The financial markets have taken the world economy hostage. This has presented the world’s central banks with a dilemma. They fear the consequences of paying off those responsible for the mess. But they cannot let hundreds of millions of innocents suffer. Last week’s announcement of the first US monthly fall in employment for four years has made a cut in interest rates from the Federal Reserve this month a virtual certainty. So act it will. But making the right decisions is going to be hard.

Martin Feldstein of Harvard university put the case for big cuts in a powerful summing up at this year’s Jackson Hole monetary conference. He argued that the US housing sector was at the heart of three interrelated events. First was “a sharp decline in house prices and the related fall in home-building that could lead to an economy-wide recession”. Second was “a subprime mortgage problem that has triggered a substantial widening of all credit spreads and the freezing of much of the credit markets”. The third was “a decline in home equity loans and mortgage refinancing that could cause greater declines in consumer spending”.

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We are living through the first crisis of our brave new world of securitised financial markets. It is too early to tell how economically important this upheaval will prove. But nobody can doubt its significance for the financial system. Its origins lie with credit expansion and financial innovation in the US itself. It cannot be blamed on “crony capitalism” in peripheral economies, but rather on irresponsibility in the core of the world economy.

What has happened raises important questions. Here are seven.

First, why did this crisis start in the US? The answer is: “The borrowing, stupid”. Default on debt – actual and feared – always drives big financial crises because creditors think that they ought to be repaid. US households were the world economy’s most important net borrowers in the mid-2000s, replacing the emerging markets of the 1990s.

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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. The one last Wednesday showing Christopher Dodd, chairman of the US senate’s banking committee, flanked by Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, governor of the Federal Reserve, was such a picture. This showed Mr Bernanke as a performer in a political circus. Mr Dodd even announced Mr Bernanke’s policies: the latter had, said Mr Dodd, told him he would use “all the tools” at his disposal to contain market turmoil and prevent it from damaging the economy. The Fed has its orders: save Main Street and rescue Wall Street.

Such panic-driven politicisation is almost certain to lead to both overreaction and the creation of bad precedents. What then would be the right response to this latest scrape that supposedly sophisticated financial markets have fallen into?

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By Lawrence Summers

Over the past 20 years major financial disruptions have taken place roughly every three years, starting with the 1987 stock market crash; the Savings & Loans collapse and credit crunch of the early 1990s; the 1994 Mexican crisis; the Asian financial crises of 1997 with the Russian and Long-Term Capital Management events of 1998; the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000; the potential disruptions of the payments system after the events of September 11 2001 and the deflationary scare in the credit markets in 2002 after the collapse of Enron.

This record suggests that by 2007 the world had been overdue a major disruption. Sure enough the problems of subprime mortgages – initially seen as a confined issue – went systemic as the market began to doubt the creditworthiness of even the strongest institutions and rushed to buy US Treasury debt. Financial crises differ in detail but, just as there are plot cycles common to literary tragedies, they follow a common arc.

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Fast growth, huge current account “imbalances”, low real interest rates and risk spreads, subdued inflation and easy access to finance characterise the world economy. Is this party about to end? Probably not. But to identify the risks we must first decide what drives the strange world economy we see around us.

The two interesting alternative explanations are the “savings glut” and the “money glut”. Both share common themes: globalisation; the revolution in finance; the rise of China; low inflation; and macroeconomic stability. Beyond this, however, they diverge. In particular, they reverse the role of victim and villain: in the savings-glut story, the thrifty are the villains and profligate the victims; in the money-glut story, it is the other way round. This is a contemporary version of the old Keynesian versus monetarist dispute.

The “savings glut” hypothesis is associated with Ben Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve. But the idea was floated earlier by others. Brian Reading, of Lombard Street Research, lays out the line of argument in a recent note*. A substantial excess of savings over investment has emerged, he says, predominantly in China and Japan and the oil exporters (see chart). This has led to low global real interest rates and huge capital flows towards the world’s most creditworthy and willing borrowers, above all, US households. The short-term effect is an appreciation of real exchange rates and soaring current account deficits in destination countries. To sustain output in line with potential, domestic demand in those countries must also be substantially higher than gross domestic product. A country must choose fiscal and monetary policies that bring this result about.

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Is the market turbulence of the last week telling us something or is it no more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Some analysts are prepared not only to explain day-to-day movements in markets, but to predict them. I am neither clever enough for the former, nor rash enough for the latter. I am prepared, however, to make four statements: first, a period of market volatility is welcome; second, core equity markets do look overvalued; third, that this does not appear to be the case is due to the extraordinary condition of the world economy; finally, the big question is how long those conditions will endure.

Any long period of market stability encourages speculation. Taken to excess, such risk-taking, particularly when fuelled by huge amounts of borrowing, can create significant instability. At a time when asset markets are generally buoyant and risk premiums low, the need for a reminder of riskiness is valuable. It is far better, as natives of San Francisco must know, to suffer a series of mini-earthquakes than a long period of calm, followed by a huge one. Similarly, euphoria in markets is dangerous. From time to time it needs to be punctured, before bubbles reach the proportions seen in Japanese markets in 1990 and US markets in 2000.

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The barbarians are again at the gates. The announcement this week of the largest ever private equity buy-out of a public company – the $45bn takeover of TXU, one of the largest utilities in the US, by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific Group – confirms the trend. To its defenders, private equity makes companies more efficient. To its attackers, its practitioners are financial manipulators and asset-strippers. So who is right? An obvious answer is that private equity is a growing activity in which willing sellers meet willing buyers. If it prospers, it must be profitable. If it is profitable, it should also be adding value. Where private equity finances start-ups or small and medium-sized companies, few would question this argument. The taking private of well-known public companies with huge numbers of employees is a different matter. Why, though, should the benefits of such deals be doubted? Do they not also fall under the broad category of beneficial transactions? To this there are three answers. The remainder of Martin Wolf’s column can be read here (FT.com subscribers only). Discussion from our guest economists is free.

By Lawrence Summers The new year will begin with the greatest divergence for a generation between the general view of global risks as reflected by conventional wisdom and the risks as priced in financial markets. While the commentariat has been more alarmed about the state of the world than global markets for some years, the gap increased in 2006 as markets became more serene and everyone else grew more anxious. The headlines and opinion writers focus on how the US is badly bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; on an increasingly unstable Middle East and dangerous energy dependence; on nuclear proliferation that has already occurred in North Korea and that is coming in Iran; on the potential weakness of lame-duck political leaders in the US and other major democracies; on record global trade imbalances and rising protectionist pressures; on increased levels of public and private sector borrowing combined with record low saving in the US; on falling home prices and middle class economic insecurity. At the same time, financial markets are pricing in an expectation of tranquility as far as the eye can see. Stock prices in the US are at all-time highs. The risk premiums to cover the possibility of default that corporations or developing countries have to pay to borrow money are at or near historic lows. In addition, estimates of the volatility of the stock, bond and foreign exchange markets inferred from the prices of options are near record lows. Why the divergence between the headlines and the markets? Will the journalists or the investors be proved right about the state of the world? Or will the divergence continue? (more…)