This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its first estimate for 2011 GDP.   It showed national output for the first time surpassing the pre-recession peak, which occurred in the last quarter of 2007.    (See chart below)    The expansion in 2011 was led by autos, computers, and other manufactured goods.

Given that the economy hit its trough in mid-2009, the long slow climb since then has been disappointing.   The outcome turns out to have been worse than the conventional wisdom that sharp declines tend to be followed by sharp recoveries.   On the other hand, the outcome turns out to have been somewhat better than the Reinhart-Rogoff thesis that when the cause of a recession is a financial crisis, the recovery tends to take many years.  

To be sure, the housing market has yet to recover and households are still painstakingly rebuilding their battered balance sheets.   But is this the complete explanation for the disappointing state of the economy — the origins of the crisis in a housing bubble and financial collapse?   

The first point to note is that the biggest single reason why the level of GDP over the last three years has been lower than most people forecast in January 2009 has nothing to do with overly optimistic forecasts in January 2009 of the rate of growth looking forward, nor with how good or bad Obama’s policy proposals were, nor with how effective the Republicans turned out to be at blocking them.  The BEA subsequently revised the GDP statistics substantially downward, and now reports that the real growth rate of the economy in the last quarter of the Bush Administration, instead of negative 3.8% per annum as reported that January, was in fact negative 8.9% per annum! The trough of the V was far deeper than was realized at the time.

The second point to note is that construction, which usually helps lead the economy out of a recession, remained, indeed had a strong negative influence on GDP throughour 2006-2010.   Fortunately, in the latest figures, residential construction finally returned to a (small) positive source of growth in the economy over the last three quarters.

The third point to note is that the government sector has been the one component of demand to exert a substantial negative effect througout the last five quarters.   The reason is the withdrawal of fiscal stimulus at the federal level, at a time when state and local governments are also cutting back sharply on spending and employment. 

 

Emerging markets have performed amazingly well over the last seven years. They have outperformed the advanced industrialized countries in terms of economic growth, debt-to-GDP ratios, and countercyclical fiscal policy.  Many now receive better assessments by rating agencies and financial markets than some of the advanced economies.

As 2012 begins, however, emerging markets may be due for a correction, triggered by a new wave of “risk off” behavior among investors. Will China experience a hard landing? Will a decline in commodity prices hit Latin America? Will the sovereign-debt woes of the European periphery spread to neighbors such as Turkey in a new “Aegean crisis”?

Engorged by large capital inflows, some emerging market countries were in an overheated state a year ago. It is unlikely that the rapid economic growth and high trade deficits that Turkey has experienced in recent years can be sustained. Likewise, high GDP growth rates in Brazil and Argentina over the same period could soon reverse, particularly if global commodity prices fall - not a remote prospect if the Chinese economy falters or global real interest rates were to rise this year. China, for its part, could land hard as its real-estate bubble deflates and the country’s banks are forced to work off their bad loans.

The World Bank has now downgraded economic forecasts for developing countries in 2012 (Global Economic Prospects, Jan.18, 2012).    Brazil’s economic growth, for example, came to a halt in the third quarter of 2011 and is forecast at only 3.4 percent in 2012 …well below the rapid 2010 growth rate of 7.5 percent.  Reflecting a sharp slowdown in the second half of the year in India, South Asia is coming off of a torrid six years, including 9.1 percent growth in 2010.  Regional growth is projected to ease further to 5.8 percent in 2012.

But will economic slowdown turn to financial crash?   Three possible lines of argument support the worry that emerging markets’ performance are fated to suffer dramatically in 2012: empirical, literary, and causal. Each line of argument is admittedly tentative.

The empirical argument is just historically based numerology: emerging-market crises seem to come in 15-year cycles. The international debt crisis surfaced in Mexico in mid-1982, and then spread to the rest of Latin America and beyond. The East Asian crisis erupted 15 years later, in Thailand in mid-1997, and then spread to the rest of the region and beyond. We are now another 15 years down the road. So is 2012 the time for the third round of emerging markets crises?

The hypothesis of regular boom-bust cycles is supported by a long-standing scholarly literature, such as the writings of Carmen Reinhart. But I would appeal to an even older source: the Old Testament - in particular, the story of Joseph, who was called upon by the Pharaoh to interpret a dream about seven fat cows followed by seven skinny cows.

Joseph prophesied that there would come seven years of plenty, with abundant harvests from an overflowing Nile, followed by seven lean years, with famine resulting from drought. His forecast turned out to be accurate. Fortunately the Pharaoh had empowered his technocratic official (Joseph) to save grain in the seven years of plenty, building up sufficient stockpiles to save the Egyptian people from starvation during the bad years. That is a valuable lesson for today’s government officials in industrialized and developing countries alike.

For emerging markets, the first phase of seven years of plentiful capital flows occurred in 1975-1981, with the recycling of petrodollars in the form of loans to developing countries.  The international debt crisis that began in Mexico in 1982 was the catalyst for the seven lean years, known in Latin America as the “lost decade.” The turnaround year, 1989, was marked by the first issue of Brady bonds, which helped write down the debt overhang and put a line under the crisis.

The second cycle of seven fat years was the period of record capital flows to emerging markets in 1990-1996.  Following the 1997 “sudden stop” in East Asia came seven years of capital drought. The third cycle of inflows, often identified as a “carry trade,” came in 2004-2011 and persisted even through the global financial crisis. If history repeats itself, it is now time for a third sudden stop of capital flows to emerging markets.

Are a couple of data points and a biblical parable enough to take the hypothesis of a 15-year cycle seriously?  We need some sort of causal theory that could explain such periodicity to international capital flows.

Here is a possibility: 15 years is how long it takes for individual loan officers and hedge-fund traders to be promoted out of their jobs. Today’s young crop of asset pickers knows that there was a crisis in Turkey in 2001, but they did not experience it first hand. They think that perhaps this time is different.  

If emerging markets crash in 2012, remember where you heard it first - in ancient Egypt.

[This article was published in Project Syndicate, which holds the copyright.]

Many questions in the field of financial regulation are hard to answer:    Would the separation of commercial banking and investment banking help prevent crises?   To what extent should individual consumers be protected against foolishly borrowing too much?  Should Credit Default Swaps be regulated out of existence?    What should regulators do about patterns of high executive compensation that is evidently not a reward for performance?  I have views on these questions, just as other observers do.  But in these cases I see the arguments on both sides.

The question of funding the U.S. financial regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is easy to answer, however.  I do not see the argument  for cutting funding  of the SEC and CFTC or for the other ways that Republicans in Congress are finding to make it difficult for these agencies to do their jobs.   They are also deliberately impeding two new agencies set up in response to the 2008 financial crisis — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lodged at the Fed, and the Office of Financial Research at the Treasury — from doing their respective jobs.

Bernard Madoff was the most obviously venal of the figures in the financial crisis of the fall of 2008.  There is nothing hard to understand about the swindle he perpetrated, no ambiguities about where the legal line is drawn, no free-market interpretation that anyone uses to justify what he did.  The SEC had been warned over and over again in the years before 2008.   Why did it do nothing?  In large part because it had in effect been given a mandate to regulate as little as possible. 

I realize that in the United States, as in every country, we have some regulations that are excessive or undesirable.  But how anyone can think that regulation by the SEC was excessive during 2001-08 and that this contributed to the financial crisis?

That is the irrationality on the Right.   There is an equally irrational point of view on the Left.  It goes like this:  because the head of the CFTC is a former investment banker from Goldman Sachs, it must necessarily be that he is serving the interests of the financial community.  It happens that Gary Gensler is doing a great job, against great odds.   He has been trying to force derivatives trading into clearinghouses with lower counterparty risk, as required by the Dodd-Frank bill, to try to avoid repeats of September 2008.  I can see, when an investment banker is appointed to such a position, asking questions that one would not ask if he came from some other profession.  But he has been in office for 2 ½ years, pursuing regulation of derivatives with sufficient vigor to make most of Wall Street angry.  Reading the words “Goldman Sachs” on someone’s resume should not be a substitute for all other thought processes.

     After the currency crises of 1994-2001, and especially the East Asia crises of 1997-98, a lot of research investigated what countries could do to protect themselves against a future repeat.  More importantly, policy makers in emerging markets took some serious measures.  Some countries abandoned exchange rate targets and began to float.   Many accumulated high levels of foreign exchange reserves.  Many moved away from dollar-denominated debt, toward other kinds of capital inflow that would be less vulnerable to currency mismatch, such as domestic currency debt or Foreign Direct Investment.   Some instituted Collective Action Clauses in their debt contracts to facilitate otherwise-messy restructuring of debt in the event of a severe negative shock.  A few raised reserve requirements or otherwise tightened prudential banking regulations (clearly not enough, in retrospect). And so on.

When the Global Financial Crisis hit ten years later, it was bad news for everyone, except that it was good news for econometricians:  we could observe which countries got hit badly by this common external shock in 2008-09 and which did not, and could try to draw inferences about which strategies helped countries withstand the shock better than others.  The NBER is holding a public symposium in Washington on September 22.   The topic of the 3^rd and final session is: What ex ante policies can help reduce vulnerability to future shocks?

     Three papers that were presented at the earlier NBER conference in Bretton Woods (the culmination of a project on the Global Financial Crisis  sponsored by the Sloan Foundation) fall naturally into this category:

• International Reserves and the Global Financial Crisis, Kathryn Dominguez (University of Michigan), Yuko Hashimoto (IMF), and Takatoshi Ito (University of Tokyo);
• Managing Capital Inflows: The Role of Controls and Prudential Policies,  Jonathan Ostry, Atish Ghosh, Marcos Chamon, and Mahvash Qureshi (all of the IMF);
• International Financial Crises and the IMF: What the Historical Record Shows, Bergljot Barkbu (IMF), Barry Eichengreen (UC, Berkeley), and Ashoka Mody (IMF). 

To simplify a bit, Dominguez and co-authors study whether holding high levels of reserves helped countries do better in the Global Financial Crisis;  Ostry and co-authors study whether capital controls and bank regulation helped; and Barkbu, Eichengreen and Mody consider possible new mechanisms to improve the risk structure of capital inflows and to smooth adjustment to shocks, such as sovereign CoCos (Contingent Convertible bonds) and indexing of debt.

     The question that Dominguez, Hashimoto, and Ito address in International Reserves and the Global Financial Crisis, had been actively debated in the years before 2008.   Some economists thought that China, especially, but other emerging market countries as well, were holding far more foreign exchange reserves than they needed to withstand shocks.  Larry Summers (2006) was one prominent example; I must admit that his argument sounded sensible to me at the time.  When the global financial crisis hit, it was possible to test the proposition.   Some of the early studies found that reserve holdings did not seem to help countries withstand the crisis better.  Blanchard, Faruqee and Klyuev (2009) was one.   A series of papers by Andy Rose and Mark Spiegel (2009a, b) also found no significant effect.   But others found an important effect.    One of the technical contributions of the paper by Dominguez and co-authors is to subtract estimates of interest income and valuation changes from officially report levels of reserves in order to get at the actively managed component.  Their single most important finding is that real GDP growth recovery after the global financial crisis was stronger for countries that had accumulated large reserve holdings before the crisis.

This is the same thing I had found in a study with George Saravelos (NBER WP no.16047, 2010) .   Out of dozens of potential early warning indicators, foreign exchange reserves are the indicator that had been most often identified as significant by eighty pre-2008 studies conducted on earlier data.  We found that reserves are also the indicator that was the strongest predictor of which countries got into trouble in 2008-09. A particularly useful indicator is the ratio of reserves to short-term debt (Guidotti, 2003).   We found that the second most consistently important early warning indicator was overvaluation of the currency by criteria like PPP.   Also important in the recent crisis were measures of national saving.

Why did the Dominguez paper and my paper find that reserves had a significant effect, and others did not?    My guess is that it has to do with different definitions.  In particular, we define the crisis period as late 2008 and early 2009, whereas the earlier papers I mentioned ended in 2008.

     In Managing Capital Inflows: The Role of Controls and Prudential Policies, Ostry, Ghosh, Chamon, and Qureshi do something very important.  Too many discussions lump financial regulations together (speaking indiscriminately of Tobin taxes, Chile-style or Brazil-style controls on short-term capital inflows, Venezuela’s  controls on outflows, etc., even though these are completely different things).  Chamon and co-authors develop three new country indices: one for financial-sector capital controls, one for prudential regulation of foreign exchange transactions in the domestic banking sector, and one for domestic prudential policies.  This helps avoid exacerbating what is often a sterile oversimplified debate.  For example, even if one is ideologically opposed to capital controls, or has been persuaded by research such as Kristin Forbes (2007) that the famous Chile controls caused undesirable distortions, it is hard to be opposed to prudential banking regulations, especially in light of the origins of the 2008 crisis.   Chamon and co-authors find that capital controls and FX-related prudential measures can both help shift the composition of lending, away from FX-denominated bank loans and toward equity and FDI components of capital inflows.   Previous researchers have found that shifts of this sort in the composition of inflow, as opposed to reductions in the level of inflows per se, reduce the probability of a crisis. (Frankel and Rose, 1996, among many others.)   Probably the most important finding by Chamon et al is a reasonably strong statistical association between pre-crisis prudential and capital control policy and resilience to the sudden stop.   Countries in the upper quarter of restrictiveness of FX-related prudential measures do better in a crisis than those in the bottom quarter, by a whopping margin of 2 ½ - 3 ½ % percentage points of growth.  An important lesson for countries facing large inflows today.

     One of the co-authors of International Financial Crises and the IMF: What the Historical Record Shows, Barry Eichengreen, is not just the pre-eminent economic historian of this field but also supplied a lot of the intellectual force behind the adoption of Collective Action Clauses after the preceding round of emerging market crises (e.g., Eichengreen, 2003; and Eichengreen and Mody, 2004).  Thus it is well worth listening to what they have to say about further ideas for structuring capital flows ex ante in such a way as to avoid messy and costly restructuring ex post.

Barkbu, Mody, and Eichengreen explore how to automate the restructuring decision.  Automating the process has key advantages: it preserves the integrity of the contract (which avoids the uncertainties involved in triggering CDS); it is predictable; and it can be priced.   It can also avoid the need for what otherwise might be a lengthy process of renegotiation between debtors and creditors during which time economic activity falls and everyone suffers.  To this end, they discuss the idea of adding to future government bond issues so-called sovereign cocos, contractual provisions that automatically lengthen maturities or reduce interest and amortization payments when a pre-specified debt/GDP ratio is reached.  

There are also other ways of improving risk sharing and avoiding the need for costly restructuring negotiations.  An idea that is older but that I think merits more of a try-out than it has received — applicable for countries that export oil, minerals or agricultural commodities — is to index the debt to the world price of the export commodity.  Also in this category is the basic movement away from dollar-denominated debt and toward domestic-denominated debt, equity and FDI .  It seems to me that countries that heeded such lesson of the 1990s (including many emerging markets in Asia and Latin America) came through the GFC relatively well, whereas those that did not (Eastern Europe), did not.   

References

Barkbu, Bergljot, Barry Eichengreen, and Ashoka Mody, International Financial Crises and the IMF: What the Historical Record Shows, NBER Conference on The Global Financial Crisis, Bretton Woods, NH, June 2011, organized by C.Engel, K.Forbes, and J.Frankel.
Berkmen, Pelin, Gaston Gelos, Robert Rennhack, and James P Walsh (2009), “The Global Financial Crisis: Explaining Cross-Country Differences in the Output Impact“, IMF Working Paper 09/280.
Blanchard, Olivier, Hamid Faruqee, and Vladimir Klyuev (2009), “Did Foreign Reserves Help Weather the Crisis“, IMF Survey Magazine, October.
Chamon, Marcos, Atish Ghosh, Jonathan Ostry, and Mahvash Qureshi, Managing Capital Inflows: The Role of Controls and Prudential Policies,   NBER Conference on The Global Financial Crisis, Bretton Woods, NH, June 2011, organized by C.Engel, K.Forbes, and J.Frankel.
Dominguez, Kathryn, Yuko Hashimoto, and Takatoshi Ito, International Reserves and the Global Financial Crisis, , NBER Conference on The Global Financial Crisis, Bretton Woods, NH, June 2011, organized by C.Engel, K.Forbes, and J.Frankel.
Eichengreen, Barry, 2003, “Restructuring Sovereign Debt,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 17, Number 4, 1 November , 75-98.
Eichengreen, Barry and Ashoka Mody. 2004, “Do Collective Action Clauses Raise Borrowing Costs?,” Economic Journal, v114 (495,April), 247-264.   NBER WP 7458.
Forbes, Kristin, “One cost of the Chilean capital controls: Increased financial constraints for smaller traded firms,” Journal of International Economics,  71, Issue 2, April 2007, Pages 294-323
Frankel, Jeffrey and George Saravelos (2010), “Are Leading Indicators of Financial Crises Useful for Assessing Country Vulnerability? Evidence from the 2008-09 Global Crisis,” NBER WP 16047, June.
Frankel, Jeffrey, and Andrew Rose (1996) “Currency Crashes in Emerging Markets,” Journal of International Economics 41, no. 3/4, 351-66.
Guidotti, Pablo (2003), in J Antonio Gonzalez, V.Corbo, A.Krueger, and A.Tornell, (eds.), Latin American Macroeconomic Reforms: The Second Stage, University of Chicago Press.
Obstfeld, Maurice, Jay Shambaugh, and Alan Taylor (2009), “Financial Instability, Reserves, and Central Bank Swap Lines in the Panic of 2008,” American Economic Review, 99(2):480-486.
Obstfeld, Maurice, Jay Shambaugh, and Alan Taylor (2010), “Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves“, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
Rose, Andrew and Mark Spiegel (2009a), “The Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Crisis: Early Warning,” Global Journal of Economics. NBER Working Paper 15357.
Rose, Andrew, and Mark Spiegel (2009b), “The Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Crisis: International Linkages and American Exposure,” Pacific Economic Review.
Summers, Lawrence, 2006,  “Reflections on Global Account Imbalances and Emerging Markets Reserve Accumulation,” March 24.

My preceding blogpost identified three mistakes made by leaders of the European Economic and Monetary Union in dealing with Greece.   But what is done is done.  The mistakes now lie in the past.  How can Europe’s fiscal regime be reformed to avoid future repeats of this crisis?  

The reforms that are now underway are not credible.  (”We are going to make the fiscal rules more explicit and make sure to monitor them more tightly next time.”)    Similarly, most proposals for how to put teeth into the rules are not credible — penalties such as monetary fines or loss of voting privileges. 

It is too late for Greece. But it is not too late for a euroland reform that would help avoid the re-emergence of unsustainable sovereign debt levels next time around by applying the lesson of mistake number two: to adjust the ECB policy of accepting the debt of all member states as collateral.  This is the policy that short-circuited warning signals that the private markets would otherwise have sent via interest rates during 2002-2007.  

My proposal:   The eurozone should in the future adopt a rule that whenever a country violates the fiscal criterion of the Stability and Growth Pact (say, a budget deficit in excess of 3% of GDP, structurally adjusted), the ECB must stop accepting that government’s debt as collateral.  This system would achieve the elusive objective of true automaticity.   If a country exceeded the threshold for justifiable reasons, such as natural disaster, the private markets could perceive that and impose little or no default risk premium.   No judgment of the merits by bureaucrats or politicians would be required.   More likely, for periphery countries, the result of such a re-classification would be the re-emergence of sovereign spreads of moderate magnitudes, in between the extremes of the 2002-07 lows and the 2009-11 highs (see chart).  The interest rate premium would send a message far more credibly, forcefully, and promptly than any warning that any Brussels bureaucracy will ever turn out.  

This is how it works among the U.S. states and municipalities.  Despite the absence of their own currencies, the recurrence of dysfunctional local politics and excessive deficits, and even a history of state defaults in the 19^th century, federal bailouts are not delivered and are not expected.   Without some such device, the new European Stability Mechanism is in danger of becoming a mechanism for instability.

[Niels Thygesen made the case in favor of the current reform track in "Governance in the Euro Area" at the Challenge of Europe session of INET's Annual Conference, Bretton Woods, NH, April 10, 2011. I gave my comment there as well. (Video)]

[Comments can be posted on the Vox.eu site (which has the copyright.)]

By now just about everybody agrees that the European bailout of Greece has failed:  The debt will have to be restructured.    As has been evident for well over a year, it is not possible to think of a plausible combination of Greek budget balance, sovereign risk premium, and economic growth rates that imply anything other than an explosive path for the future ratio of debt to GDP.

There is plenty of blame to go around.  But three big mistakes can be attributed to the European leadership.  This includes the European Central Bank - surprisingly, in that the ECB has otherwise been the most competent and successful of Europe-wide institutions.

Mistake number 1 was the decision in 2000 to admit Greece in the first place.   The country was an outlier, geographically and economically.  It did not come close to meeting the Maastricht Criteria, particularly the 3 % ceiling on the budget deficit as a share of GDP.  No doubt most Greeks would agree with the judgment that they would be much better off today if they were outside the euro, free to devalue and restore their lost competitiveness.

The second mistake was to allow the interest rate spreads on sovereign bonds issued by Greece (and other periphery countries) to fall almost to zero during the period 2002-2007.   Despite budget deficits and debt levels that far exceeded the limits of the Stability and Growth Pact, Greece was able to borrow almost as easily as Germany.  Part of the blame belongs to international investors who grossly underestimated risk on all sorts of assets during this period.  And part of the blame belongs to the rating agencies who, as usual, have been lagging indicators of European debt troubles, rather than leading indicators.  But in this case, both groups might justify their attitudes by pointing out that the ECB accepted Greek debt as collateral, on a par with German debt.

The third mistake was the failure to send Greece to the IMF early in the crisis, before Greek interest rates went to 600 basis points (see graph).  By January 2010 the need to go to the Fund should have been clear.  Rather than going into shock, leaders in Frankfurt and Brussels could have welcomed the Greek crisis as a useful opportunity to establish a precedent for the long-term life of the euro.   The idea that a debt problem of this sort would eventually arise somewhere in euroland cannot have come as a surprise.  After all, why had the architects of the Maastricht fiscal criteria and the No Bailout Clause (1991) and the Stability & Growth Pact (1997) written them in the first place?   Skeptical German taxpayers believed that, before the project was done, they would be asked to bail out some spendthrift Mediterranean country.  European elites adopted the fiscal rules precisely to combat these fears.   

When the rules failed and the crisis came, the leaders should have thanked their lucky stars that the first test case had arisen in a country that met two characteristics admirably:   
(i) The Greek government had broken the rules so egregiously and so frequently that one could with a clear conscience judge that a firm stand was merited.  The only alternative was to risk establishing the precedent that even profligate governments can expect ultimately to be bailed out, with all the moral hazard headaches that precedent implies.    (ii) The Greek economy was small enough to make it feasible for Europe to come up with the funds necessary to insulate others who were vulnerable to contagion but not as blameworthy:  banks that hold Greek debt and governments such as Ireland that had tried to follow responsible policies in the period before the global financial crisis.

European leaders also should have thanked their stars that the IMF exists.   Instead of acting as if such a crisis had never been seen before, they should have realized that imposing policy conditionality in rescue loan packages is precisely the IMF’s job.  International politics is less likely to prevent the Fund from enforcing painful fiscal retrenchment and other difficult conditions than it is among regional neighbors or other political allies.   Europe is no different in this respect than Latin America or Asia.  

But the reaction of leaders in both Frankfurt and Brussels was that going to the Fund was unthinkable, that this was a problem to be settled within Europe.   They chose to play for time instead, to treat insolvency as illiquidity.  Against all evidence — despite a decade of SGP violations — they still wish to believe that they can impose fiscal discipline on member states.  Despite two decades in which citizens of Germany and other European countries have expressed clearly that they do not share their leaders’ enthusiasm for Economic and Monetary Union, the latter apparently still wish to believe that further progress to political and fiscal union is possible.  The emu has long since become an ostrich, burying its head in the sand.

It turned out that the German taxpayers had been right all along.   How, in light of that democratic deficit, can anyone think that Europe is ready for a transfer union? 

Next week’s post:   A proposal to avoid future repeats of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.

These matters were discussed in a session on the Challenge of Europe at the Annual Conference of George Soros’ INET, April 10, 2011.  Video & slides are available, including my own comment.

[Comments can be posted on the Vox.eu site.]

         December 31 is technically the end of the first decade of the 21^st century.  It is perhaps an appropriate time to review one’s predictions.    It seems to me that I got some things right over the last decade.  Indulge me while I review the predictions that came true, before turning to those that did not work out as well.

Stock market peak     At the end of the 1990s, I felt that the dizzying ascent of equity prices could not continue into the new decade, that there was “…a bubble component in the stock market”  (Nov. 20, 1999).   This was four months before the bubble burst in 2000.  So far so good.

Exchange rate        Also at the start of the decade, I thought the euro was undervalued.   My prophesy: “… there will be a major appreciation of the euro against the dollar” (June 21, 2000).  Over the next eight years the euro in fact rose 60% in value.

TIPS           I recommended Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities to my blog readers, early in what turned out to be a period of steep rise in their value.  (Feb. 2009.)

            The big economic story of the decade of course was its second recession, the worst in 70 years, and the severe financial crisis that caused it.    A number of economists got important parts of the 2007-09 crisis right ahead of time (although nobody got all of it right).   I give credit in particular to Krugman, Shiller, Gramlich, Rajan, Borio and White at the BIS, Rogoff, and Roubini.  A 2009 paper identifies 12 commentators as having warned that the US housing market would end in a serious recession.

What parts did I get right?

Severity of recession             After the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, I predicted that spending growth and deficits would rise rather than fall, and that the legacy of high debt would mean that the next recession would be longer and more severe than past recessions:

 ”Good economic logic does not support the idea that Bush fiscal policies caused the weak economy of the last three years. Good economic logic supports, rather, a causal link between Bush fiscal policies and the next recession. The future downturn is likely to be far worse than the recent one…They also created long-range uncertainty that makes planning difficult (nobody from either party expects the relevant tax law to remain as it is currently written)… It is impossible to say when the next recession will come. But when it does, it is likely to be worse than the 2001 recession. Why? Precisely because we will enter it at a time when the budget deficit and national debt are already alarmingly high…Thus when the next recession hits, we will not have luxury of being able to cut taxes and increase spending as George II has done. … The resulting pain will make the economic travails of George II’s first term pale in comparison…”  (Oct. 30, 2003.  Also Dec.2003 and Nov.2004).    
That seems to me precisely what has happened.

Budget deficits       Like many others, I continued throughout the decade to warn that fiscal policy was irresponsible.  The “White House forecast of cutting budget deficit in half by 2009 will not be met,” and “Further, the much more serious deterioration will start after 2009.”  (May 24, 2006.)

Market underestimation of risk        I was dubious of the “Great Moderation.”   By 2006, I was warning frequently of serious risks facing the economy, arguing that even though the odds of each sort of possible setback were small in any given year, the cumulative probability that at least one of them would hit the economy over the next couple of years was relatively high.  (May 24, 2006.)  The markets were underestimating this risk:
 ”How can the implied volatility in options prices be so low?  Perhaps investors are judging risk solely from the statistics of recent history, and not from a forward-looking open-eyed consideration of the risks facing the global economy.”  (Nov. 2006.)    “The implicit volatilities in options prices are substantially too low, and will rise.  … market estimates of risk are lower than they should be.  … the market is basing its perception of risk on recent history, not on a forward-looking assessment of the risks facing the US and global economies.    Such risks include further falls in housing or rises in oil, a hard landing for the dollar, and geopolitical risks arising from the Middle East.”   (Jan.12, 2007. And again, May 14, 2007.)     
The VIX (the CBOE index of market-expected volatility) was close to 10 when that was written.  It was to go as high as 80 when the full financial crisis hit in 2008.

The carry trade “should be reversing.” (Jan.12, 2007.)    Market perceptions of risk had “fallen to irrational lows, as reflected in the low interest rates at which governments of developing countries, unqualified American homebuyers and high-risk businesses could borrow money.” (Nov.19, 2007, and Jan. 2008.)   

International crises    When asked “Have financial developments made the International Monetary Fund obsolete?” my answer was “The IMF is by no means obsolete. …. It is foolhardy to think, just because emerging market spreads have been very low recently, that there will be no more crises in the future.”    (March 1, 2007)   I identified Hungary and other Eastern European countries as particularly vulnerable.  (Jan. 2008.)

The coming financial crash       The comments I made at a Cato conference held in November 2006, shortly before the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit in 2007, look good now:

 ”The Greenspan Fed probably erred by providing too much liquidity in 2001-2004….If the Fed erred in keeping interest rates so low so long after the 2001 recession, what cost are we paying? None yet; but dangers lie in the future. It is not that I am especially worried about inflation at the moment. … what cost do I fear might come from the extraordinarily easy monetary policy of 2001-04? As the Bank for International Settlements points out, some of the biggest financial crashes and some of the longest recession periods have followed liquidity-fed booms that never did show up as goods inflation, but rather as asset inflation…”     (In Responding to Crises, Cato Journal, Spring 2007.)

Housing          Of the various asset markets, housing was the area where policy had most clearly gone awry.    I had long thought “that some people were being pushed to buy houses who couldn’t afford it, that (mirabile dictu) there was such a thing as too high a rate of national homeownership, and that the default rate would shoot up as soon as real interest rates rose or house prices stopped rising.”   (March 26, 2007.)    “Many people bought houses they could not afford unless prices continued to rise rapidly or real interest rates remained extraordinarily low, which predictably did not happen.”  (April 28, 2007.)     

The start of the recession     “[A]t the time of writing [Jan. 2008], the United States appeared to be poised on the brink of recession….A coming recession may be more severe and long-lasting than the last one in 2001….”   By May 2008 I had figured out that a recession was indeed probably underway– at a time when some Administration officials were still ruling it out and indeed GDP figures appeared to show positive growth in the first part of that year.   

Banking crisis resolution       When the Obama Administration announced its revised form of the Bush Administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, I argued that maybe they actually knew what they were doing and that the plan should be given a chance to work.  (March 23, 2009.)  I felt pretty isolated.  Others attacked the plan, from both left and right.  They expected Tim Geithner’s stress tests to be phony.  The critics were sure that the taxpayer would end up paying hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.  They wanted either to nationalize the banks or leave everything to the free market.  As things developed, however, financial collapse was averted without nationalization and the banks have since repaid the Treasury with interest.   

The trough      Financial markets stabilized in the first half of 2009.  Turnarounds in the rates of growth and job loss led me to believe in the summer of 2009 that the economy had probably hit bottom by then.   This turns out in fact to have been the case: The record shows that the recession ended that June.

Predictions gone wrong          Needless to say, I got plenty wrong in the decade as well.   For one thing, I kept expecting U.S. long-term interest rates to rise, because of the alarming long-term fiscal profile. Yet the bond market correction never came.   For another thing, based on econometric estimation of reserve currency holdings, Menzie Chinn and I projected that the euro might eventually rival the dollar by 2015 or 2022.    Those dates are still aways off.   But it now seems unlikely.   I certainly thought that the sort of financial crisis that began in the U.S. in 2007-08 would be accompanied by a fall in the dollar.  Yet flows into the U.S. showed that the dollar is still a safe haven.  For this reason I abandoned my euro-bullishness, even before the mismanaged Greek crisis in early 2010.

My most spectacularly wrong predictions were all in the area of politics.  I had thought that if any presidential candidate gained the White House without winning the popular vote, his entire term would be consumed by divisive efforts to reform the Electoral College.   (This did not happen after January 2001.)   I had thought that if a high-casualty international terrorist attack hit the U.S. (September 11, 2001), American foreign policy would thereafter become ruled less by jingoism and more by expertise.  (Not!)   In 2008 I suspected that a Democrat who was perceived as a northern liberal could not be elected president.   (Wrong again.)  

In the coming decade, I resolve to eschew political forecasts, and stick to economics.

[Comments can be posted on the Belfer site.]

    
      In 2008, the global financial system was grievously infected by so-called toxic assets originating in the United States.  As a result of the crisis, many have asked what fundamental rethinking will be necessary to save macroeconomic theory.  Some answers may lie with models that have in the past been applied to fit the realities of emerging markets — models that are at home with the financial market imperfections that have now unexpectedly turned up in industrialized countries.  The imperfections include default risk, asymmetric information, incentive incompatibility, procyclicality of capital flows, procyclicality of fiscal policy, imperfect property rights, and other flawed institutions.   To be sure, many of these theories had been first constructed in the context of industrialized economies, but they had not become mainstream there.   Only in the context of less advanced economies were the imperfections undeniable.  There the models thrived.     
 

     An analogy can capture the apparently novel suggestion that emerging markets may have important lessons for advanced countries.   In the latter part of the nineteenth century most of the vineyards of Europe were destroyed by the microscopic aphid Phylloxera vastatrix. Eventually a desperate last resort was tried: grafting susceptible European vines onto resistant American root stock.   Purist French vintners initially disdained a strategy that they considered would compromise the refined tastes of their grape varieties. But it saved the European vineyards, and did not impair the quality of the wine. The New World had come to the rescue of the Old World.

 

     The academic literature on macroeconomics and finance in developing countries hardly existed 30 years ago.  But by now it has grown very large — large enough to deserve a survey of its own.  I review much of this research in a survey titled “Monetary Policy in Emerging Markets.”  It appears as a chapter in the Handbook of Monetary Economics, edited by Ben Friedman and Michael Woodford, which has just this week become available from Elsevier Publishing.   Among the hundreds of authors represented in the survey are Caballero, Calvo, Dooley, Dornbusch, Edwards, Reinhart and Velasco, as well as many younger scholars.  Again, although financial opening gave capital flows a central role in the emerging market models, the need to allow for imperfections in these markets has always been clear.   It is also what gives the models so much relevance today, not just for theory but for policy as well.   Raghu Rajan and Simon Johnson point out that some of the institutional failings that we associate with financial sectors in developing countries, such as distorted incentives and undue political influence, also apply to the United States and other advanced countries.  Among other areas of economic policy where the North could draw useful lessons from small countries in the South as to how to address the problems, in earlier blogposts I have given the example of the procedures that Chile has used over the past decade to achieve countercyclical fiscal policy.  

[Comments can be posted on the Belfer Center site.]

With aftershocks of the recent global financial earthquake still being felt in some parts of the world, it would be useful to have a set of Early Warning Indicators to tell us what countries are most vulnerable.    Nobody should be surprised that it is hard to forecast crises with high reliability;    low-risk opportunities for profits are never easy to find.   Thus it is especially hard to predict the timing of a crisis.  Some economists, however, are skeptical that Early Warning Indicators (EWIs) have any useful predictive ability at all.  A common assessment is that EWIs have failed, in the sense that in each historical round of emerging market crises (1982, 1994-2001, 2008) those particular variables that appeared statistically significant in that round did not perform well in the subsequent round.   This is not the right conclusion.

In a recent NBER working paper (featured in a ReutersTV interview today), George Saravelos and I began by examining more than eighty contributions to the pre-2008 literature on EWIs.   The table below reports which variables were most often found to have performed consistently well in predicting crises in the past.   Among 17 categories of indicators, the level of international reserves and  exchange rate overvaluation stand out by far as the two most useful leading indicators.  These results hold across different crisis episodes stretching from the 1950s to the early 2000s, even though different authors have defined “crisis” and “useful” in different ways.

The 2008-09 financial crisis

The recent global financial crisis was in a sense a perfect experiment for testing the performance of EWIs, because it originated in a shock that was exogenous to the smaller countries of the world.    It hit everyone at the same time, so we don’t have to worry about the issue of timing.  We can focus on what economic variables indicate vulnerability to such a shock.

To summarize the findings in our paper, the EWIs from the pre-2008 literature do relatively well in predicting which countries got hit in 2008-09, and the indicator that was found to be the top performer in past crises was also the top performer this time:   foreign exchange reserve holdings, especially expressed relative to a denominator such as debt.

Other economists have not gotten such strong results.   The first wave of analysis of the global crisis — by top scholars including Blanchard, Obstfeld, and Rose — found that few, if any, indicators were useful in explaining which countries got hit the most.(See references below.)   Why do we get stronger results?   These papers necessarily defined the crisis period as the year 2008; they lacked data on 2009 at the time when they were written.   We define the global crisis as beginning in earnest in the latter part of 2008.  (Recall that the failure of Lehman Brothers came in September.)  We extend the period under consideration through early 2009, because many aspects of global financial markets and the real economy did not begin to recover until the 2^nd quarter of that year.   We believe that the difference in the period that is defined to be the crisis is the reason for the difference in results.

The table below summarizes our results.  Each column represents another criterion for gauging the severity of the 2008-09 crisis in a particular country.  We consider a country to have suffered more from the crisis if it experienced larger output drops, bigger stock market falls, loss in demand for its currency, or a need for access to IMF funds.   We regressed each of these dependent variables against the list of useful EWIs indentified in our literature review.  A darker color in the figure indicates greater statistical significance for that indicator.

We controlled for GDP per capita, allowing us to mix high-income and low-income countries in the same data set.   The last three years have featured a historic role reversal in which some “advanced countries” were badly hit (Iceland, Greece, and others on the periphery of Europe) while some big emerging markets” did much better (China, Brazil, Indonesia and others).

What works?

At the top of the list is central bank reserves.   We find that the level of reserves in 2007 was a statistically significant predictor of crisis incidence in 2008-09.   The best-performing of the reserve measures expresses them relative to short-term debt.   This is consistent with earlier findings, including the Guidotti Rule that tells emerging market central banks to hold reserves equal to at least the amount of debt maturing within one year.

Next on our list is overvaluation measured by past movements in the real effective exchange rate (REER). It is statistically significant in predicting devaluation, exchange market pressure and access to IMF stand-by arrangement programs.    A few of the other leading indicators stand out as well.  A higher current account balance or level of national savings is associated with lower crisis intensity. Other variables with some explanatory power but less consistently useful across different measures include the level of external debt, its composition (e.g. short-term vs. long-term), and the extent of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).  Broadly speaking, many Eastern European countries suffered in the crisis for these reasons, while most Asian countries did much better.

We conclude that early warning exercises can indeed be a useful tool for assessing future vulnerabilities.   The same variable that topped the list of indicators in the earlier literature, central bank reserves, also worked the best in predicting who got hit in the 2008-09 crisis.

Click here for .pdf enlargement of the table below

[A slightly longer version of this summary appears on Vox.]

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REFERENCES
Berkmen, Pelin, et. al., 2009, “The Global Financial Crisis: Explaining Cross-Country Differences in the Output Impact,” IMF Working Papers 09/280.

Blanchard, Olivier, Hamid Faruqee, and Vladimir Klyuev, 2009, “Did Foreign Reserves Help Weather the Crisis.”

Obstfeld, Maurice, Jay Shambaugh, and Alan Taylor, 2009, “Financial Instability, Reserves, and Central Bank Swap Lines in the Panic of 2008,” American Economic Review, 99, no.2, May, 480-86;   and 2010, “Financial Stability, the Trilemma, and International Reserves.” Amer. Ec. Journal: Macroeconomics.

Rose, Andrew, and Mark Spiegel, 2009a, “The Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Crisis: Early Warning,” Global Journal of Economics, forthcoming;   and 2009b, “The Causes and Consequences of the 2008 Crisis: International Linkages and American Exposure,” Pacific Economic Review, forthcoming.

Guidotti, Pablo, 2003, in Gonzalez, Corbo, Krueger, and Tornell, eds., Latin American Macroeconomic Reforms: The Second Stage.

The National Journal asks for views on a recent proposal from Len Burman .  I couldn’t agree more with the idea:  we need to limit tax expenditures.  
 
With regard to the politics, one would have to see whether the phrase “cut tax expenditures” polls more like the phrase “cut expenditures,” which I assume polls well, or like the phrase “raise taxes,” which of course polls horribly.  I have no idea.  But at least there is a hope of breaking through the mindless artificial “Taxes versus Spending” rhetoric that dominates Washington.

With regard to the merits of the idea as economic policy — in a context where strong measures to reduce the budget deficit will be necessary in coming years — Burman is completely right.   Most tax expenditures tend by nature to be distortionary.   Many of them are convoluted ways of making what would otherwise be a subsidy look like a tax deduction.

Agreeing to the general principle of limiting tax expenditures is easier than agreeing to all the detailed implications.   Looking at the list of the actual 12 largest tax expenditures would give most people pause.   But much less so for economists.    The only one on the list that gives me serious pause, personally, is #7:  the “charitable deduction (other than education and health).”   But the top two deserve to be cut, as part of a larger fiscal package, not just because they would save a lot of money, but also to get economic incentives right.  Those top two are the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and the mortgage interest deduction.
 
A proposal to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction would of course get zero support in Congress, because it is political suicide with middle class voters.   A more moderate proposal to freeze the amount of the deduction would also be unpopular.  The same with three other pro-housing tax expenditures out of Len’s list of 12:    exclusion of net imputed rental income, capital gains exclusion on home sales, and property tax deduction.   All politicians and voters (excluding economists) continue to believe that public policy should tilt in favor of home ownership.   Notwithstanding the recession that began with the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, economists have not made even a dent in popular perceptions, with our arguments against artificially tilting the field away from rental housing and the rest of the capital stock, which is what you do when you tilt toward owner-occupied housing.   That the bias is toward high leverage in home ownership makes it worse.  To take another example, whatever happens ultimately to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they certainly won’t be abolished.    Americans believe too strongly in the dream of home ownership to absorb fully the point that you are not doing a family a favor if getting them into their own house means burdening them with debt that they will probably not be able to repay.

“Political impossibility” is not a reason not to try.  After all, our country will not get through the next few decades, fiscally, unless we make some “politically impossible” changes.   But I emphasized the housing issue in the preceding paragraph to make a different point.   Almost all commentators on the financial crisis, whether from the left or right, talk as if the causes of the crisis are obvious and our leaders are idiots for not having acted to fix the problem ahead of time.  Needless to say, those on the left blame the right, for deregulation, and those on the right blame the left, for moral hazard.   And yet there is still zero support for fixing the housing policy parts of the problem, on which economists have almost unanimous agreement (and did ahead of the crisis).

[Comments  can be posted on the SeekingAlpha site.]