Ever wondered what the IMF would demand from Britain? Simon Johnson, the former IMF chief economist, offers a good guide to an organisation that “specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear”. His piece in the Atlantic runs through a typical IMF solution for the US, but most of the points apply to the UK too. Here’s the nub of his argument, which would be painful reading for Gordon Brown and “oligarchs” in the City.
Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.
Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington….
The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.
He goes on to recommend that the big banks that helped lead the economy to ruin are broken up.
The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.
Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.
If you want to see a critical response to the article, Dani Rodrik makes some convincing points.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
