Month: October 2008

The fiscal policy response to the crisis

John Quiggin23 Comments

With the effective nationalisation of the banking system now accepted as necessary (Australia’s comprehensive guarantees amount to public assumption of the risks of ownership, and hopefully the fees to be paid by the banks will reflect this) attention has turned to the role of fiscal policy.

Getting fiscal policy right involves a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, there is the short-term need for stimulus. On the other hand, the combination of a large stimulus and a bailout/nationalisation package imply big deficits, which will have to be recouped in the future.

In the Australian context, the Opposition is calling for an immediate pension increase and the bringing forward of the next stage of tax cuts. That’s a plausible line, although other opportunities for stimulus through public expenditure need to be explored. But the obvious, though unstated, quid pro quo is that the ‘aspirational’ tax cuts proposed for the next Parliament should be taken off the table. It will take a long time to restore the budget balance after the kind of stimulus that is needed here.

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Now we're getting somewhere

John Quiggin33 Comments

The British government has abandoned proposals for non-voting preference shares and is moving towards full-scale nationalisation of the banking sector. According to the London Times(h/t Felix Salmon) the latest proposals would leave the government owning 70 per cent of Royal Bank of Scotland and 50 per cent of Halifax. The London stockmarket is likely to be closed, and it seems unlikely that many banks will remain private by the time it reopens. Presumably, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in deep strife, the US can’t be far behind, though Paulson is still talking nonsense about non-voting shares. Still, it’s only three weeks ago that he was opposing any kind of public equity, and only six weeks ago that he was claiming that there were no real problems.

As the Times says, no-one knows how much toxic sludge will turn up when the government finally gets access to the books, but it seems unlikely that most governments will be overwhelmed in the way that Iceland has been. The capacity of developed-country governments to raise additional revenue is huge, easily enough to cover trillions in bad debt over a few years. So, once the sector is nationalised it should be possible to get lending flowing again. And, the prospects for an orderly shutdown of the massively overgrown markets for derivatives like credit default swaps suddenly seem a lot better.

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A bad move

John Quiggin59 Comments

The Rudd government has made its first big mistake in handling the financial crisis. The just-announced proposal to guarantee bank accounts up to $20 000 is worse than useless. Given that lots of people hold more than $20 000 in individual bank accounts, they have an obvious incentive to diversify, which means large scale withdrawals. The possibility of this turning into a run is far from remote. Turnbull’s suggestion of $100 000 is better, but the only serious option is an unlimited guarantee.

Update Some good news on this. Once we have a guarantee of $100K or more in place, the extra liability associated with an unlimited guarantee will be modest, while the gain in simplicity will be substantial, and the argument for exercising direct control over bank lending will be unanswerable. Of course, as a colleague pointed out in the course of email discussions on this point, the real problem is the banks’ reliance on overseas borrowing. I’ll be discussing some proposals on this before too long I hope.

We are all socialists now

John Quiggin47 Comments

A couple of days ago, I thought my call for full-scale nationalisation of the banking sector would remain beyond the pale of political acceptability for at least a week. But in today’s paper I read the following, very sensible assessment

Inevitably, the US, Britain and Europe are going to end up with nationalised banking systems in one form or another, and with governments guaranteeing not only their deposits but probably all their liabilities. The nationalisation will be a temporary emergency measure. But for some time at least the systemically important banks effectively are going to be public utilities and must be regulated accordingly.

This taxpayer rescue of banking systems opens up a new and potentially very important avenue for unfreezing bank lending and restoring the flow of credit. If governments effectively control the banks, what is to stop them from demanding that they start lending again?

And what wild-eyed socialist wrote this? Alan Wood in the Australian.

Meanwhile, calls for a guarantee of bank deposits are gaining force.

Of course, none of this constitutes a shift to socialism in any meaningful sense of the term. But it does mean, for quite some time to come, the end of neoliberalism (or free-market liberalism or whatever you want to call the set of ideas centred on the proposition that markets can do a better job than governments in managing risks of all kinds). The question of what will replace neoliberalism has come up so suddenly, and in such chaotic circumstances, that no-one has a clear answer. I’m confident that the response must be broadly social democratic, but there are a lot of details that need to be filled in.

Note The spam filter has been rejecting comments because of the ci*lis problem in the post title. I’ve fixed that, but commenters will probably need to asterisk the S word (Soci*lism) to avoid the filter.

State capitalism on the instalment plan

John Quiggin67 Comments

With the financial meltdown accelerating in the wake of the US bailout, and the recognition that many more failing banks will have to be nationalized, the British government is moving to get ahead of the game by offering equity injections across the board. But already this seems inadequate. Now that the taboo on nationalization has been broken, wouldn’t it make better sense to for the UK (and others) to nationalize the whole sector? With full control, governments could then ensure the resumption of interbank lending at least among their own banks. This would provide a feasible basis for co-operative moves to re-establish international markets.

For this week at least, such an idea is beyond the range of political acceptability. But it’s striking to look back a month and realise that in that period the US government has become the main mortgage lender, the guarantor of the short term money market, the effective owner of the world’s largest insurance company, the potential future owner of much of the banking sector and now the purchaser of last resort for commercial paper. Since the reluctance of banks to buy commercial paper must reflect a significant probability of default, it seems inevitable that some of this commercial paper will end up being converted into claims on the assets of defaulting issuers, extending the scope of nationalisation beyond the finance sector and into business in general.

This kind of instalment-plan nationalisation seems to offer the worst of all worlds. At some point, a more systematic approach will have to be adopted, and given the rate at which markets are plummeting, the sooner that point comes the better. This isn’t the return of socialism, but it certainly looks like the end of the kind of financial capitalism that has prevailed for the last few decades.