By Martin Feldstein

The risk of a downward spiral of house prices is the primary danger facing the American economy. Because of the structure of securitised mortgage finance, this risk has the potential to cause a global financial crisis. Both of these problems will remain until a new policy brings stability to house prices.

The current decline of house prices is the natural result of the bubble that by 2006 had raised house prices to 60 per cent above their long-term trend. The sharp decline since then means that today’s prices are about 15 per cent above the trend level. But while a further 15 per cent decline may be inevitable, there is nothing to stop prices declining even further.

House prices that could overshoot by 60 per cent on the way up could also overshoot substantially on the way down. During the past 12 months, house prices across the nation fell by an average of 16 per cent. The large overhang of unsold homes continues to create pressure for further price declines. The record level of defaults and foreclosures continues to add to the stock of unsold homes. Potential house buyers who foresee continued foreclosures are reluctant to buy now because they anticipate future price declines.

A policy is needed that will permit the appropriate 15 per cent additional decline in house prices but end the risk of a further downward spiral. No such policy is now in place or on the legislative drawing board. The fear of continued mortgage defaults and house price declines is depressing the prices of mortgage-backed securities and of the derivative products based on them. This fall, in turn, is causing large losses at commercial banks and other financial institutions.

The remainder of this column can be read here.  Discussion from our forum members and contributors appears below.

By Lawrence Summers

With two wars still continuing and violence in Georgia dominating the foreign policy debate; and with the financial crisis and economic insecurity for families dominating the domestic debate, US international economic policy is receiving less attention in this presidential election year than usual. The limited attention it has received has focused on concerns about specific trade agreements, not broader questions of international strategy. That is unfortunate. The next administration faces the prospect of having to make the most consequential international economic policy choices in a generation at a time when the confidence of governments in free markets is being increasingly questioned.

The current distribution of regional economic power is unlike anything that was predicted even a decade ago. The rise of the developing world, its growing share in global output and far greater share of global growth, is perhaps a quantitative but not a qualitative surprise. The qualitative surprise is this: with almost all the industrial world in or near recession, much of the momentum in the global economy is coming from countries with authoritarian governments that are pursuing economic strategies directed towards wealth accumulation and building up geopolitical strength rather than improving living standards for their populations. China, where household consumption has now fallen below 40 per cent of its gross domestic product – which must be some kind of peacetime record – is the most extreme example. Similar tendencies, however, can be seen in other parts of Asia, Russia and other oil exporting countries.

Even before the slowdown in the industrial world, a striking feature of the global economy was the substantial net flow of capital from the emerging periphery to the industrial centre. Rising oil prices have geopolitical as well as economic consequences. The run-up in oil prices over the past year has generated more than $10bn (€6.8bn, £5.4bn) a week in extra revenues for Opec members. Asian export powers and oil exporters have enjoyed a vast accumulation of wealth, adding about $1,000bn a year in assets.

These shifts have affected almost every global economic issue. The pressure created by the investment of these surpluses was one of the big factors driving the excesses that preceded our financial problems. Concern about the flow of imports from countries that have pursued a strategy of export-led growth is a big reason for the protectionist backlash now being seen in the industrialised world. It is now recognised that meaningful efforts to address climate change require a framework that induces China and other emerging markets to co-operate.

It has become a cliché to suggest that the world’s institutional approaches to economic co-operation need overhauling to take into account the rising economic clout of emerging markets and the decline in dominance of the group of seven leading industrialised nations (G7). This is correct. The steps taken so far – the initiation of the G-20 during the 1990s and the adjustments of voting shares in international financial institutions – are valuable if insufficient. (more…)

by Pranab Bardhan

As the petro-authoritarianism of Russia flexes its muscles and the economic prowess of China struts in Olympic glory, developing countries in the world might start rethinking about the lectures on democracy and development they have heard all these years from the West. This is at a time when advanced capitalist democracies are reeling under the shock of unregulated financial overreach and years of living beyond their means, a far cry from the end-of-history triumphalism of capitalist democracy of less than two decades back.

The Chinese case in particular is reviving a hoary myth of how particularly in the initial stages of economic development authoritarianism delivers much more than democracy. This is also backed by the memory of impressive economic performance of other East Asian authoritarian regimes (like those in South Korea and Taiwan in the recent past). The lingering hope of democrats had been that as the middle classes prosper in these regimes, they then demand, and in the latter two cases got, the movement toward political democracy.

But the relationship between authoritarianism or democracy and development is not so simple. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s industrial democracies, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.

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by Mickey Levy

It is not just the rapid decline in home prices but the uncertainty about how much further they will fall that stands out as one of the largest negative factors hanging over the economy and financial markets. The current pace of adjustments suggests that uncertainty will begin to abate late this year and early 2009.

Falling home prices increase affordability and are necessary to reduce bloated inventories of houses for sale, but expectations that prices will fall further keeps potential buyers on the sidelines. And this same uncertainty creates havoc in financial markets by driving up credit losses and making it nearly impossible with any degree of reliability to value a sizeable portion of the over $10 trillion of mortgage securities held by banks, investment banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a wide array of global investors. This has plagued mortgage markets and pushed up mortgage rates even as the Federal Reserve has eased 325 basis points. A key channel through which the Fed’s monetary easing is supposed to stimulate the economy has been gummed up.

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By Jagdish Bhagwati

In the 1980s, Japan was feared in the US to be a lethal combination of Superman and the evil genius Lex Luthor in a classic case of what I have called the Diminished Giant Syndrome.

Members of Congress famously smashed a Toshiba radio cassette recorder on the steps of Capitol Hill in protest in 1987. Great Britain at the turn of the 19th century had been marked by similar diffidence, despair and recrimination when Germany and the US were emerging on the world scene. There, Sir Howard Vincent entered parliament festooned with mops, pails and brushes marked “Made in Germany”.

US hegemony survived the exaggerated threat from Japan. But the US is now once again a fearful giant. Many Americans see trade as a peril rather than an opportunity. This has turned the US from what the economist Charles Kindleberger famously called an “altruistic” hegemon into a “selfish” hegemon.

The remainder of this article can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.

by Raghuram Rajan

Many commentators are looking for an increase in domestic demand in emerging markets to compensate for the slowdown in the US. Indeed, domestic consumption is picking up in several countries including China, while governments in Asia and the Middle East are turning to neglected public investment. Yet years of strong growth and cutbacks in public investment, which have restored economic health to emerging markets, have also eaten up excess capacity. Any increase in domestic demand, if it is not to result in bottlenecks and even higher inflation, will have to be accompanied by a shift in production from an external focus to an internal focus. This means that emerging market currencies will have to appreciate, and the weight of output will shift from traded goods such as T-shirts and electronics to non-traded goods such as real estate and health services over the next few years.

A shift from an outward focus to an inward focus will have to be accompanied by much more institutional discipline. With fewer constraints on underlying inflation, emerging market central banks will have to be more careful in targeting low inflation, especially as exchange pegs become less viable. Labour markets will have to be more flexible, while product markets will have to be deregulated far more if profitable productive growth is sought in the non-traded goods sector. With more expenditure flowing to assets such as housing, the financial sector will have to be careful not to precipitate booms and busts, and this will mean more reform as well as better supervision. Finally, governments will have to meet the greater demand for public investment without eroding fiscal discipline, maintaining greater caution as the cushion of large foreign exchange reserves diminishes and increases their vulnerability.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.

As my colleague, Clive Crook, has already noted in his blog on several occasions, the journalist, Michael Kinsley, has started a conversation on “creative capitalism”, the controversial idea advanced by Bill Gates at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum last January. Michael was kind enough to invite me to contribute. In the end, most of what I wrote was about capitalism itself, rather than creative capitalism (whatever that may be).

My starting point was that one would not get very far in understanding how capitalism might be changed if one did not first understand what it was. In the end, I posted four pieces, which I hope will also be of some interest to readers of this forum. They are entitled “what makes profit-maximisation possible”, “what Bill Gates really means by creative capitalism”, “profit-maximisation as the sole goal of a corporation” and “corporate social confusion”. They can be found here.

By Barry Eichengreen  

One of the chief ways financial market participants make sense of events is by drawing parallels with the past. The subprime crisis, when it first erupted, was widely perceived as the most dangerous financial crisis since the 1930s. The implication was that it was critical to avoid the policy mistakes that transformed that earlier crisis into a macro­economic disaster. The lesson drawn was that it was important to avoid an excessively tight monetary policy.

Now, with inflation rising, the popular parallel is not the deflationary 1930s but the stagflationary 1970s. Again the implication is that it is important for policymakers to avoid past mistakes. In this case past mistakes mean a monetary policy that allows inflation expectations to become unanchored.

In fact both analogies are misleading, precisely because market participants and policymakers are aware of this history. Their awareness means that financial history never repeats itself in the same way. Biochemists can replicate their experiments because molecules do not learn. Central bankers lack this luxury.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.

By Jean Pisani-Ferry

As the collapse of the trade talks in Geneva in July made clear, there is no longer any meaningful trade negotiation without the main nations from the emerging world. The year 2008 may go down in history as the one in which rich countries discovered that this applies to macroeconomic policies, too.

In January it looked as if the opposite lessons could be drawn from events. For a while, Ben Bernanke at the US Federal Reserve and Jean-Claude Trichet at the European Central Bank seemed to be the only relevant policymakers in the world – and they were, as far as liquidity strains were concerned, if only because the US and Europe account for about two-thirds of the global supply of financial assets.

But as months went by, it became clear that countries affected by the shock represented merely a half of world gross domestic product, two-fifths of global energy demand and not even a third of world cereal consumption. Furthermore, rich countries have significantly less weight at the margin: their contribution to world growth is about half their share of world GDP, so one-quarter of the total, and the same rule of thumb applies even more to the demand for oil and foodstuffs. So in the market for scarce commodities, the effects of the slowdown in the US and Europe were offset by domestic booms in the emerging world.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Debate from our expert panel appears below.

By Niall Ferguson  

The phrase “perfect storm” has been trotted out once too often to characterise the past year’s financial crisis. Yet the real perfect storm may still lie ahead.

Fans of the George Clooney film will recall that the perfect storm was caused by the convergence of a hurricane off the Atlantic seaboard, an area of low pressure south of Nova Scotia and a cold front swooping down from Canada. Result: howling winds, vast waves and the loss of at least one boatload of Gloucester fishermen.

One year after the onset of the financial crisis we are still calling the “credit crunch”, could we be witnessing a similar catastrophic convergence, as the slow-moving hurricane of a US banking crisis hits first a commodity price rise and then a global slowdown?

The remainder of this article can be read here. Debate from our panel of economists appears below.