Global Economic Crisis

Canada’s Budgetary Officer, known as the PBO, recently  released a report that stated that unless major fiscal consolidation occurs in government spending, deficits at a high level are projected to continue until at least 2070. That is, high deficit spending is baked into the cake for the next half-century. That projection excluded likely future scenarios such as more pandemics, natural disasters and military conflict, not to mention internal issues. It is a dystopian prediction for government spending, and it is unsustainable.

The PBO projection for government spending is a mirror image that can be applied to every economy on the glove, in particular all the G7 countries.

No nation is as entrapped in high deficit spending to as a high degree as the United States. When the U.S. briefly went into budgetary surpluses in the latter years of the Clinton administration, the incoming George W. Bush presidency swiftly headed back into deficit spending due to the enactment of major tax reductions , particularly those affecting higher income earners. The rationale? The Vice President , Dick Cheney, told the GOP, supposedly the party of fiscal conservatism, that former president Ronald Reagan had “proved” that fiscal deficits “don’t matter.”

However, the low to mid single digit proportion of GDP reflected by the size of deficits has now morphed into  high single digits and even double digit fractions of national GDP since politicians throughout the world opened the spigot of sovereign debt spending, abetted by the near-zero interest policies of central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve.

In the current fiscal year, the United States  federal government has generated  $3.1 trillion dollars in revenue and $5.3 trillion in spending, resulting in  a deficit of $2.2 trillion.  The current national debt has skyrocketed past $28 trillion. This figure represents  130 % of America’s GDP. By way of comparison, in 2001, only twenty years ago, the U.S. national debt was $5.8 trillion, and represented 55 % of GDP.

The trajectory regarding America’s-and many other nation’s-government spending  patterns are clearly and inalterably headed in the wrong direction. This cannot be sustained indefinitely. Already, inflation is raising its ugly head as a form of stealth taxation. At some point, probably when central bank are compelled by inflationary pressures to significantly raise interest rates, the whole illusory edifice will implode.

Sheldon Filger-blogger for GlobalEconomicCrisis.com

In March 2020 the U.S. Federal Government posted a deficit of $119 billion, reflecting the already profligate spending of Washington pre-pandemic. One year later, with President Biden going literally for broke, Covid related federal spending  pushed government outlays to $927 billion, with receipts of only $268 billion, leaving a record deficit for March 2021 of $ 660 billion.

Not during Franklin Roosevelt’s Great Depression era  New Deal program, or the massive stimulus budget of the Obama administration in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis has there been such dizzying levels of federal spending. The  deficits incurred by Washington are fully matched by state governments, as well as sovereigns throughout the world.

Despite the record  price levels on equity markets and particularly on Wall Street, there are worrying signs of approaching inflation. As this blog has warned before, significantly higher rates of inflation will compel the Federal Reserve to abandon its near-zero interest rate policy. Once interest rates rise to anything approaching normal levels, debt servicing costs for Washington will balloon to an unsustainable level.

Sheldon Filger-blogger for GlobalEconomicCrisis.com

As the coronavirus ravages our planet, decimating economies large and small in its wake, it distinguishes itself from the 2007-09 global financial crisis in this way: it is an economic disaster brought on by a health crisis, as opposed to the GFC, where economies were harmed by a major financial crisis. However, this distinction will soon vanish, for the following reasons.

The enforced shutdown of the global economy created by the health response to the Covid-19 panic has led to massive spikes in unemployment, at a faster pace than even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while businesses large and small are shuttered, severely constricting activity, while households are on the verge of insolvency. To prevent complete economic and societal collapse, sovereigns have launched emergency stimulus measures, at unprecedented levels of deficit spending, typically in the range of 10 to 15 % of GDP, as in the United States with Congress recently passing a 2 trillion dollar stimulus bill (representing ten percent of pre-crisis GDP).

However, with millions of workers now jobless and corporate activity at a near standstill, tax revenue from personal and corporate income, as well as capital gains, will shrink precipitously.

Before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the U.S. economy, supposedly operating at its best level of performance, and with unemployment at a record low, was still requiring an annual budget deficit of one trillion dollars to fund federal government operating costs. Factoring everything we now know, the actual U.S. government deficit for the current fiscal year will be substantially higher than 20 %.

Should large developed economies such as the United States run annual deficits in the range of 20 percent of a shrinking GDP, notwithstanding debt monetization by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, a sovereign debt crisis of unparalleled dimensions will complement the Covid-19 pandemic in its negative impact on the global economy, and endure long after a vaccine is developed for coronavirus.

The increasingly likely sovereign debt crisis makes it more certain that the global economic crisis will not only be long-lasting, but will manifest the characteristics of an economic depression as opposed to a less virulent recession. Furthermore, long-term monetary measures a sovereign debt crisis will compel policymakers to implement will heighten the risk of severe global inflation, leading to a period of prolonged stagflation.

A global panic by policy makers has been in overdrive since the initial financial crisis brought the world’s credit markets to the brink of total meltdown. Staggering sums of money that boggle the human imagination are being heaved at the global crisis. With a fully-fledged global economic crisis now underway, the spigot of debt-driven cash is flowing out of governments like Niagara Falls. The most conspicuous example is the Obama stimulus package, now in preparation for rapid passage once the 44^th U.S. President is sworn in. The planned American stimulus package alone may top one trillion dollars over two years. This comes on top of the $700 billion TARP program of Hank Paulson infamy, now conceded by many economists to have been a poorly conceived boondoggle.

The global public square is being told that this massive amount of money must be spent, or the world economy will fall into even worse distress. Conveniently being veiled is the inconvenient fact that these monstrously large expenditures must be made with borrowed money, as many nations, especially the United States, have treasuries that have long been laid bare by accumulated deficit spending.

Even economists who are convinced that huge amounts of deficit spending must be tolerated to salvage the global economy are aware that the “medicine” may be the harbinger of its own financial disease. Consider what Nouriel Roubini, the “prophet of doom,” told BusinessWeek in a recent interview about the U.S. stimulus spending:

“…the cost of issuing a huge amount of public debt will be trillion-dollar budget deficits this year and next, which eventually is going to have a crowding-out effect on private demand. So either we issue a huge amount of public debt to finance it, and that’s going to push up interest rates, or we print a lot of money that eventually is going to be inflationary and again damaging to the economy. We have no choice but to have an aggressive policy response, but it’s not a free lunch.”

Not a free lunch, states Roubini, a reality that policymakers are hiding from their publics. These, the very same mediocre political leaders who facilitated the global economic crisis, surrendering to the “logic” of the unregulated market place. What does “no free lunch” mean?

The United States is currently broke, from a fiscal standpoint. The trillions of dollars in excess expenditures being planned by the policy makers will inevitably require massive borrowing, at a time when foreign countries whose credit markets the American authorities depend on will be doing their own stimulus deficit spending. The only way the U.S. will be able to attract foreign credit in this context is through much higher interest rates. This will kill private borrowing, stifling investment and ultimately defeating the purpose of the stimulus spending. The other alternative is to simply print the money, and produce the hyper-inflationary hell that now exists in Zimbabwe.

Virtually every serious economist agrees that massive deficit spending in the United States by both the public and private sector was the driver of the global economic crisis. Strange that the identical prescription that led to this disaster is now being advertised as the cure.

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.