The bad idea contagion

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Great Recession of 2008 has morphed into the North Atlantic Recession: It is mainly Europe and the United States, not the major emerging markets, that have become mired in slow growth and high unemployment. And it is Europe and America that are marching, alone and together, to the denouement of a grand debacle. A busted bubble led to a massive Keynesian stimulus that averted a much deeper recession, but that also fueled substantial budget deficits. The response - massive spending cuts - ensures that unacceptably high levels of unemployment (a vast waste of resources and an oversupply of suffering) will continue, possibly for years.

The European Union has finally committed itself to helping its financially distressed members. It had no choice: With financial turmoil threatening to spread from small countries like Greece and Ireland to large ones like Italy and Spain, the euro's very survival was in growing jeopardy. Europe's leaders recognized that distressed countries' debts would become unmanageable unless their economies could grow, and that growth could not be achieved without assistance.

But, even as Europe's leaders promised that help was on the way, they doubled down on the belief that non-crisis countries must cut spending. The resulting austerity will hinder Europe's growth, and thus that of its most distressed economies: Nothing would help Greece more than robust growth in its trading partners. Low growth will hurt tax revenue, undermining the proclaimed goal of fiscal consolidation.

The discussions before the crisis illustrated how little had been done to repair economic fundamentals. The European Central Bank's (ECB's) vehement opposition to what is essential to all capitalist economies - the restructuring of failed or insolvent entities' debt - is evidence of the continuing fragility of the Western banking system.

The ECB argued that taxpayers should pick up the entire tab for Greece's bad sovereign debt, for fear that any private-sector involvement (PSI) would trigger a "credit event," which would force large payouts on credit-default swaps (CDSs), possibly fueling further financial turmoil. But, if that is a real fear for the ECB - if it is not merely acting on behalf of private lenders - surely it should have demanded that the banks have more capital.

Likewise, the ECB should have barred banks from the risky CDS market, where they are held hostage to rating agency decisions about what constitutes a "credit event." Indeed, one positive achievement by European leaders at the recent Brussels summit was to begin reining in both the ECB and the power of the American rating agencies.

Indeed, the most curious aspect of the ECB's position was its threat not to accept restructured government bonds as collateral if the rating agencies decided that the restructuring should be classified as a credit event. The whole point of restructuring was to discharge debt and make the remainder more manageable. If the bonds were acceptable as collateral before the restructuring, surely they were safer after the restructuring, and thus equally acceptable.

This episode serves as a reminder that central banks are political institutions, with a political agenda, and that independent central banks tend to be captured by the banks that they are supposed to regulate.

And matters are little better on the other side of the Atlantic. There, the extreme right threatened to shut down the U.S. government, confirming what game theory suggests: When those who are irrationally committed to destruction if they don't get their way confront rational individuals, the former prevail.

As a result, President Barack Obama acquiesced in an unbalanced debt-reduction strategy, with no tax increases - not even for the millionaires who have done so well during the past two decades, and not even by eliminating tax giveaways to oil companies, which undermine economic efficiency and contribute to environmental degradation.

Optimists argue that the short-run macroeconomic impact of the deal to raise America's debt ceiling and prevent sovereign default will be limited - roughly $25 billion in expenditure cuts in the coming year. But the payroll-tax cut (which put more than $100 billion into the pockets of ordinary Americans) was not renewed, and surely business, anticipating the contractionary effects down the line, will be even more reluctant to lend.

The end of the stimulus itself is contractionary. And, with housing prices continuing to fall, GDP growth faltering and unemployment remaining stubbornly high (one in six Americans who want a full-time job still can't get one), more stimulus, not austerity, is needed - for the sake of balancing the budget, as well. The single most important driver of deficit growth is weak tax revenues, owing to poor economic performance; the single best remedy would be to put America back to work. The recent debt deal is a move in the wrong direction.

There has been much concern about financial contagion between Europe and America. After all, America's financial mismanagement played an important role in triggering Europe's problems, and financial turmoil in Europe would not be good for the United States - especially given the fragility of the U.S. banking system and the continuing role it plays in non-transparent CDSs.

But the real problem stems from another form of contagion: Bad ideas move easily across borders, and misguided economic notions on both sides of the Atlantic have been reinforcing each other. The same will be true of the stagnation that those policies bring.

- The author is a professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics.

© 2011 Project Syndicate