Global Economic Crisis

Amid the clamour over the Greek debt crisis, a far more perilous threat to the global economy is becoming increasingly apparent. The global economic and financial crisis has wrecked havoc on the United Kingdom’s public finances, with no clear path to salvation.

Consider the following statistics. Greece has a GDP of approximately $350 billion, compared with $2.2 trillion for the UK. In other words, the Greek economy is only 16% the aggregate size of Great Britain’s. The proportion of Greece’s annual deficit to GDP is 12.5%, a figure that has triggered the current Greek sovereign debt crisis and panic search for a bailout formula within the Eurozone. Yet, in the much larger UK economy, the deficit to GDP ratio has reached 13%, an even higher level than for Greece, which has aroused so much fear among global investors and policymakers. Furthermore, while the UK’s official public national debt comprises 68% of GDP, a figure lower than America’s and much lower than with Greece, that level of indebtedness is accelerating at a rapid rate. It must be recalled that only three years ago the UK national debt to GDP ratio was only 38%, and with double digit deficits now an inescapable fiscal reality in the United Kingdom, it seems almost certain that the nation’s public debt will exceed 100% of GDP within the next three years. Furthermore, it is widely believed by analysts and investors that off balance sheet public debts (as was similarly revealed in relation to Greece’s current debt crisis) and unfunded contingent liabilities significantly add to the official figures.

What do these dismal statistics tell us about the future trajectory of the UK’s profound sovereign debt and economic crisis? Consider what Kornelius Purps, fixed income director at UniCredit, Europe’s 2nd largest bank, told the British newspaper,The Daily Telegraph; “Britain’s AAA-rating is highly at risk. The budget deficit is huge at 13% of GDP and investors are not happy. The outgoing government is inactive due to the election. There will have to be absolute cuts in public salaries or pay, but nobody is talking about that.”

In effect, the UK economy is at a dangerous tipping point. Massive public indebtedness occurred as a result of the government’s bailout of its banks, yet businesses remain afflicted by a severe credit crunch. Massive stimulus spending has added enormously to the deficit, but the only result has been suspect figures that, if interpreted most optimistically, show that the UK’s economy has essentially flatlined after incurring a sharp contraction in economic output during the height of the global financial crisis.

The predictable outcome, as alluded to by Kornelius Purps, is that in the future the UK’s treasury gilts will be unable to finance the nation’s prodigious borrowing needs with historically low interest rates. At some point, perhaps sooner than many realize, interest rates on the UK’s debt instruments will rise precipitously. This will occur while GDP growth is at best sluggish. Sharp reductions in public spending will almost certainly tip the economy back into deep recession, further constricting revenue  and maintaining London’s fiscal imbalance. However, the alternative is even more unpalatable. The sovereign bond market will demand increasingly higher yields, leading to a fiscal reality that is unsustainable. Ultimately, the United Kingdom will face the real prospect of national insolvency, with all the predictable dire consequences.

 
This grim trajectory has an even darker meaning for the United States. As bad as the UK’s fiscal situation is, America’s is far worse. Its annual deficit to GDP ratio is only marginally lower than Great Britain’s. Furthermore, its national debt to GDP correlation is significantly higher. More importantly, the average period of turnover on the United Kingdom’s debt is 14 years, compared with a mere four years on U.S. Treasuries. Once bond yields start to rise, the short term structure of America’s national debt will incur a vast increase in annual interest payments.

It seems to this  observer  that it is only a matter of time before the UK sinks into an irreversible sovereign debt cataclysm, with the United States not far behind. Anyone who believes that the same political establishment and financial elites that have led both nations to this hellish fiscal precipice can now lead us to a sustainable solution is, in all probability, being excessively hopeful.

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According to the U.S. Treasury Department, America’s federal government set a record for red ink in February 2010, accumulating a deficit in just that one month of  $221 billion. In comparison, the deficit for February 2009 was $194 billion.  Year on year, the February deficit grew by 14%. No doubt, the Obama administration is spending and borrowing at a record pace, in order to put as much of a dent as possible in America’s staggering unemployment number before the midterm election in November. Thus, short term political expediency is given a higher priority than the long term fiscal health of the nation.

The massive U.S. government deficits are not only a function of rapacious federal spending, but also a reflection of plummeting revenues. In the year to date corporate tax receipts were $45.4 billion, compared to $52.8 billion during  the same period in FY 2009, while individual income tax receipts declined by 14%. Where does this end? Bar an economic miracle leading to instant double-digit real growth, fiscal doomsday lies before us, as policymakers in the United States and other advanced economies sail on at flank speed towards the mother of all sovereign debt crises.

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Economic and financial history seems to be repeating itself, in an utterly surreal example of hubris and mockery. When residential real estate prices in the U.S. began collapsing and the sub-prime mortgage market imploded, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his then sidekick, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, boasted that their brilliant intervention had “contained” the crisis, preventing it from spreading into the broader American economy. Well, in hindsight, they were partially right. The sub-prime debacle did quite spread, or rather only spread, to the wider U.S. economy. It merely metastasized across the world, bringing about the global economic crisis. It now appears that the head of the International Monetary Fund is doing the same thing.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the scandal-prone managing director of the IMF (he had previously been involved in a highly publicized intimate tryst with a female employee at the IMF, triggering a legal investigation into his conduct) has just offered his pontification on the potential systemic risks connected with the ongoing Greek public debt and deficit crisis. He told the news agency Reuters that “there was no reason to expect that Spain and Portugal will need external financial support to get to grips with their public debt.” The IMF boss, in essence, claims that the Greek debt crisis will not spread to other regions of the Eurozone experiencing high levels of public debt to GDP.

His calming words will probably fool few investors. Obviously, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has engaged in PR spin, as his attempts at downplaying the growing public debt to GDP ratios throughout the Eurozone and in the UK, not to mention the United States, are absurd beyond all measure. More importantly, he has illustrated  in his own uniquely obtuse fashion that the IMF is an increasingly irrelevant institution as the mounting public debt levels ensure that a massive sovereign debt crisis is ahead of us all.

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High noon in the high Arctic is fast approaching, as the people of Iceland get set to vote on March 6 in a national referendum on a plan to compensate the British and Dutch governments for their payments to deposits in their respective countries who lost money in the collapse of  Iceland’s banks. It was one of these banks, Landsbanki, which ran Icesave as an online bank that enticed foreign depositors by offering above market rates of interest on accounts. Under immense pressure from the UK and the Netherlands, the government in Reykjavik agreed to pay back more than $5 billion to the two governments, representing a significant part of Iceland’s GDP over several years.

Widespread disapproval of the agreement by the people of Iceland led the nation’s president to decide not to approve the agreement, but rather allow the people of Iceland to exercise their sovereign right on the fate of the Icesave agreement through a national referendum. Despite warnings of economic and financial isolation parallel with economic disintegration emanating from the Icelandic government and the UK and Dutch authorities, it seems almost certain that the Icesave agreement will be overwhelmingly repudiated by Iceland’s voters.

What is occurring in Iceland is noteworthy for the following reason: after politicians throughout the world have adopted the policy that taxpayers must bear the financial costs of failure in the private sector by so-called “too big to fail” businesses, for the first time an aroused citizenry is utilizing the ballot box to say to the policymakers: “Enough!”

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In 1953, manufacturing comprised 28.3 % of America’s total economic output. This was a postwar high, capping the immense industrial build-up that occurred during World War II, when the United States became the world’s “arsenal of democracy.” The industrial might of America and her massive manufacturing base is what ultimately led the USA out of the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the once might American industrial capacity has been allowed to wither on the vine, as a new elite engineered the rise of the financial sector as America’s most significant economic field. In the interim, U.S. industrial plants have been “outsourced,” that euphemism for the nation’s deindustrialization. By 2006, just prior to the onset of the Great Recession and global economic crisis, manufacturing represented only 12% of America’s GDP.

Financial engineering has replaced industrial engineering in the United States, while the government proportion of the total economy surges simultaneously with the shrinkage in manufacturing capacity. The very nature of the taxpayer funded automobile manufacturers’ bailout, involving the government subsidized downsizing of the industry, is a metaphor for the apparently irreversible decline of the once-mighty manufacturing and industrial behemoth that existed in America.

According to the elites running America’s economic policymaking, it makes sense to accumulate massive public debt  to save the financiers and Wall Street bankers from their own costly mistakes, while ignoring the decline and fall of the U.S. industrial empire. I believe history will render a most harsh and unforgiving verdict on this myopic and irrational policy of economic suicide.

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Just over a year ago, simultaneously with the implosion of Lehman Brothers, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department decided not to let American International Group  fail, no matter the cost. That bill has been heavy; $182.3 billion of U.S. taxpayers money has been injected into AIG to ensure its survival amidst massive losses on its London-based credit default swap business. Each and every citizen of the United States has been billed more than $600 to cover AIG’s losses. In effect, the Fed and U.S. Treasury have used the zombie-like subsidized life support of AIG as a pass-though, transferring billions of dollars to investment and foreign banks. The largest recipient of American taxpayers money transferred through AIG was Goldman Sachs, which received a $12.9 billion payoff, which seems to have gone straight into bonuses for its senior executives. Was it mere coincidence that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein sat in on a meeting with Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson to decide on the scope of the taxpayer’s subsidy to AIG?

The Fed and Treasury, which decided on their own to effect a bailout of AIG without any input or sanction from Congress and the American people, have assured us that their infallible judgement can be relied on to make the correct decision for the U.S. taxpayers. Well, that “infallible” decision-making has left the American people tied ball and chain to a private corporate entity that is still losing vast amounts of money. AIG has recently reported its Q4 results: a loss of $8.9 billion. This may be a sign of more red ink to come, as the global economic recovery falters amid mounting concern over high unemployment and sovereign debt crises. AIG apparently is not done as a costly financial liability for the citizens of the United States, despite the fact that not a single one of them had the opportunity to vote in favor of this hideously expensive experiment in corporate socialism.

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The British pound sank like a stone as the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, issued a grim warning during testimony before the UK Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee. The central fiscal problem is the £178 billion annual deficit incurred by Gordon Brown’s government in the midst of the global economic crisis.

Mervyn King indicated that the Bank of England will have to continue with quantitative easing in the face of the massive government deficits, sending negative signals to investors as to the stability of the nation’s currency. He warned that both the current government, and a likely new government to succeed Brown after the next British general election, must send a clear message to the markets that they have a credible plan to significantly reduce the nation’s fiscal deficits.

I think the current breed of politicians, in the UK and elsewhere, haven’t a clue how to address the massive, unsustainable deficits that plague virtually every major and advanced economy. Which means that it is only a matter of time before the UK, and then the US, follow in the footsteps of Greece down the road of national insolvency.

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A highly tangible outcome of the global economic crisis and its first stage, the so-called Great Recession, has been the deleveraging underway by households and businesses throughout major advanced economies. In the United States and United Kingdom, consumers who boosted consumption on the basis of easy credit as opposed to higher disposable incomes are now tightening their belts and battening down the hatches. The predictable result has been a decline in aggregate demand. This is where the neo-Keynesians enter the fray, preaching the gospel of mega-deficit spending by governments.

The classical economic theory as developed by John Maynard Keynes holds that in times of severe economic contraction in the private economy, it is permissible for the sovereign to go into debt and increase spending to compensate for the falloff in consumer and other private sector expenditures. The rationale is that this short-term increase in the public debt will retard the rise in unemployment, limit the impact and duration of the economic recession and in the long run lead to overall better economic performance, with limited effect on the ratio of public debt to GDP. Though advocates and opponents can offer differing views on the historical validity of Keynes and his counter-cyclical concepts of sovereign  intervention in the economy, there is no doubt that his theory is intellectually cogent and based on a serious analysis of economic problems, particularly in regards to the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, is the current wave of unprecedented sovereign indebtedness equally cogent? If John Maynard Keynes were still alive, he would likely take issue with the massive tidal wave of red ink being unleashed by politicians as their antidote to the global economic crisis.

Though John Maynard Keynes is portrayed as a deficit-loving interventionist, in reality he was not. What is left out of the description of his theory in regards to counter-cyclical fiscal policy is that Keynes also believed that in times of relative prosperity sovereigns should create budget surpluses. He belief was that booms and busts were an integral characteristic of modern capitalism, and that  the accumulation of reserves during times of plenty would enable governments to engage in temporary deficit spending to combat a severe recession, without creating the long-term danger of exploding national debt to GDP ratios. This is an aspect of Keynes’s views on fiscal policy that has been conveniently forgotten by the modern interpreters of Keynesian economics.

Since World War II, the U.S. has seldom run balanced budgets. If generally accepted accounting principles were applied to official U.S. federal government budget reports, which require taking into account future liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, then during this period the United States has always run large fiscal deficits, even during times of relative economic prosperity. What this means in reality is that the conditions laid out by John Maynard Keynes for allowing a sovereign to engage in deficit spending during a recession, namely building budget surpluses during periods of economic expansion, have never been adhered to.

During the Great Depression,  the U.S. government did engage in substantial deficit spending within the framework of the New Deal, but with a ratio to GDP far lower than what is currently occurring on President Obama’s watch. This fiscal policy was engaged in with a cumulative national debt to GDP ratio nowhere near the current level, and with a large base of domestic savers prepared to buy U.S. government debt, in contrast with the present day reliance on foreign buyers of U.S. Treasury Bills.

If John Maynard Keynes were alive today, I suspect he would be horrified at the manner in which his economic theories have been distorted, and the likely outcome of such fiscal profligacy.

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Thomas Hoenig, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, has issued a stark warning regarding the ballooning U.S. federal government annual deficit and cumulative national debt. Hoenig told  the Pew-Peterson Commission on Budget Reform that massive deficits being  projected by the Obama administration would endanger the Fed’s ability to fulfill its mandate of maintaining stable economic growth and price stability.

“Without pre-emptive action, the U.S. risks its next crisis,” stated Hoenig. What this senior Federal Reserve official is saying, on the public record, is that the current U.S. fiscal policies are unsustainable, and unless halted and reversed in short order, will precipitate a hyper-inflationary depression.

Paul Revere has spoken. But who is listening? Certainly not the economic policymakers in Washington DC, who believe only small countries like Greece can face national insolvency. Sooner then they can imagine, they will receive an education  which unfortunately will cost their countrymen dear.

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In my book, “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015: Recession Into Depression,” I project that a growing sovereign fiscal crisis will transform the current Great Recession into a synchronized global depression. The events currently transpiring in the Eurozone are early indicators that my forecast is on track.
 
At the recent summit of European Union leaders in Brussels, which included the head of the European Central Bank, the PR spin doctors released what can best be described as ambiguity in the form of a communiqué, offering unspecified assurances that the Eurozone’s major actors will not permit Greece to succumb to its current sovereign debt crisis. The hope was that the markets would buy this assurance, thus preventing a further slide in the euro.

Not only are the markets, at least terms of the euro’s relative value, not being reassured by the happy talk that emanated out of Brussels; upon his return to Athens, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou  was harshly critical at the lukewarm words of EU reassurance. He said, “in the battle against the impressions and the psychology of the market, it was at the very least timid, ” in referring to the EU communiqué.

The bottom line is that without a massive bailout by the big guns in the Eurozone, in particular Germany and France, Greece faces fiscal collapse, which in turn will prove destructive to the whole Eurozone. However, if indeed Greece is bailed out, a host of other insolvent EU members using the euro will be lining up for their bailouts. Even ignoring the feelings of the German and French taxpayers (which is not politically tenable) there simply is not fiscal capacity within the Eurozone to backstop the other potential sovereign basket cases.

I foresee no possible scenario that allows for a soft landing from this escalating sovereign fiscal and debt crisis.

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