ft.com/crookblog

Apparently not.

The Inn Between’s waitress is busy delivering the lunch special of breaded chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans to a stream of customers who work at different places but all seem to know one another.

The banter is raucous and sustained, and when the conversation turns to a proposed federal bailout for U.S. automakers, there is little support for the idea.

“I don’t think they should bail them out because … obviously something’s not right in the way they’re running their business, and why should the American people have to bail them out if they can’t figure out how to do it right?” September Quinn, the busy waitress, said after the lunch rush at the Inn Between.

I attended the Cato Institute’s annual monetary conference. The Fed’s vice-chairman, Don Kohn, gave the keynote address, and used it to emphasise that the central bank would not let the economy fall into a deflationary spiral (speech; Krishna Guha’s report). The BLS released inflation figures for October, showing a seasonally adjusted drop in the CPI of 1 percent, the biggest since 1947. Even core inflation was negative last month. Stockmarkets crashed again. I suppose Cato should be congratulated on its timing.

Paul Collier’s well-received book, “The Bottom Billion“, advocated military intervention alongside economic aid to improve security and economic growth in some of the world’s poorest countries. Iraq notwithstanding, the idea has caught on in official development circles–rhetorically, at any rate. In this review essay, Bill Easterly is unimpressed. By the time his tanks have rolled through, not much of Collier’s thesis is left standing. Bill’s article is recommended reading not just as an attack on Collier but as a warning about the social-science method as applied to development more generally.

In fairness to Collier, it is very difficult to demonstrate causal effects with the kind of data we have available to us on civil wars and failing states. As Collier writes, “our model cannot be used for prediction.” In the research papers on which his book is based, Collier does give abundant caveats that show he understands the limits of correlations for inferring that actions cause outcomes. But the caveats are not as apparent in the book, and Collier does not explain to the reader just why he recommends precise actions so confidently on the basis of mere correlations.

Of course, governments take many actions even when social scientists are unable to establish that such actions will cause certain desirable outcomes. Presumably they use some kind of political judgment that is not based on statistical analysis. What is unusual about Collier’s book is that he seems to offer statistical analysis as a replacement for political judgment, or perhaps unintentionally gives scholarly cover for actions that governments want to take anyway. The press shows a certain reverence for social science work with statistics that can make this cover quite effective. The paradox is that many social scientists familiar with this kind of analysis do not share the press’s reverence.

The timing of China’s fiscal announcement this weekend is notable. It comes just ahead of the White House economic summit of G20 countries. As that meeting approaches, an outgoing US president, a not-yet-US-president, and a lame-duck US Congress are discussing a second stimulus plan costing maybe $100 billion to $200 billion–which might happen before the inauguration, or possibly not. Meanwhile China’s government stuns global markets by promising to inject nearly $600 billion of spending on infrastructure and social welfare this year and next. Supposing the US plan ends up providing $200 billion, that would be roughly 1.5 per cent of US GDP; $600 billion is roughly 15 per cent of China’s GDP. Remind me, which country is taking the lead in managing the global economy?

True, doubts surround the details of China’s proposal. It’s unclear how much of what they are proposing is really additional to existing plans. And of course the timing was not determined entirely by the approaching summit. Figures about to be released are expected to show a sharp deceleration in Chinese growth; announcing a big stimulus in anticipation of this makes sense domestically. Nonetheless, the new initiative–described by Chinese officials as “massive”–sure gives President Hu Jintao something talk about when he meets George Bush later this week. Up to now, the US and the West have been urging China to do more to help stabilise the world economy. Suddenly, China is setting the pace and it is the US and Europe that are dragging their feet. A sign of things to come?

While giving that some thought, here is some useful prep on the summit. Morris Goldstein at the Peterson Institute for International Economics reiterates his “ten-plus-ten” plan with characteristic force and clarity. And in a remarkable feat of timeliness, VoxEU publishes a collection of short and (putting China’s announcement to one side) bang up-to-date essays in an electronic volume edited by Barry Eichengreen and Richard Baldwin, “What G20 leaders must do to stabilise the economy and fix the financial system”. It includes fast accessible pieces by many of the best international-economics and finance scholars in the world, including Willem Buiter, Raghuram Rajan, Dani Rodrik, Michael Spence and others. By the way, my spirits lifted to see Dani, who is usually inclined to pick holes in the orthodox case for open markets on the grounds that it is all so complicated, propose these refreshingly simple-minded phrases for inclusion in the final communique:

The weeks and months ahead will be trying times for economic policymakers everywhere, as they try to contain the fallout for output and employment. Raising trade barriers against imports will be a temptation, especially when currencies fluctuate so much. But the experience with the Great Depression teaches us that this is the surest way to magnify the costs of the crisis, and to spread it to other countries. Hence the most serious challenge for the global trading regime at the present is to ensure that the financial and economic crisis does not lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism, greatly exacerbating the economic downturn.

So we jointly commit ourselves in public to not raising protectionist barriers in response to perceived threats to employment from imports. We further ask the secretariat of the World Trade Organisation to monitor and report unilateral changes in trade policy, with the purpose of “naming and shaming” G20 members that depart from this commitment.

In this article for National Journal, I look at the arguments for a second fiscal stimulus. In light of the most recent data another fiscal boost is needed, and it had better be big.

This week, we learned that consumer confidence crashed in October to its lowest level since records began more than 40 years ago. This is far more worrying than a run of bad days on Wall Street. So severe a collapse in confidence — forecasters had expected a big drop, but not this big — is invariably the leading edge of a major recession, and unless governments act promptly and wisely, maybe a very prolonged one as well.

Several interacting forces are pressing the economy down. First, the credit system is broken. Good corporate borrowers cannot get financing to make new investments, or in some cases even to cover their payrolls and stay in business. Households are finding it harder to get loans as well, which is holding back recovery in the housing market. The government’s $700 billion bailout was intended to preserve the flow of loans. Without it, things would be even worse, but the situation is still anything but normal. The Treasury Department is telling banks that they must lend, lend, lend; but they are weak, and a process of sudden “deleveraging” — a collectively self-defeating effort to avoid risk by curbing credit — cannot be easily switched off.

Second, households are adding up their net worth. Their homes are valued at much less than they were a year ago, and prices are still dropping. Their 401(k)s have fallen by a third or more. Jobs that might have looked safe even a month or two ago no longer do. People suddenly feel much more vulnerable. To repair some of the savings shortfall, they are spending less, causing sharply lower sales of inessential goods. This, of course, is putting many companies under extra pressure. As firms cut their profit forecasts — which they are now doing en masse — and start to lay off workers, consumers become even more worried, and try even harder to cut back. And so it goes.

On top of all this is the fog of uncertainty about where the economy is heading. Until recently, many consumers had been telling themselves that the economy and the stock market would bounce back. They seem to have changed their minds. The parallels with the 1930s that the Bush administration drew to win support for the bailout were hardly reassuring. And lately, economists have been striving to outdo each other in the gravity of their assessments. In the end, all of this alarm seeps through.

A depression like that of the 1930s seems, even now, so unlikely as to be almost impossible — but in itself this is not very reassuring. Unemployment reached 25 percent in 1933. With government spending now much higher as a share of national income than it was back then, and with Congress, the administration, and the Federal Reserve Board all set on acting promptly and at sufficient scale, it is hard to see how a similarly massive and sustained contraction could happen again.

But unemployment in double digits — say half of what it was in the 1930s — is by no means unimaginable. Even if we are not headed for another Great Depression, we could easily be heading for the worst recession that most Americans have ever experienced. In fact, we most likely are.

You can read the whole article here. (The link expires in two weeks.)

I’ve had a lot of emails about my piece on McCain’s failure to sell his main tax proposal–the refundable credit for health insurance. The article explained how the credit would leave most middle-income Americans paying less tax than under Obama’s plans. As it happens, taken together, I prefer Obama’s tax and health-care proposals to McCain’s: I think McCain’s health credit is good as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. Obama’s plan would expand coverage much more, and it seems to me that this should be a key goal. However, the fact remains that McCain’s plan would put more disposable income (net of taxes and health-care outlays) in the pockets of most middle-income voters.

Well, you would not guess this from the way the McCain campaign has dealt with the issue. Joe the Plumber and the preoccupation with Obama’s thinking on redistribution has clouded what surely ought to have been the main thing, from a tactical point of view. Anyway, as many have pointed out, we are all redistributionists in principle. Republicans too believe in spreading the wealth around. Is McCain planning to abolish the earned-income tax credit? Is he proposing a flat-rate income tax with no exemptions? It is a question of how far, not whether.

Many of the emails I received began, “You are just wrong,” and came from accounting firms, lawyers, and academics of one sort or another. I was initially disconcerted. What had I missed, I wondered? But no, it turns out, my correspondents had simply misunderstood McCain’s proposal in one way or another–and I don’t blame them for having done so. He is offering a refundable tax credit, not an ordinary credit (which can only be set against taxes owed) and not a deduction in taxable income (which would provide a much smaller tax saving); this credit would also be paid to people with employer-provided health insurance, not just to people who buy their own; and the existing payroll-tax exemption for health insurance would continue under the McCain plan (if this were abolished too, his plan would cut disposable income rather than increase it for many households). These were the most popular reasons for believing I was mistaken, and for maintaining that the Obama proposals would give middle-income households a bigger overall tax cut. Even sophisticated voters have failed to get the message: McCain is offering middle-income American a bigger tax cut than Obama.

Am I naive to suppose that this would have been a stronger selling-point than Joe the Plumber? Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to make sure this was understood?

Apologies: I jotted this down a few days ago and then forgot to post it. I’m blaming jet lag (see next post). Anyway, for the record…

What form will the backlash against lightly regulated capitalism take in the US? I ponder the question in this piece for the FT’s Analysis page:

Even before the worst financial crisis since the 1930s bore down on the US this summer, the country seemed poised for an ideological shift. The administration of President George W. Bush was immensely unpopular. Anti-trade and anti-business sentiment was on the rise and both main political parties, in different ways, were responding.

The technocratic market-friendly liberalism espoused by Bill Clinton and the New Democrats was already much less prominent in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As the country’s economic difficulties have worsened, the pro-market theme has not so much subsided as disappeared. Mr Obama now is far more likely to talk about the bankruptcy of “trickle-down economics” than the need for competition and incentives.

John McCain, the Republican candidate, has yielded nothing to his opponent in the stridency of his recent denunciations of “Wall Street greed”. The administration, meanwhile, has been forced to swallow what remained of its rhetorical commitment to market forces and deregulation with a $250bn bank recapitalisation – a plan that Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, described as “objectionable” but necessary.

Where might this lead? Does the present upheaval, as some have speculated, point to the end of a distinctively American capitalism? On the whole, this seems unlikely – though the pressures on “American exceptionalism” have rarely looked so strong.

Read on here.

My column for the FT this week (mentioned here two posts ago) states my own view on the implications of the financial crisis for the future of capitalism–namely, that the effects outside finance will be limited, and this is not the end of capitalism as we know it. Here are two other interesting and forcefully expressed opinions.

Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post thinks the game is up for “unregulated capitalism”:

In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone, wrote essays explaining why they were no longer communists. The essays were collected in a volume entitled “The God That Failed.”

Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism. The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there’s been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely.

What exactly do economic conservatives believe now that their god is dead? What’s become of the glories of privatized Social Security? Of the merits of 401(k)s vs. defined-benefit pensions?

No wonder we’ve seen a disoriented John McCain wandering the moors howling about Bill Ayers. What’s he supposed to do? Admit that the Reagan-Thatcher faith in unregulated capitalism, to which every GOP presidential candidate was pledging allegiance just last winter, has collapsed?

Interesting to see this dismiss the Clinton and Blair administrations as mere extensions of the Reagan-Thatcher order. Actually I agree with Meyerson about that: they were. But I thought that the Democratic narrative upholds the 1990s as an example of how good things can be when intelligent, well-meaning people are in charge. In other words, good government is more a question of competence and good faith than ideology. To abandon that line, you have to consign Clinton and Blair to the trash.

I was also a bit puzzled by this:

McCain and Barack Obama disagree sharply on the government’s role in bolstering the economy. Obama favors public outlays on alternative energy and education, which would not only create jobs but also make us more competitive globally.

What is this, “make us more competitive globally”? Surely that is the old, dead paradigm. Even as the piece reads its last rites, that Reagan-Thatcher way of thinking is stirring back to life. If you are going to dispense with market forces, I don’t think you can afford to care very much about staying competitive globally.

The other piece, much more to my own way of thinking, is by Simon Jenkins. For many years (outside the specialist domain of economic commentary) he has been my favourite  British pundit, and one of the two or three best I have come across anywhere. Rigorous, liberal (in the old-fashioned sense), open-minded and surprising. See what you think:

So this is to be Brown’s Falklands. Victory on Mount All-fall-down. Bonfire of the bonuses. Service in St Paul’s. March-past by the Royal Troop of Derivatives Traders. Anthem to the Bankers’ Brigade. Tomb of the Unknown Arbitrageur.

A fortnight is clearly a long time in ideology. What fun historians will have with October 2008. Do you remember the hoary old days when they let Lehmans go bankrupt and refused to guarantee bank deposits? Where were you when a governor of the Bank of England worried about inflation and something called moral hazard? How tables turn. Socialism is now cock of the walk, capitalism mugged by reality.

It is rubbish, total rubbish. Market failure has been compounded by brain failure of the discredited profession of economics, overwhelmed by journalistic wish-fulfilment and glee.

The banks have not been “nationalised”, just deluged with money. They remain pluralist and competitive institutions, with independent boards. Their workers are not civil servants. Investors retain their shares. The bonus culture will revive. The impresarios of greed have been punished, or at least a few of them. But this is not socialism in our time, just public money hurled at the face of capitalism.

Warmest congratulations to Paul Krugman on getting the Nobel prize. It was overdue (but then it usually is). I can’t think of an economist who could match him at extracting deep insight from simple, ingeniously specified models–again and again, one thought, why did nobody else see this?–or whose forthcoming academic papers would arouse such excitement. He can be an irascible fellow. He often finds it hard to respect people he disagrees with. I think he is much too quick to accuse people of bad faith. But his detractors should not deceive themselves: he is a kind of genius.

As I’ve mused before, it was a significant loss to economics when he put scholarly work to one side to make himself the scourge of the Bush administration, not to mention an affront to the principle of comparative advantage. Economists of his quality are much harder to find than angry pundits, however effective, and serve a greater social purpose. An enlightened central planner would never have allowed it.

At least we can be sure that the prize won’t go to Paul’s head. As he pointed out a while back, the Nobel is a second-class award, conferring less distinction than the Clark medal. (Paul won that 16 years ago.)

The stunning scale of the interventions under way in financial markets – barely imaginable just weeks ago – make it seem that nothing will ever be the same. A crisis so grave, so weighted with ideological implications, must point to a grand political realignment, with much of what we thought we knew about the role of governments and markets overthrown. So it is argued, and so many people hope.

It is possible. It happened after the Great Depression. But I doubt that this crisis will change the world anything like as profoundly. In the end, I doubt it will even overthrow much of the conventional wisdom about states and markets.

In thinking through the parallel with the 1930s, the important question is how far the financial emergency will infect the rest of the economy. The Depression changed the US and the world because it wrecked the lives of countless millions of people.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.