Global Economic Crisis

Nouriel Roubini is known as “Dr. Doom” for his earlier predictions that a housing bubble in the United States would lead to disaster for the international financial and banking system. Roubini, Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University and also Chairman of RGE Monitor, an economic and financial consultancy, was proven correct. Now he is considered the wisest sage on the future course of the Global Economic Crisis. His latest prediction will not lighten the hearts of investors.

In a recent article, Roubini stated that “the worst is still ahead of us. In the next few months, the macroeconomic news and earnings/profits reports from around the world will be much worse than expected, putting further downward pressure on prices of risky assets, because equity analysts are still deluding themselves that the economic contraction will be mild and short.”

Nouriel Roubini adds that the credit crisis will grow worse, pointing to a grim year ahead for global financial markets. He suggests in his article that “2009 will be a painful year of global recession and further financial stresses, losses, and bankruptcies. Only aggressive, coordinated, and effective policy actions by advanced and emerging-market countries can ensure that the global economy recovers in 2010, rather than entering a more protracted period of economic stagnation.”

While Roubini has thus far avoided using the term “Great Depression” to describe what he thinks may happen, it is clear that the world’s top economist on forecasting the Global Economic Crisis sees no grounds for optimism. His sobering assessment of what lies ahead for 2009 makes clear that a catastrophic year ahead awaits the global economy. He warns that the severe deflation now threatening will nullify monetary policy as a means of addressing the economic crisis, further enhancing the grave danger of a liquidity trap.

According to the most recent data, Japan’s industrial production dropped by more than 8 % in November from the previous month. This is the steepest one-month decline in Japanese industrial output on record, and is directly related to the demand destruction resulting from the global economic crisis. Japan’s economy is largely based on export-driven manufacturing, so the latest economic data indicates that worldwide demand for Japanese manufactured products is dropping like a lead stone.

Japanese automakers are among the major producers that have seen a sharp decline in orders for their products from overseas customers, especially in the United Sates. Many analysts and economists are issuing dire forecasts that the Japanese economy, highly dependent on export-driven trade, will contract sharply as the Global Economic Crisis grows more severe

“Production is falling off a cliff,” said Naoki Iizuka, a senior economist in a statement to the Reuters news agency. “The Japanese economy is unlikely to bottom out until October-December next year as output is expected to remain very weak until then,” he added, reflecting the gloomy cloud now hanging over the world’s second largest economy.

When the global financial crisis first arose, leading to a worldwide credit crunch, it became apparent that the economic policies of George W. Bush would be the defining issue of the 2008 presidential campaign, spelling doom for the Republican nominee. When the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, proclaimed that the economic fundamentals of the U.S. were sound, he insured that Barack Obama would win the election and become the 44^th president of the United States. In fact, the fundamentals of the American economy are as feeble as were those of the Soviet Union before it collapsed.

Barack Obama is a very intelligent politician, and is already being compared to President Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the New Deal economic policies of the 1930s in the depths of the Great Depression. However, Barack Obama may also be compared to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the once-mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Gorbachev, like Obama, is a highly intelligent man. He was selected by the Soviet elite as their last-ditch candidate to save the crumbling Soviet Union. In spite of his best efforts, he failed. The economy of the Soviet Union imploded, leading to the total disintegration of the Soviet State, which once was deemed an equal superpower rival to the United States of America. Will Obama’s fate be that of Franklin Roosevelt, or Mikhail Gorbachev? There are disturbing parallels between the United States of 2009 and the Soviet Union in its last years of existence. These may prove more relevant than the comparisons some American economists are trying to draw between Obama’s and Roosevelt’s America.

Consider the following: prior to its extinction, the Soviet Union was driven to bankruptcy by bloated military expenditures, exacerbated by a losing war in Afghanistan. Its economy was immune to reform due to the tyranny of central planners. In the America that gave birth to the global financial crisis and credit crunch, the government’s finances have been driven to the brink of bankruptcy by vastly excessive military expenditures, run amok by a losing war in Afghanistan and an unnecessary war in Iraq. Its economy, supposedly a paean of free-market flexibility, has now proven to be a myth constructed by the financial alchemists of Wall Street and pseudo central-planners of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department. Just as the Soviet Union used tax-payer money to bail out failed industries, the United States through its Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank have deemed failed financial enterprises “too big to fail,” warranting hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit borrowing that tax payers are responsible for in an equally futile rescue bid.

Obama, like Gorbachev, will be tied to an elite that has a vested stake in salvaging a doomed system, even at the risk of national insolvency. If Barack Obama has the intellectual stamina to resist the American financial elite and recognize that the Global Economic Crisis calls for a total restructuring of the economic order of the United States, he will go down in history as the president that saved America’s economy and preserved its status as the dominant economic power in the world. If, however, he is unable to unshackle himself from the failed policies of the American financial elite, he will be doomed to share the fate of Mikhail Gorbachev as that of being a valiant failure.

The weakness with all these arguments is that those advocating them have tried to construct an economic rescue paradigm based on 1929 and its aftermath. While some parallels between the current Global Economic Crisis and Great Depression no doubt exist, every epoch in history, including economic crises, have their own unique reality. What may or may not have worked in the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal is not necessarily analogous to the prescription required for the current economic emergency confronting the United States.

The years leading up to the collapse of the world financial system and current global economic crisis were ones of unprecedented deficit spending by the U.S. government. Under President Bush, taxes for the most affluent Americans were slashed while government spending across the board, but especially in the military sphere, skyrocketed. The result was that even before massive governmental spending was initiated, as the economic crisis became more acute, Bush’s economic policy had already in place budgetary practices in the category of major fiscal stimulus. The fact that the national debt of the United States doubled from $5 trillion to nearly $10 trillion before the onset of the global financial crisis is a reflection of that fiscal reality.

Economists rightly point to the demand destruction that is crippling the world economy. In the United States this has had a severe impact, considering that more than 70 % of America’s GDP is derived from consumer spending. Accordingly, in this time of economic crisis, the government must substitute for the downfall in retail and business activity by regenerating demand in the economy. However, replicating the fiscal and monetary indiscipline of the past 8 years will only lay the seeds for far worse financial turmoil. There is another alternative for policy makers to consider, which offers a structural as opposed to a Band-Aid cure for the global economic crisis, especially in its impact on the American economy.

If the incoming Obama administration were to reverse the massive increases in military spending undertaken by George W. Bush, several hundred billion dollars a year can be redirected from unneeded defense department allocations to the civilian economy, including funding for massive infrastructure projects. Since the staggering increases in military spending are premised on the threat posed by one enemy, a non-state actor called Al-Qaeda, a fundamental question must be answered by the incoming Obama administration: what poses the greatest risk to America’s national security- a non-state actor with a few thousand adherents, or a global economic crisis that threatens to bankrupt the United States, and destroy its economic power, which is the basis of its military power? It may very well be that redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars from expensive new weapons systems that may be unnecessary for the defense of the nation to the civilian economy will be a sounder approach to financing a major economic stimulus program than continuing to add to the indebtedness of the national economy.

Contrary to the image politicians and critics have created regarding GM, Ford and Chrysler, all three have sharply reduced their payrolls, while increasing productivity through enhanced use of robotics in manufacturing. While the domestic manufacturers are criticized for producing fuel wasting SUVs, the critics conveniently ignore the fact that supposedly more professionally managed foreign rivals, including Toyota, Honda and Nissan have also introduced large SUVs. BMW and Mercedes-Benz built assembly plants in the Southern United States for the sole purpose of building large, expensive luxury SUVs.

The primary reason why Detroit is facing extinction is the ongoing global economic crisis, which has created vast demand destruction throughout the consumer economy, especially regarding hard durable items such as cars. The concomitant world financial crisis has created a credit crunch that inhibits the ability of the big three American car producers to weather the impact of the global economic crisis until it has receded to the point where consumer demand for automobiles has sufficiently recovered.

The only government solution that would work would be to substitute for the demand destruction of the current economic crisis with hundreds of billions of dollars in direct purchases related to infrastructure. The precedent for this is World War II, when the U.S. government required the automakers to stop all civilian car manufacturing, while retooling to fill vast government orders for defense equipment. It was the direct government purchases from major American manufacturers, in particular the auto industry, which not only ended the Great Depression, but also led to the long-term ascendancy of the U.S. economy.

Anything short of a World War II style government mass purchasing program will doom the automobile industry to financial implosion, kept on life support only as long as the government is prepared to borrow money it cannot generate from current revenue. With the worsening global economic crisis, it is unlikely that perpetual government deficit spending to prop up failing industries is a sustainable economic model.

For both the auto industry and the U.S. economy in general, the outlook for 2009 is becoming increasingly dark and gloomy. Short of radical governmental intervention similar to what occurred during the Second World War, Detroit’s once-proud automobile industry may be fated to being the iconic casualty of the global economic crisis.

Though the New York stock market reacted in a celebratory way to the Fed issuing its effectively zero rate, more thoughtful observers are terrified. This is clearly another panicky response by the Fed, acting out of desperation rather than thoughtful analysis. If America through the Fed’s actions does indeed fall into a liquidity trap, the result will go beyond the severe recession already being forecasted. The likely result will be the protraction of the global economic crisis, with the U.S. economy crippled beyond the worst nightmares of even those predicting another Great Depression.

For the American economy, due to the Fed’s actions, the worst outcome possible is practically assured. The real tragedy is that the radical cuts in interest rates by the Fed under the reign of Alan Greenspan are now recognized as a cause of the mortgage meltdown that led to the current global economic crisis. For Ben Bernanke, current chairman of the Federal Reserve, to replicate his predecessor’s disastrous monetary policies is utterly inexplicable.

On December 11, 2008 the FBI arrested Bernard Madoff. He was charged with securities fraud, this coming on the heels of an admission, supposedly to his sons, that Madoff’s business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.” This is connected with an asset management component of his firm.

Contained in the criminal complaint is the allegation that investors lost a staggering $50 billion from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. After his arrest and booking, Madoff was released after posting $10 million in bail. If convicted, Madoff faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $5 million.

Amidst the raging global economic crisis, Madoff’s emergence reveals another dimension of danger to already shaken global financial markets. The current credit crunch is related to lack of trust and transparency, contributing to excess counter-party risk among banks and other financial institutions. The charges against Madoff, and the vast sums of vanished wealth that may be involved, will increase distrust regarding the already fragile hedge funds and their managers. It also raises the question: how many other schemes leading to vast degrees of wealth destruction are yet to be uncovered while the global economic crisis continues? Perhaps there are other Bernard Madoffs still to be uncovered, leading to further erosion of trust by investors big and small with the major financial institutions of the global economy.

America’s car industry is on the verge of extinction amidst the global economic crisis. The Senate tuned down a bill offering Detroit automakers a $14 billion dollar bridge loan. Now it is up to the Bush administration to grant the 3 domestic auto manufactures the money from its TARP fund for the temporary rescue of the Detroit automakers; TARP was originally set up by Congress to save the financial industry from the global economic crisis.

The downturn in the auto business is not only an American phenomenon. The global economic crisis has ravaged auto producers throughout the world. Among the major European car producers come warnings of a bleak and barren 2009. The indications are growing that the deepening crisis in the automobile sector is global, going beyond the American auto industry’s desperate life and death struggle.

Recently, the CEOs of Renault-Nissan and Fiat stated that the automobile markets would undergo sustained declines in 2009. This parallels the catastrophic sales declines that have pushed the American “Big Three,” Ford, GM and Chrysler, to beg for bailouts from the government. The global economic crisis is destroying demand for cars in virtually every market.

The world’s number one car company, Toyota Motor Corp, will be reporting a loss of about 100 billion-yen ($1.11 billion at current exchange) for October-March. This is according to Japanese media. If even Toyota is losing money and cutting automobile production, how many weaker car companies will become extinct during the global economic crisis? For the auto business, as with many other enterprises, the worst is yet to come as the global economic crisis picks up the pace of its destructive impact on the world economy and global financial system.

What began as a financial crisis in the U.S. housing and mortgage market has metastasized as a virulent global economic cancer. The U.S. economy is imploding, and taking down much of the world with it. In a tsunami of financial panic, central banks across the globe have been slashing interest rates to virtual zero, while simultaneously borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, which are being injected into failing banking systems.

With global financial arteries clogged, the economies of the planet are now cratering, with the United States economy in particular imploding at an alarming rate. A concrete example of this is the impending bankruptcy of the American automobile industry, which directly and indirectly represents the core of what is left of the domestic manufacturing industry in the United States. Ford, Chrysler and especially GM have told the U.S. government and its elected representatives in no uncertain terms that unless the government injects untold tens of billions of dollars into their virtually empty coffers, those companies will go bankrupt in a matter of months. GM has even indicated it could be forced to shut down within weeks.

With a federal budget deficit that has grown from the hundreds of billions to the trillions of dollars, where is the U.S. Treasury going to get these vast funds for the industrial bailout requests that are now piling on? Perhaps soon the retail sector of the American economy will be coming to Capital Hill, hat in hand. However, an infinite series of bailouts is not a solution to the global economic crisis.

The global economic crisis accelerated the US trade deficit, which rose in October by 1.1 percent to 57.2 billion dollars. The October results also showed that America’s trade gap with China had widened, according to U.S. government official figures.

The trade numbers caught economists and experts off guard, as they had forecasted a drop to $53.5 billion. Results show that the American trade deficit with China grew slightly to $27.9 billion in October from 27.8 billion dollars the previous month. The U.S. Commerce Department released the trade figures.

The trade results also show that total trade volume had fallen by 1.7 percent. Declines were registered in imports and exports, a manifestation of the growing impact of the global economic crisis in both the United States and throughout the world. October imports declined by 1.4 percent from September to 208.9 billion dollars. Exports also showed a decline, dropping 2.4 percent to 151.7 billion dollars.

The dismal trade figures highlighted the third straight month of a drop in both imports and exports. The Commerce Department numbers reflect a weakening in the performance of the U.S. economy simultaneously with a reduction of international trade. In the first ten months of 2008 the cumulative American trade deficit was a staggering $590.9 billion.