Stephen Roach, Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the bank’s former chief economist, answers questions.
How should capitalism evolve to create a sustainable economy and limit the occurrence of boom and busts and asset bubbles, while at the same time creating opportunities and incentives for innovation and wealth creation?
Stephen Roach: The demise of capitalism is greatly exaggerated. As the free-enterprise system survived the Great Depression of the 1930s, I have little doubt it will reinvent itself and endure the current crisis. Yet we can and must do much better in making market-based capitalism a safer, more stable and sustainable system. There has been a major systemic failure of the model that has held the world together since the 1930s.
Governance, or the lack thereof both within the private sector as well as by those charged with regulation and oversight proved to be the weak link in the chain. As a first priority, that shortcoming now needs to be addressed head on.
In one key respect, that is already happening: Wall Street is being turned inside out right before our eyes. But the new post-crisis regime must also include a revamped code of governance not just regulatory streamlining and reform but also the hardwiring of financial stability into the policy mandates of central banks.
Independent central banks that operate apolitically and free of ideology could well be the most important stewards of a post-crisis capitalism. But they can’t do it alone. Only through better discipline and more effective governance of regulators, rating agencies, and the political oversight function, can the invisible hand of Adam Smith start to work its magic once again.
How should global imbalances, the savings glut in the U.S. funded by China and Japan, be addressed?
SR: The theory is simple: spenders need to start saving and savers need to start spending. Easier said than done, of course. Execution is the problem for a world that simply doesn’t seem to have the appetite, i.e., political will, for the heavy lifting of global rebalancing.
Significantly, powerful market forces have already sparked the early stages of an endogenous rebalancing. In the US, the simultaneous bursting of property, equity, and credit bubbles is forcing households to shift from asset-based saving strategies back to income-based saving strategies. The ageing of 77 million US baby boomers, the first of whom started retiring last year, underscores the urgency of this adjustment, as a large generation of Americans now comes face to face with the imperatives of retirement security.
In China, a massive external demand shock has brought its export-led growth strategy into serious question. If a multi-year compression in US consumer spending growth leads to a protracted slowing in the growth of China’s external markets, Chinese policymakers will have no other choice than to accelerate the transition to a more balanced, and increasingly consumer-led, growth.
Critical in this regard is for China finally to put in place policies that will expand its social safety net, especially social security, private pensions, unemployment insurance, and public support to education and healthcare.
The United States is adding to its already great national debt to fight the recession. Should the US enact laws now, which state that we will raise taxes and cut spending in the future to guarantee that we will stand behind our national debt and prevent catastrophe, e.g. increased interest rates if our debt is considered worthless or has reduced credit worthiness?
SR: The good news is that the coming explosion of federal debt starts from a relatively low base, just 40 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008. The bad news is that open-ended deficit spending seems likely to take the debt-to-GDP ratio toward 60 per cent by 2013 and to over 100 per cent by 2022.
The real problem is the lack of a credible exit strategy from fiscal and monetary stimulus, alike. Post bubble economies are very fragile and not easy to wean from the life support of fiscal and monetary accommodation. Just ask Japan. Twenty years after the bursting of its big bubbles, public sector debt-to-GDP is nearly 150 per cent and the Bank of Japan’s zero interest rate policy is celebrating its 10th anniversary.
While I am not worried about a debt default of the United States government, I am very sympathetic to your suggestion that we codify an exit strategy to the massive fiscal expansion now under way. Toward that end, I believe that the Congress and the White House should collectively declare a formal fiscal emergency and empower a bi-partisan task force to develop new guidelines for federal budgetary control.
Washington did this once before in an effort to contain the runaway budget deficits of the Reagan era, deficits that now look like child’s play when compared with what lies ahead. The automatic spending caps and sequestration mechanisms prescribed by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 succeeded in taking some of the optionality out of the fiscal debate.
This problem is too big and the long-term stakes are too high for fiscal sustainability to be entrusted to the oft-politicised whims of the year-by-year discretionary budgeting process.
Given the balance sheet repair needed by the Western consumers, do you see Asia growing at all over the next two years? And more specifically, is there any way that China can juice its economy now that global demand has evaporated?
SR: In light of prospects for a multi-year compression of US consumer demand growth, together with persistent sluggishness of private consumption in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere in the developed world, there can be no mistaking the challenges faced by export-led Developing Asia.
Those challenges are all the more acute in light of Asia’s sharply increased dependence on exports. Over the past decade-plus, the export share of Developing Asia’s GDP went from about 36 per cent in 1997-98 to fully 47 per cent by 2007. This strategy worked brilliantly while global trade was booming. But now that this boom has gone bust, Asia has been hit extremely hard leaving it with no choice other than to come up with a new growth strategy.
The answer for Asia is obvious, to embark on the heavy lifting of structural rebalancing and stimulate internal private consumption. Nowhere is that more evident than in China, where the private consumption share has fallen to a record low of about 36 per cent of its GDP.
In the meantime, Developing Asia will still grow, driven by ongoing infrastructure-led investment and less than optimal growth in personal consumption. I suspect the growth rate for the region over the next few years will average only around 5 per cent about half the pre-crisis norms and not strong enough to prevent unemployment from rising further. For a region that has long worried about social instability, this is a disconcerting outcome, to say the least. It underscores the critical imperatives of Asian rebalancing.
What is the likelihood of Anglo-Saxon-style capitalism morphing toward a more state-involved Chinese approach, along with more draconian penalties for moral lapses?
SR: Your point is provocative and well taken, but I just can’t get on board this ideological spin to the twists and turns of a post-crisis capitalism. The history of capitalism is very much a continuum of tough tests. Yet in the end, it is a system with strong survival instincts, one that periodically reinvents itself. Financial panics, periodic recessions, and even the Great Depression are all part of the stress testing that has long shaped the rough and tumble evolution of market-based capitalism.
Notwithstanding the claims of a sensationalist media, the scale of state-directed intervention in America’s privately-held corporations remains relatively small.
According to US Commerce Department statistics, the value added by banks, securities firms, and other financial intermediaries collectively accounted for 6.2 per cent of the private sector’s gross domestic product in 2007; the insurance sector made up another 2.8 per cent, whereas the share going to motor vehicles manufacturers was just 0.8 per cent.
Private employment shares of these newly protected industries are even smaller, 5.3 per cent for finance and insurance and just 0.7 per cent for motor vehicles.
These figures provide an outside estimate of the US government’s recent intervention share of around 6-10 per cent in the private economy. That means, of course, that more than 90 per cent of the private sector in the United States is still operating largely as a free-enterprise system. That is not exactly consistent with the widely popularised image of a bail-out nation that has been offered up to depict a US economy in chaos and a market-based system on the brink of collapse.
Still, there is good reason to be concerned about the implications of these recent interventions. Emergency government investments in privately-held companies, capital injections as well as backstop financing, have become an all-too-frequent outgrowth of what started out as a mere sub-prime crisis. At the same time, compensation caps, home mortgage foreclosure mitigation efforts, and politically-engineered consumer lending programs all smack of a quasi-socialisation of American finance.
Add to that, Washington’s new-found aggression on trade policy, “buy America” government procurement policies, along with Chinese currency bashing and it seems as if the US strain of capitalism is being turned inside out. The US body politic is rushing headlong toward a very slippery slope!
The intro asks what is to be done to restore ”faith” in the free market. Is anyone using reason to re-examine free-market ideology itself, or considering the possibility that free markets might be less lethal if they were a little less free?
SR: The current mess is deeply rooted in an ideological approach to economic governance, namely, America’s recent penchant for market libertarianism. Alan Greenspan, the high priest of this approach, framed most of the Federal Reserve’s critical policy choices in the context of this ideology.
As seen through this lens, asset bubbles were not judged to represent a dangerous build-up of speculative excesses instead, they were repeatedly perceived by Greenspan as outgrowths of America’s thriving free enterprise system. The equity bubble of the late 1990s was justified by the breathtaking acclaim accorded to IT-enabled, productivity-led advances of a New Economy.
Property bubbles were presumed to be local, not national, especially in an era of rising homeownership at the lower or subprime end of the income distribution. And the credit bubble, together with the risk bubble it spawned, was offered as testament to the genius of financial innovation and American creativity. Market libertarians simply looked the other way as the US lurched recklessly from bubble to bubble.
Bubbles, of course, are always based on a shred of truth. But the post-bubble wreckage of the US economy begs for a very different interpretation than that which became conventional wisdom over the past decade. So, too, does the Fed’s blatant abrogation of its regulatory responsibilities during the Greenspan years.
Nowhere was that more apparent than in the central bank’s failure to make the distinction between financial engineering and financial innovation. Far from playing the widely popularised role as the ultimate shock absorber, the originate and distribute hallmark of the derivatives explosion became a lethal transmission mechanism of cross-border and cross-product shocks.
Ideology blinded America’s central bank, as well as its political overseers, to the imperatives of discipline. That same ideology let an unregulated and increasingly unstable free-enterprise system veer unnecessarily out of control. I don’t think that markets have to be any less free, as you suggest.
We just need to be more vigilant in attending to their potential for instability and in recognising the repercussions such destabilising adjustments can have on increasingly asset-dependent real economies. Market risk must be taken far more seriously by the Authorities in the future.
Some form of regulation is undoubtedly needed, but it can sometimes be counter-productive, merely adding layers of costs and giving more business to corporate lawyers and auditors. Sarbanes-Oxley is a perfect example of this form of regulation. In light of such issues, what in your opinion is the ideal form of regulation, and do you foresee a return to Glass-Steagall?
SR: While I agree that misplaced regulation can be counter-productive, I also believe that our system of self-regulation failed miserably in an increasingly complex and globalised economy. An important corollary of this failure is the dangerous and destabilising implications of bubble-dependent economic growth.
We must be very careful, however, in rushing to judgment in designing a new regulatory approach in this post-bubble era. The search for scapegoats can become an obsession; in effect, a lightning rod for national angst. But scapegoating can play an even more destructive role as it can bias and eventually undermine the re-regulatory fix that invariably follows any crisis.
Therein lies one of the greatest potential pitfalls in the post-crisis backlash of 2009. Wall Street has been singled out as the villain in this crisis. On one level, this is understandable. Financial service firms did make many serious and regretful mistakes from faulty risk management models and perverse incentive systems to misguided business strategies and momentum-driven capital deployment. But they were hardly alone.
The modern US financial system has long been under the purview of an institutionalised network of checks and balances controlled by regulators, a politically-independent central bank, and congressional oversight. Rating agencies were empowered as the arbiters of risk assessment. Yet every single one of those safeguards failed to temper the systemic problems that were building for years in the Era of Excess.
The task ahead is to pick up the pieces, learn the lessons of this crisis, and take actions to insure these types of problems never occur again. The post-crisis fix can succeed only if it is grounded in the premise of shared responsibility. A targeted politicised fix is not a solution to a systemic problem. Fix the system that gave rise to the crisis not just the banks that have defined ground zero of a wrenching credit crunch.
It is hard to know where the re-regulatory fix will end up. I would not be surprised if new Glass-Steagall-like regulations were enacted in order to shield the credit intermediation function from riskier activities. Moreover, a much broader umbrella is likely, covering banks and non-bank financial institutions, alike.
In the face of government picking winners and losers both of businesses and individuals have we had a free market in reality during the last 40 years? Isn’t it correct to state that what we have had is a hybrid economic system that depended on government manipulation of the financial system to exist?
SR: To the contrary. During the Era of Excess, market libertarians were in charge, embracing a regime of self-regulation and unbridled free-market capitalism. Led by Alan Greenspan, there was very little of the manipulation you seem to believe in.
Those days appear to be over at least for the time being. With many of the once proud icons of Corporate America now on the skids, emergency government intervention has become the norm in this crisis. That is closer to the hybrid system that you seem to be alluding to. As I noted above, the real trick will be to wean the patient from the life support measures of such interventions without triggering a relapse.
To what extent might governments try to influence the business strategies of the financial institutions, which agreed to state aid?
SR: That is a little close to home. The words “might” and “try” should be stricken as this train has already left the station. The feeding frenzy of US Congressional bonus bashing has taken on a life of its own with extreme “clawback” legislation having already passed the House of Representatives and now working its way through the Senate.
If signed into law, these draconian measures would severely impact talent retention, as well as the willingness of any financial institution to accept government “assistance” in the future. Your choice of the word “influence” is a massive understatement of the destructive intent of America’s increasingly vengeful body politic.
Personally, I am sickened by the hypocrisy of the blame game that has been spawned by this wrenching crisis, a politically inspired witch-hunt that has now singled out Wall Street as the villain in this mess. While our industry is hardly blameless for developments that gave rise to the so-called sub-prime crisis, it is dead wrong to lay it all on Wall Street.
Yes, we made many serious mistakes from faulty risk management models and perverse incentive systems to misguided business strategies and momentum-driven capital deployment. I personally have great regret for these errors, honest mistakes that were made by a few but with implications for far too many.
But the verdict must be rendered in context. Governance of the modern US financial system has long been relegated to an institutionalised network of checks and balances, controlled by regulators, a politically-independent central bank, and congressional oversight. Rating agencies were empowered as the arbiters of risk assessment.
Yet every single one of those safeguards failed to temper the systemic problems that were building for years in the Era of Excess. In short, the system failed. And in this new era of responsibility, as President Obama calls it, all of us must accept shared responsibility for that, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.
America’s politicians, the stewards of a system that went to excess, apparently can’t stomach the possibility that they, too, played an important role in shaping the endgame. They prefer, instead, to opt for the blame game, in particular, singling out Wall Street as the major culprit in this devastating crisis.
Focusing on the fall guy deflects attention away from the tough choices that ultimately must be made by elected leaders to avoid the repetition of a crisis like this in the future. Never mind the hypocrisy. It is as if the people’s representatives were innocent passengers on a runaway train.
The blame game is the darkest side of any crisis. The search for scapegoats often becomes an obsession, in effect, a lightning rod for national angst. And it brings out the very worst in an otherwise great nation. Accountability is, indeed, a critical issue in any post-crisis debate. But it must be adjudicated objectively and fairly.
Capitalism is failed in the form it is in and will fail again. If the only target of a system is to accumulate wealth for the minority, it is a worthless system. What do think about the ideas of Mahammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank?
SR: I stand by what I said above. The failure is not capitalism but the system of governance or should I say, the non-governance of self-regulation, that was put in place to manage the capitalist system. Fix that, and capitalism will be fine.
No one could reasonably have expected the boards of directors of major financial institutions to foresee the devastation caused by the financial crisis, but was it not reasonable to expect them to be much more effective in forcing their chief executives to protect against the demise of their banks? If not, what real value can boards play in a governance system if they cannot be relied on to do the right thing when it is most critical?
SR: It is premature to judge the most critical failures in the system of corporate governance that guided financial institutions into the eye of this storm. Was it directors, senior managements, risk managers, credit departments, incentive systems or a lethal interplay between all of the above?
Or was it a siloed decision making process and a related failure to communicate effectively across these different constituencies? Getting to the bottom of these concerns is an urgent matter for every financial services firm.
But there is a very human piece to this sad tale, as well. Call it greed, blind greed, for that matter. Like it or not, booms, artificial or real, distort incentives. Booms also warp values and blind us to downside risks. And denial, that most powerful of human defenses, leads us to dismiss the tough questions that might draw the staying power of a boom into question.
In the now-ended boom, there was everything to gain from keeping the magic alive. And much to lose by drawing it all into question. But it wasn’t just Boards of Directors that failed. It was the American body politic – from Wall Street to Main Street to Washington that was consumed by the hopes and dreams of a bubble-induced boom.
As long as the music kept playing, went the painfully accurate metaphor, no one wanted to stop dancing. We even found heroes to worship: Alan Greenspan, anointed as the Maestro, knighted by the Queen, lionised by US Congress, and yet derelict in his responsibilities as a tough and disciplined central banker was the champion of the Era of Excess.
In the end, the ultimate seduction came from the appearance of unbridled wealth accumulation, soaring stock prices, surging home values, and the ultimate in retirement security. But it wasn’t just us. The rest of the world was delighted to go along for the ride, especially export-led developing economies whose newfound prosperity was built on selling anything and everything to over-extended American consumers. Literally, no one, not even you guys in Shanghai, Peter, wanted this party to end.
If the core reason for the current financial crisis was the failure of the American consumer to save, how will policies designed to simulate spending massively at a time when the consumers’ financial position is even more precarious be conducive to the long term change in behaviour needed to really solve this crisis?
SR: There is enormous push-back to my pro-saving prescription for a saving-short US economy. “America needs to spend,” is the increasingly desperate cry of the born-again Keynesians steeped in fear of the dreaded “Paradox of Thrift.” Greg, you have your finger on one of the biggest issues of this crisis: do we want to go back to the failed macro of bubble-and debt-driven consumption that got us into this mess, or do we have the guts to try and break the mold of years of excess?
The answer is clear to me: the US needs to shift its growth dynamic away from excess consumption and de-minimus saving toward enhanced saving and increased investment. The surplus savers of the world need to do the opposite. To do this, we need to rethink our views on the “paradox of thrift”, viewing this phenomenon in the context of an open global economy rather than something as seen through the lens of a closed domestic economy.
I am not suggesting that the world boost its saving rate. What I am suggesting is a critical shift in the mix of global saving with the US doing more of it and Asia doing less of it. As Developing Asia moves to more of a consumption-driven economy, its currencies should also appreciate, allowing the US dollar to work its way lower and helping American boost its export competitiveness.
If the Obama Administration delivers on other aspects of its competitiveness agenda, namely, infrastructure, educational and healthcare reforms, and energy independence, the excesses of bubble-dependent consumption growth should give way to increasing support from export-led growth.
If, however, the US backtracks and goes back to the well for another dose of excess consumption growth, imbalances will only build again, culminating in an even more treacherous endgame. The ever-expedient quick fix must be avoided at all costs. It is a recipe for disaster.
What would be the very first sign that you will be looking for to tell you that this crisis has come to an end and recovery should begin soon? Do you think there will be a long gap between the end of this crisis and the start of recovery?
SR: I wish it were that easy, one magical indicator turns and the end would finally be in sight. This is a lethal and very complex crisis, with many moving parts. The first stage was the credit market contagion that started with the bursting of the subprime bubble in the summer of 2007 and then spread like wildfire in a cross-product contagion that engulfed the remainder of the capital markets.
Moreover, courtesy of the “originate and distribute” technology of the derivatives explosion, toxic instruments found their way all over the world. This interplay between cross-product and cross-border contagion has created a crisis of truly epic proportions.
The second stage of this crisis is the impact of the capital markets contagion on the real side of asset-dependent economies. The asset-dependent American consumer has been first to tumble. But quick to follow has been export-led economies elsewhere in the world – especially in Asia, Europe, and now Latin America. The decoupling dream was just that – actually a bad dream, bordering on a nightmare.
The third stage of this crisis involves the adverse feedback loop between a deteriorating real business cycle and the loan quality of the same financial institutions that bore the brunt of the credit market contagion in the first stage. That stage is now unfolding with a vengeance. Unfortunately, these stages tend to feed on each other – creating the true vicious circle that is exceedingly difficult to break.
Politicians, policymakers, media pundits, and many business leaders have argued for quite some time that this is mainly a crisis of confidence. If only we all just started smiling more and spinning the good news, then the vicious circle would magically turn virtuous and the worst would be over. As I said, I wish it were that easy.
What will be the global consequences of the Fed’s decision to buy US government bonds and bad bank debt on such a massive scale? Will we see hyper-inflation in the US, and will the creditor nations in Asia now want to stop lending them money? What strategic opportunities/risks do you see as a result of this situation?
SR: For a world in recession, the immediate impact of Helicopter Ben’s unconventional monetary easing is not nearly as problematic as you seem to imply. Given the slack in the global economy, together with its still massive imbalances, it is highly unlikely that inflation will spontaneously ignite or that the world will stage a buying protest against dollar-denominated assets.
Keep in mind that trend growth in the world economy has been about 3.7 per cent per annum over the past 35 years. That means if global GDP contracts by over 1 per cent this year as many, myself included, now suspect, such an outcome will open up about a five percentage point gap relative to the global economy’s longer-term growth potential. Given the multi-year sluggishness I envision, I suspect that the global output gap will expand further in the years immediately ahead, possibly peaking at around 7 per cent to 10 per cent of world GDP.
Such a huge global output gap implies a lingering risk of deflation rather than the immediate risk of an outbreak of inflation. If, however, the gap starts to narrow and the Authorities have been unable to develop effective and credible exit strategies for their massive monetary and fiscal stimulus campaigns, then there will be good reason to worry about inflation. Those worries are distant, however, at least three years, and maybe even five years out in time.
In the meantime, I doubt if the export-dependent surplus savers in Asia would stop lending capital to the US. If they did, their currencies would appreciate, undermining their export competitiveness and thereby threatening a key source of their economic growth.
However, if Asia is successful in migrating to more of a consumption-dependent growth strategy, it will start to absorb its surplus saving and have less capital to send to the US. And then, Asians can truly afford to be far more demanding in seeking better terms on dollar-denominated assets. Doesn’t sound very symbiotic to me.
If banks are too big to fail, too important to our economy, are they not also too important to be owned and managed by capitalists alone? How can we have smart and well-paid bankers and traders make the right decisions for the long-run benefit of their organisations, and not just churn and burn for short-term bonuses?
SR: Having worked for one firm on Wall Street for over 26 years, I am obviously biased in attempting to answer this critical question. But I believe very strongly that financial institutions are too important to be turned back into state-owned public utilities. In an era of globalisation and interdependent markets, financial intermediation and capital allocation have taken on new dimensions of complexity and risk. These are critically important functions in any economy’s quest for prosperity.
Alas, as we have painfully learned, that quest can cut both ways. That provides one of the most important lessons for the financial services industry, the need to redress the asymmetries of reward and compensation. Remuneration, in my view, can no longer be paid out on a point-of-sale basis. It must be aligned with the longer-term risk-adjusted returns of individuals and their companies. Only then, can we avoid the distorted incentives that encouraged short-term payouts from bubble-driven momentum in trading and banking activities.
Of course, in the Era of Excess, we ended up with a very different system. The profusion of bubbles distorted everything, from the financial system to the real economy. If we do a better job in containing the excesses of asset and credit bubbles in the future, I think we will go a long way in establishing a stable and secure market structure that will force the financial services industry to adopt a more reasonable and equitable system of incentives and rewards.
This critical adjustment can not be taken for granted. The trick will come in aligning a new financial system with the industry’s contribution to broader measures of national prosperity. That is a very contentious point.
Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker put it all too well in an April 2008 speech to The Economic Club of New York when he said, “It is hard to argue that the new (financial) system has brought exceptional benefits to the economy generally. Economic growth and productivity over the last 25 years has been comparable to that of the 1950s and 60s, but in the earlier years the prosperity was more widely shared.” Volcker concluded that. “The bright new financial system, for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards, has failed the test of the market place.”
If the next financial system fails the Volcker-like test of the market place, its rewards, or lack thereof, should be aligned with its failed returns. If, however, the outcome is more favorable, remuneration to its workforce, and presumably to its shareholders, should follow. This is the crux of the challenge for our industry and for those charged with its governance. It is an especially critical challenge for the central bank, an institution, which owes its very existence to the crises of yesteryear.
The role of the central bank is, in fact, testament to one of capitalism’s most important covenants, that finance cannot be entrusted to self-regulation. That is the most painful flaw of the Greenspan era. Never again should we let ideology guide central banking and its regulatory responsibilities.
Central banks need new mandates that explicitly tie their policy targets to the requirement of containing the excesses of asset bubbles and the severe economic distortions they spawn. Then, and only then, can the new financial system be on much sounder footing than the old one. But that’s not to say that we in the industry shouldn’t take a long and hard look in the mirror before we embark on our own Herculean task of attempting to rebuild a failed financial system.
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