2011: Speculations from Delhi
By Shankar Acharya
What might 2011 hold for us? Given the intrinsic uncertainty about the future, the really honest answer would be: I don’t know. But that would be far too boring a response and, perhaps more to the point, would not fill a column. So, at the risk of looking foolish in a year’s time, here are some predictions for 2011.
By Kevin P Gallagher
Developing a sovereign debt crisis management regime should be at the top of the G20’s agenda.
As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff show in This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly banking crises are often followed by sovereign debt crises. Europe’s debt crisis might be topping the headlines now, but the problem won’t end here.
Reinhart and Rogoff find that the debt/GDP threshold where nations slip into crises has historically been 30-35 per cent of GDP. According to the World Bank more than 60, mostly developing, countries reached that threshold in 2008. A 2009 IMF report, which examined 71 low-income countries, suggested 28 of the poorest nations are at high risk of debt crises.
Anybody who looks carefully at the world economy will recognise that a degree of monetary and fiscal stimulus unprecedented in peacetime is all that is prodding it along, not only in high-income countries, but also in big emerging ones. The conventional wisdom is that it will also be possible to manage a smooth exit. Nothing seems less likely. So let us consider the endgame, instead.
The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.
So what did I make of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos? It felt like sitting at the bedside of somebody who had survived a heart attack but was unsure how long it would take to recover full vigour, if, indeed, he would at all. The mood of “Davos men” (yes, they mostly still are) was, as my colleague, Gideon Rachman, has pointed out, one of anxiety. Meanwhile, the participants in a still predominantly western meeting looked at the youthful vigour of emerging economies with admiration, envy and even fear.
For me, the highlight of the programme was the economic outlook session on Saturday.* This is not only because I was moderator. The starting point for the discussion was an obvious one: the policy interventions of late 2008 and 2009 have been a resounding success. The outcome has been a far briefer and shallower recession than most participants imagined a year ago. That is obvious from the successive consensus of forecasts for 2010. For almost every significant economy, the forecast for growth this year is higher than it was a year or even six months ago (see charts). The world economy survived the heart attack in the financial system.
The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.
The only truly global power was in rapid relative decline. Not long before, it had won a pyrrhic victory in a costly colonial war. New great powers were on the rise. An arms race was under way, as was competition for markets and resources in undeveloped areas of the world. Yet people still believed in the durability of the free trade and free capital flows that had nurtured prosperity and, many believed, had also underpinned peace.
That was how the world looked to many at the end of the “noughties” of the 20th century. Yet catastrophe lay ahead: a world war; a communist revolution; a Great Depression; fascism; and then another world war. The world order – built on competing great powers, imperialism and liberal markets – proved incapable of providing the public goods of peace and prosperity. It took calamity, the cold war and the replacement of the UK by the US as hegemonic power to re-establish stability. That then facilitated decolonisation, unprecedented economic expansion, the collapse of communism and yet another epoch of market-led global integration.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” as Mark Twain is supposed to have said. The noughties of the 21st century now have the same fin de regime feeling as those of a century ago. Then the US, Germany, Russia and Japan were on the rise; now it is China and India. Then it was the Boer war; now it is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was an arms race between Germany and the UK; now it is the military build-up in China. Then the protectionism of the US undermined liberal trade; now conflicts between the US and China undermine our ability to tackle climate change. Then the US was isolationist; now China and other rising powers demand untrammelled sovereignty.
The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.
From FT:
Time for the ECB to get serious about the overvalued euro – Willem Buiter
Why the euro is not the next global currency – Jean Pisani-Ferry and Adam Posen
Safe as houses – FT editorial on new mortgage regulation
From elsewhere:
The global crisis and central banks in Latin America: Breaking with the past – Luis I. Jácome H., VOXEU
The secret Paulson-Goldman meeting – Felix Salmon, Reuters
Why Is The Chamber Of Commerce Defending Big Banks? – Simon Johnson, Baseline Scenario
So Now We Know Why Lehman Went Under – Naked Capitalism
Is the current crisis a watershed, with market-led globalisation, financial capitalism and western domination on the one side and protectionism, regulation and Asian predominance on the other? Or will historians judge it, instead, as an event caused by fools, signifying little? My own guess is that it will end up in between. It is neither a Great Depression, because the policy response has been so determined, nor capitalism’s 1989.
Did the meeting of the Group of 20 in London last week put the world economy on the path of sustainable recovery? The answer is no. Such meetings cannot resolve fundamental disagreements over what has gone wrong and how to put it right. As a result, the world is on a path towards an unsustainable recovery, as I argued last week. An unsustainable recovery might be better than none, but it is not good enough.
The UK has followed the US and Japan into “unconventional monetary policy”. Meanwhile, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England warns the UK government of the dangers of further discretionary fiscal stimulus. Yet what are the implications of the policies followed by central banks? Are these not the big threat to monetary stability?
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