years ago.

We have embraced "globalization". It sounds trendy, even cosmopolitan. Economist tell us its the only way. But for some reason we have yet to understand its effects -- and political hacks are not about to spell them out.

Americans have enjoyed a long period of time where our wages were several standard deviations above the rest of the world's. Now that we are forced to compete with people who have a much lower standard of living certain unpleasant things must happen. Our standard of living must decrease as developing nation's standard of living increases. (When a candidate promises to bring back jobs, look him straight in the eye and ask him/her, how can they do this when the competition can work for 1/20th our wages? Then stand back and watch him/her dissemble)

In order for Americans to maintain a high standard of living either asset prices have to lower (purchasing power has to increase), they must have wage and price levels that allow savings, or they must borrow. But this is not possible with the current system. Deflation is viewed as worse than death, especially since so many derivatives are collateralized by extremely overvalued assets. (emphasis added, CHS)

Deflation raises the cost of servicing debt. considering the level of public and private debt this is one of the reasons why all the stops are being pulled out to prevent it. Promoting saving would be to discourage spending (see second paragraph second sentence in the above quote). Rising wages, also a result of deflation, would make us uncompetitive (we already are). This leaves borrowing.

This brings us full circle in this absurd Greek tragedy. Borrowing has a saturation point. We have reached that point both at the private and public level. Because we have an economic system that requires exponential amounts of debt in order to grow, OTC (CDS) derivatives were given legal certainty, unsound mortgage policies were encouraged at the highest level (Alan Greenspan), people were encouraged to equity strip their homes (HELOC) to consume. Wealthy and poor were encourage to live wildly beyond their means in attempts to meet the exponential expansion of debt required to grow. Borrow we must because that is how new money (growth) is created absent real productivity. Therefore, in my opinion, none of what is occurring was or is accidental or incidental.

But as I have stated debt has a saturation point. At the point it takes infinite amounts of credit created instantly for infinity the circumstance is revealed for what it is: a Ponzi scheme, robbery, a fraud, a swindle that transfers wealth from the many to a few. It leads to collectivism. It destroys freedom. It indentures whole nations for many generations to come.

This is what this administration is fighting to preserve.

As others have stated, Paulson wants to solve a debt saturation problem by even greater debt saturation. But Starbucks is not closing 600 stores because it needs more debt. With three or more cars in most driveways across America GM and Ford are not struggling because they need more debt. Entire neighborhoods and high rise buildings have not become foreclosure ghost towns because the owners needed more debt.

In every stated situation it was the over-saturation of debt that brought about demise. The temperature of a liquid cannot be raised above its boiling point no matter how much heat is added, only its vapor can be superheated. Unfortunately money that has vaporized is not useful.

Its time to listen to Thomas Jefferson and tell the banks, NO. America chooses individualism over collectivism.

It is time to demand from our government that we want a real economy and a sound banking system no matter how painful the transition.

The cliff edge awaits

Asian stocks are continuing lower, and that is before the US markets show an appreciation of the harsh realities that are out there. That crisis of confidence will come soon enough. (Aug 22, '08) 
R M Cutler runs his eye over the ups and downs in the week's markets.

Predator state calls the shots

The all-too-visible predatory nature of contemporary US governance is quintessentially linked to corporations. Yet attempts to change this uniquely American phenomenon may push voters to a closer embrace of the predators. - Thomas I Palley (Aug 21, '08)

Predator state calls the shots

Economist Jamie K Galbraith's recent book [1] describes modern (Bush-Cheney) Republicanism as creating a "predator state". Its predatory aspects are starkly visible in the gangs of corporate lobbyists who roam Washington DC, the Halliburton Iraq war procurement scandal and the corruption and incompetence that surrounded the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

However, the broad concept of a predator state needs qualification as we are really talking of an "American corporate" predator state. Thus, the predatory nature of contemporary US governance is quintessentially linked to corporations, and it is also a uniquely American phenomenon.

Kleptocratic predator states, such as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Sese Seko Mobutu's Zaire in Africa, are fundamentally different. There is no equivalent in Europe, and none in East Asia where ruling elites have a sense of obligation to the nation even as they often enrich themselves illicitly. Nor is there an equivalent in Latin America because government there never reached an economic size proportional to that of government in the US.

It is important to understand the social origins of the American corporate predator state because understanding is a necessary part of developing responses for caging the predators and replacing them with another, better, order. Those origins clearly trace back to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his final televised address to the nation on January 17, 1961.

That complex has captured politics and corrupted the business of government, including of course the conduct of national security policy. The fact that it has wrapped itself with the flag makes it impossible to confront without being charged as unpatriotic. Worst yet, its enormous enduring profitability has provided a model for imitation by other industrial complexes like Big Pharma and Big Oil.

The political success of these predators is clearly linked to money's role in politics. Money gives the power to buy the political process, and that power is defended by a gospel of free speech that takes no account of the fact that out-shouting someone is qualitatively equivalent to silencing them. Economics also comes to money's defense with its absurd myth of a market for ideas in which participants compete on a level playing field and truth is effortlessly sorted from error.

The American worship of business and businessmen, which Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, 1922) wrote about long ago, also plays a role. This worship privileges business over thought and other activities, and is behind the dismissive sneer "if you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" As a result, Americans are all too willing to hand over their government to business predators. Today, it is in Goldman Sachs we trust.

Another feature of business worship is a tendency to conflate profit with free markets. That means the distinction between fair competition (which is good) and fat profits (which are bad) is lost, thereby providing cover for predators.

Lastly, there is the legacy of the Cold War which contributed to economic dumbing-down and suppression of awareness of class and class conflict. This suppression was seen as necessary for blunting the dangerous appeal of Soviet communism, but a consequence was to create blindness to the predators in our midst.

All of this reveals a deep deficit in America's social and economic understanding (some deficits really do matter). And as long as this deficit remains, the predators will have a starting-gate advantage in the game of political persuasion.

Yet, how to close the deficit and insert another understanding is an enormous challenge. There are deep institutional obstructions in the academy, the media, and the Democratic Party. Moreover, raising these issues may create unsettling cognitive dissonance that pushes voters into denial and a closer embrace of the predators.

In effect, there is a paradox to be solved. Lasting progressive political victory requires transforming understanding, but the immediate political incentives are aligned to discourage engagement with such a project.

Note: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, by James K Galbraith, Free Press, 2008.

Thomas I Palley is the founder of the Economics for Democratic and Open Societies Project.

(Copyright 2008 Thomas I Palley)

Summers: "The global consensus on trade is unravelling"

Readers may know I am not much of a fan of Larry Summers' occasional comments in the Financial Times. He has a tendency to come forth with views of how things work that sound nice but too often are at odds with facts on the ground.

His latest offering scores better than previous offerings as far as engagement with reality is concerned, although it has a few attention-grabbing departures.

Summers starts by lamenting that international economic polities are getting short shrift in pre-election debate (ahem, have they ever been front burner?) and warns:
 
The next administration faces the prospect of having to make the most consequential international economic policy choices in a generation at a time when the confidence of governments in free markets is being increasingly questioned.
This statement sound reasonable until you think about it. It presupposes that the next administration is an actor capable of making unilateral decisions that will affect the international game board. A growing theme on the FT's comment pages is that we are in a multilateral world, and key international bodies such as the IMF and World Bank need new governance arrangements that reflect the important role and economic weight of developing economies (even that sobriquet is looking dated).

Brad Setser keyed in on the likelihood of the US facing circumscribed policy choices:
I don’t think it is realistic for the US to expect to be able to rely as heavily as it currently does on other governments for financing without giving up at least a bit of policy autonomy. The enormous holdings of Agencies by the world’s central banks (along with the Agencies held by US domestic banks) are — in my view — a constraint on the options available to US policy makers struggling to get ahead of a seemingly still deepening credit crisis.

Oddly, Summers in the very next paragraph notes how the fast the emerging world has risen and again draws some debatable inferences:
 
The current distribution of regional economic power is unlike anything that was predicted even a decade ago. The rise of the developing world, its growing share in global output and far greater share of global growth, is perhaps a quantitative but not a qualitative surprise. The qualitative surprise is this: with almost all the industrial world in or near recession, much of the momentum in the global economy is coming from countries with authoritarian governments that are pursuing economic strategies directed towards wealth accumulation and building up geopolitical strength rather than improving living standards for their populations. China, where household consumption has now fallen below 40 per cent of its gross domestic product – which must be some kind of peacetime record – is the most extreme example. Similar tendencies, however, can be seen in other parts of Asia, Russia and other oil exporting countries.
Um, it's taken Summers this long to realize China, and before it, Japan, took a mercantilist stance towards the US? We noted in an earlier post:
While Summers admittedly undercuts that argument later by discussing how a more open economy can come out a net loser if its trade partners are better competitors, there is a more basic reason to take this idea with a grain of salt: we have lower trade barriers because some of our biggest partners (read Japan and China) are mercantilist and fundamentally have no intention of opening their markets very much; the advanced European economies regard maintaining surpluses and protecting labor as priorities, which again limits how much they will concede. We have lower trade barriers because we enter into negotiations with different premises and aims (at least historically) than our counterparts. (Some would also argue that our trade policy is designed more to benefit major US multinationals than the broader populace; that is harder to prove but may not be inaccurate.)
This is far from a new line of thinking. William Greider, for instance, made similar observations in 2005. At a minimum, trade negotiators with China and Japan have confronted this syndrome for years; many of our other trading partners play the game with more finesse.

Summers then has three rambling paragraphs which discuss, quelle horreur, how these developing countries, via their success in trade or by sitting on lots of oil, caused trouble:
 
The pressure created by the investment of these surpluses was one of the big factors driving the excesses that preceded our financial problems.

Note this comes perilously close to suggesting a causal relationship between high trade surpluses abroad and our financial meltdown. Back to Summers:
 
But the problems are much deeper than the question of who sits around the negotiating tables. For all the disagreements over the past decades, there has been a shared premise behind international economic policy discussions – the goal of increased economic integration, the spread of market institutions and more rapid growth for all nations. While companies may compete, the premise has been that nations co-operate to build a stronger economy in the interests of all.
 

Readers are welcome to correct me on this one, but whose consensus are we discussing, exactly? Again, China and Japan might give lip service to grand pronouncements while keeping their eye on the ball of what the gives and the gets were at the negotiating table. China, for instance, rebuffed Paulson in his recent entreaties to open its financial markets to foreign players. In fact, one could make a case that any country with a pegged currency (or as with China, a dirty float) is committed to maintaining a trade surplus, which means their commitment to achieving specific national outcomes ranks above any vision of international cooperation. And frankly, that's a rational stance.

Note that despite Summers' rhetoric, the US has not adhered strictly to this vision either. We've entering into bi-lateral and regional trade agreements, something the internationalists have decried.

Development economist and Harvard professor Dani Rodrik pointed out that deep economic integration, democracy, and national sovereignty cannot be pursued at the same time:
 
Sometimes simple and bold ideas help us see more clearly a complex reality that requires nuanced approaches. I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full....

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. The malfunctioning of the global financial system is intimately linked with these specific transaction costs.....

So I maintain that any reform of the international economic system must face up to this trilemma. If we want more globalization, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. Pretending that we can have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man's land.

I've omitted Rodrik's discussion of choices, which might interest some readers. Again, to Summers:
 
It is no longer clear that this premise remains valid. Nations are increasingly preoccupied with their relative economic standing, not the living standards of citizens. Issues of strategic leverage and vulnerability now play a bigger role in economic policy discussions.

Hhhm. One might argue, as Thomas Palley has, that the US has pursued economic policies without regard to the standard of living of our citizens. Again, who are these unnamed countries preoccupied with their relative standing? That charge does not ring true for the UK or EU. One assumes Summers at a minimum means China, and he's way off base. Joseph Stiglitz has determined that if you take China out of the equation, there has in fact been no reduction in global poverty (note that the improvements in conditions among the world's poor has been one of the strong arguments for more liberalized trade). And China remains committed to rapid growth, which will again benefit its citizens. What Summers means is that China needs to switch from export driven growth to a more balanced economy with a more robust consumer sector. It would be more useful if he would say so directly.

Instead, he again comes at his argument in a round-about way:
 
At the same time, it is unclear which underlying driver of global growth will replace the one in place for the past decade – the US as importer of last resort. Global growth has depended on US growth, which has depended on the US consumer; and the US consumer has depended on rising asset values first of stocks and more recently of real estate. With falling house prices and a challenged financial system, US consumer spending is falling. The US is no longer in a position to be a net source of demand for the rest of the world. Indeed, with the drop in value of the dollar, US growth – which had been focused on imports and which had enabled the export-led growth of other countries – is a thing of the past. Already, Europe and Japan are in or are very close to being in recession.

The current global policy debate is a cacophony. It is all very well to advocate increased US saving and a cut in the US current account deficit but the process for bringing it about will mean less US demand for foreign products. That will put pressure on jobs and output growth in other countries if no countervailing measures are put in place. Conversely, the return of a stronger dollar without other policy changes will raise US demand for exports but at the price of cutting demand for domestically produced goods and compounding the recession.

These problems will be with us for some time. They may not be at the top of anyone’s agenda right now. But the success of the next administration could depend on its ability to engage with a wider range of global economic stakeholders, on a broader agenda, at a time when disagreements are increasing not just about means but also about ultimate ends.

I suspect there was never as much agreement about "ultimate ends" as Summers suggests. Other countries fell to the US lead when the US was more powerful economically. Long-standing differences of perspective that were suppressed are now being exposed.

Summers is vague about what needs to happen if there is to be anything resembling an orderly transition. Mohamed El-Erain, former head of Harvard Management and co-CEO of Pimco, has been far more specific, and also intimated that the sort of discussions that Summers recommends have been held and failed. From an FT comment by El-Erian:
 
Whatever happened to the debate on global payments imbalances?...At its roots, the policy solution called for simultaneous implementation of three sets of measures. First, a reduction in US domestic aggregate demand to contain imports and encourage a shift to exports. Second, an increase in consumption in Asia and the Middle East, including having China adopt a higher and flexible exchange rate. Third, structural reforms in western Europe to enhance the growth potential of the global economy....

The policy solution stalled because of a basic co-ordination problem, or what is known in game theory as the “prisoners’ dilemma”. While all parties had an interest in the outcome, any individual party that moved first risked being worse off if others did not follow. With multilateral co-ordination mechanisms such as the Group of Seven industrial countries and the International Monetary Fund lacking representation and legitimacy, there was no way to provide parties with sufficient assurances that their actions would be accompanied by others. As a result, no one took sufficiently meaningful action.

Now I am most certainly not privy to high-level policy discussions, and when this piece ran, expressed some doubts as to how far these discussions went. However, El-Erian said with some certainty that the idea of a coordinated approach was dead on arrival. He viewed the outcome as not pretty:
Under this scenario, the question for markets is no longer whether the global imbalances adjust. They will. Instead, the focus should be on the collateral damage of the adjustment process – damage that is region-specific given differences in policy flexibility and initial economic and financial conditions. In the US, look for renewed pressure for further fiscal stimulus and a monetary policy that, while appropriate for the US, is too inflationary for the rest of the world. In Asia and the Middle East, the spike in inflationary pressures may inadvertently slow the move towards more efficient tools of indirect economic management. In Europe, expect attempts to bypass fiscal responsibility guidelines in order to mute political protest.
Those who would like to read El-Erian's article and our commentary can find them here.

Buiter Provokes Wrath at Jackson Hole, Says Fed Too Close to Wall Street

Go Willem Buiter! The London School of Economics prof and former Bank of England and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development official has been saying for some time that the Fed suffer from s "cognitive regulatory capture" and has been far too responsive to the needs of Wall Street. It's been puzzling to watch his detailed, well argued criticisms go unnoticed, particularly when they have been offered at forums where one would think they'd be impossible to ignore (for instance, a conference co-hosted by the New York Fed where Buiter presented a pretty harsh paper on what he called the North Atlantic Financial Crisis).

Well, he finally seems to have gotten through, perhaps because he is forward enough to criticize Fed officials to their face at an event they are hosting. Or maybe it's because the pattern of conduct he decries is so patently obvious that the key actors can no longer fool themselves. From Bloomberg:
 
Former Bank of England policy maker Willem Buiter sparked the biggest debate at the Federal Reserve's annual mountainside symposium, saying the central bank pays too much heed to the concerns of financial institutions.

``The Fed listens to Wall Street and believes what it hears,'' Buiter said yesterday in a paper presented to the Fed's conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. ``This distortion into a partial and often highly distorted perception of reality is unhealthy and dangerous.''

The Wall Street Journal's Economics blog provides a similar account and a link to the paper.
 
Mr. Buiter slams the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England for what he says was a mishandling of the financial crisis and monetary policy over the past year. He gives the worst marks to the Fed, saying it’s too close to Wall Street and financial markets — responding to their needs to the detriment of the wider economy. Mr. Buiter, a former member of the BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee, said the Fed overreacted to the economic slowdown — misjudging the importance of financial stability to the overall economy — and created a deeper inflation problem as a result.

The paper is quite long, but it is very well written and moves very quickly for this sort of exercise (it does get geeky from time to time,). I will confess to having read only the first 30 pages, but his argument seems spot on:
 
My thesis is that both monetary theory and the practice of central banking have failed to keep up with key developments in the financial systems of advanced market economies, and that as a result of this, many central banks were to varying degrees ill-prepared for the financial crisis that erupted on August 9, 2007.

The Fed gets disproportionate attention, in part due to the venue of the presentation, in part because Buiter contends that the Fed did the worst job of the major central banks. Note that Buiter is more of inflation hawk than we are, but as a result, Buiter thinks that letting housing prices decline is not the end of the world and implicitly, adjustments need to run their course (per his point 4). Even though we think this deleveraging will be nastier than Buiter anticipates, we think that trying to hold asset prices at inflated levels will inevitably fail and the effort will only create more damage. To Buiter again:
 
[T]hree factors contribute to Fed’s underachievement as regards macroeconomic stability. The first is institutional: the Fed is the least independent of the three central banks and, unlike the ECB and the BoE, has a regulatory and supervisory role; fear of political encroachment on what limited independence it has and cognitive regulatory capture by the financial sector make the Fed prone to over-react to signs of weakness in the real economy and to financial sector concerns.

The second is a sextet of technical and analytical errors: (1) misapplication of the ‘Precautionary Principle’; (2) overestimation of the effect of house prices on economic activity; (3) mistaken focus on ‘core’ inflation; (4) failure to appreciate the magnitude of the macroeconomic and financial correction/adjustment required to achieve a sustainable external equilibrium and adequate national saving rate in the US following past excesses; (5) overestimation of the likely impact on the real economy of deleveraging in the financial sector; and (6) too little attention paid (especially during the asset market and credit boom
that preceded the current crisis) to the behaviour of broad monetary and credit aggregates.

All three central banks have been too eager to blame repeated and persistent upwards inflation surprises on ‘external factors beyond their control’, specifically food, fuel and other commodity prices. The third cause of the Fed’s macroeconomic underachievement has been its tendency to use the main macroeconomic stability instrument, the Federal Funds target rate, to address financial stability problems. This was an error both because the official policy rate is a rather ineffective tool for addressing liquidity and insolvency issues and because more effective tools were available, or ought to have been. The ECB, and to some extent the BoE, have assigned the official policy rate to their price stability objective and have addressed the financial crisis with the liquidity management tools available to the lender of last resort and market maker of last resort.

Of his three charges, Buiter is on solid ground on the first and third. The second set (his points 1-6) are debatable, but you can make a solid case for them, and he does.

Some of his comments are blunt:
 
In the case of the Fed, the nature of the arrangements for pricing illiquid collateral offered by primary dealers invites abuse....

All three central banks have gone well beyond the provision of emergency liquidity to solvent but temporarily illiquid banks. All three have allowed themselves to be used as quasifiscal agents of the state, providing subsidies to banks and other highly leveraged institutions, and assisting in their recapitalisation, while keeping the resulting contingent exposure off the budget and balance sheet of the fiscal authorities. Such subservience to the fiscal authorities undermines the independence of the central banks even in the area of monetary policy.

There is a lot of good stuff. For instance, Buiter discusses the "asymmetric" response of regulators to asset bubbles (they let the bubble run but jump in to try to arrest the collapse) and discusses remedies.

Unfortunately, a lot of participants seemed more interested in defending the Fed than in sifting through Buiter's analysis to see what might be valid and useful:
 
Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin said Buiter's paper fired ``a lot of unguided missiles,'' and former Vice Chairman Alan Blinder ``respectfully disagreed'' with his analysis of the central bank's crisis management.....

Mishkin lashed out against Buiter's assertion that the Fed's rate reductions may cause higher consumer prices.

``I wish he had actually read some of the literature on optimal monetary policy, because it might have been very helpful in this context,'' said Mishkin, who collaborated with Bernanke on inflation research in the 1990s.

Mishkin, a leading advocate of the Fed's effort to sustain economic growth through rapid rate reductions, said research shows that ``what you need to do is act more aggressively.''

In reply, Buiter said the value of such a strategy ``is not at all obvious to me.''

[Bank of Isreal's Stanley] Fischer, drawing laughter from the audience, held up a red fire extinguisher saying, ``I asked the organizers for some technical assistance in dealing with this discussion.''

While defending the Fed, Blinder said Buiter's papers ``often feature an alluring mix of brilliant insight and outrageous statements.'' The central bank's performance, though not flawless, has been ``pretty good'' given the magnitude of the crisis, he said.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet also came to the Fed's defense, saying ``what has been done until now has been pretty well done under very difficult circumstances.''
 

Although the Wall Street Journal coverage of the response is less detailed, it says that Blinder, who was tasked with critiquing the paper, told a long-form version of the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dam, and said that Buiter would rather have the dam leak out of obedience to his belief in moral hazard, and let the dam burst.

I may be reading too much into this, but it strikes me that Blinder went out of his way to be insulting (anyone who regularly participates in critiques of academic papers please read the WSJ post and comment).

Part of the problem is stylistic. Even though Buiter is Dutch by descent and dislikes the idea of national identity, his writing style often echos the cut and thrust of Parliamentary debates, a posture that is also well received in English academe and drawing rooms but not well received in the US. So his bluntness is over-the-top by US standards.

From this vantage point, it's obvious that the Fed has become far too dependent on current Wall Street incumbents and thus can be manipulated by them (and in fairness, the people who are doing the persuading may be completely sincere in their views). There were ways to compensate: cultivate contacts with former executives who no longer have close ties, find independent analysts who have useful data and perspectives. No doubt Fed officials have extensive contacts, but it appears they have not been used in a deliberate, orchestrated fashion to test and validate information provided by those currently employed by major financial firms.

The second issue is that even if the Fed is too close to the financial services industry, it still may have made the right policy decisions. The jury is still out. Many people (probably including the Fed officials) hope the crisis has passed, while readers of this blog know there is good reason to think the worst has not arrived in earnest.

Buiter has taken a bold position, The Fed needs to be able to explain why what is good for Wall Street is also good for the economy as a whole. The sort of questions that Buiter is raising are notably absent from the media and US-based first rank economists. The Bloomberg story may not give a full enough account to be certain, but the responses to Buiter's charges do not seem persuasive. They amount to disputes over analytical methods and assertions that everything is working fine (after providing a $400 billion fix with no withdrawal plan and getting support from foreign investors equivalent to $1000 a person. So what's your next act?).

It will take some time to see if events prove Buiter right. And as Cassandras like Nouriel Roubini know, it can sometimes take longer than you anticipate for bad policies to finally yield the expected dismal harvest.

Local or Global?

Whatever reason we wish to give for the rise in commodity prices—oil and food, especially--, I think we can safely say that many models point to large players distorting the market, be they hedge funds, Fed interest rates, or countries controlling the resources.

Slowly but surely, I am coming to the opinion that “local” has some advantages over “global.” To illustrate my point, consider how our trade agreement with Mexico was framed, particularly in terms of corn.

NAFTA shifted Mexico's production from grains to vegetables and fruits, making Mexico much more dependent on the U.S. for grains. One incidental effect of our ethanol subsidy--using corn, for example, to product ethanol--has been to expose Mexico's vulnerability when it shifted from grains to vegetables and fruits. Suddenly, tortillas are excessively expensive.

Corn was an important crop in Mexico, and corn is now one of those important commodities reaching record high prices.

The market place creates efficiencies. Mexico’s corn crop was subsidized. NAFTA removed those subsidies; we could more efficiently supply the corn. Let Mexico concentrate on fruits and vegetables.

Such efficiencies, while seemingly laudable, create dangers. These efficiencies are celebrated as one of the benefits of globalization. Each country decides on its role in the Ricardian scheme of things. Inefficient redundancies are dropped.

The trouble is: If one major primary producer (the U.S.) decides suddenly to march to a different drummer, the whole parade becomes a chaotic mess. Yes, it may straighten itself out, but the interim consequences are devastating.

I would argue that every country has the right and duty to ensure that it can feed its populace, even if it means subsidies. Trade agreements should not place this duty at risk.

The same argument applies to energy. For decades, we have allowed OPEC to be the primary producer of cheap energy. Each country should pursue as much energy independence as possible. We have talked about our doing it, but the will has been weak.

If you argue that hedge funds seeking a new asset class have created the problem, we are now at their mercy. Whatever the argument, our vulnerability is now exposed precisely because we did not think of energy as a local issue, as something for which we are primarily responsible.

 

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Last modified: May 19, 2010