Debt and Deleveraging: A Five-Pronged Solution By Mike "Mish" Shedlock Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Has the U.S. Overcome the Debt Crisis? Is There a Light at the End of the Tunnel Anywhere? Citing the latest report on "Debt and Deleveraging" by the McKinsey Global Institute, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard proclaims America overcomes the debt crisis as Britain sinks deeper into the swamp: Britain has sunk deeper into debt. Three years after bubble burst, the UK has barely begun to tackle the crushing burden left by Gordon Brown. The contrast with the United States is frankly shocking.
US debt is already lower than Spain (363pc), France (346pc), or Italy (314pc), and may undercut Germany (278pc) before long -- given the refusal of the European Central Bank to offset fiscal contraction with monetary stimulus.
One is tempted to ask what all the fuss was about in the US. The debt of financial institutions is just 40pc, compared to the UK (219pc), Japan (120pc), France (97pc), Germany (87pc) and Italy (76pc). Bank debt has dropped from $8 trillion to $6.1 trillion -- accelerated by the Lehman collapse -- as lenders rely more on old-fashioned deposits.
In hindsight, the US property boom was remarkably modest compared to what happened in Spain, or what is happening now in China now where the house price to income ratio in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen is near 18. America's ratio peaked at 5.1 and is already back to its modern era average of three. The excesses have been unwound.
Personally, I am coming to the conclusion that the US crisis in 2008-2009 was largely a case of botched monetary policy and could easily have been avoided. The growth of M3 money -- which the Fed stopped tracking thanks to a young Ben Bernanke -- was allowed to balloon in the bubble, then collapse in 2008. US Did Not Overcome Debt Crisis There is a big difference between alleged "light at the end of the tunnel" and "America Overcomes Debt Crisis" as Pritchard claims. US consumers may be one-third of the way through, but US debt-to-GDP ratios are low only because unsustainable government spending has taken up the slack. The US has not started government debt deleveraging and until that is nearly finished there will not be light at the end of the tunnel, let alone the end of the crisis. Optimistically, the best one can possibly assert is one can possibly see light at the end of the "consumer tunnel". The government tunnel immediately follows. Moreover, one should not be "tempted to ask what all the fuss was about in the US". Just because other nations are worse, does not mean the US had no problem. Five-Pronged Solution US monetary policy and ECB monetary policy is partially to blame for these crises as Pritchard says. Reckless fiscal policies by governments everywhere is another part of the problem. The five-pronged solution which Pritchard does not mention is ... - Get rid of the central banks
- Get rid of fractional reserve lending
- Return to a gold standard.
- Minimize governments
- Embrace free market policies
Please see Hugo Salinas Price and Michael Pettis on the Trade Imbalance Dilemma; Gold's Honest Discipline Revisited for a discussion of how a gold standard can fix trade imbalances. Eurozone Structural Problems The European crisis now was foreseen in advance by many, including Pritchard. Certainly the ECB's "one size fits Germany" interest rate policy fueled the property bubbles in Spain and Ireland, as well as imbalances in Italy, Greece, and Portugal. Unlike the US, the eurozone has the structural additional problem of being a monetary union without a fiscal union. Not one such currency union in history has ever survived. Bailing out Greece and Portugal and Ireland will not fix structural problems including the ECB's "one size fits all" interest rate dilemma. Debt and Deleveraging Here are some excerpts from the McKinsey Global Institute PDF: Executive Summary The deleveraging process that began in 2008 is proving to be long and painful, just as historical experience suggested it would be. Two years ago, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report that examined the global credit bubble and provided in-depth analysis of the 32 episodes of debt reduction following financial crises since the 1930s. The eurozone's debt crisis is just the latest reminder of how damaging the consequences are when countries have too much debt and too little growth. In this report, we revisit the world's ten largest mature economies to see where they stand in the process of deleveraging. We pay particular attention to the experience and outlook for the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, a set of countries that covers a broad range of deleveraging and growth challenges. Deleveraging Only Just Begun - Includes all loans and fixed-income securities of households, corporations, financial institutions, and government.
- Defined as an increase of 25 percentage points or more.
- Or latest available.
The United States: A light at the end of the tunnel Since the end of 2008, all categories of US private-sector debt have fallen relative to GDP. Financial-sector debt has declined from $8 trillion to $6.1 trillion and stands at 40 percent of GDP, the same as in 2000. Nonfinancial corporations have also reduced their debt relative to GDP, and US household debt has fallen by $584 billion, or a 15 percentage-point reduction relative to disposable income. Two-thirds of household debt reduction is due to defaults on home loans and consumer debt. With $254 billion of mortgages still in the foreclosure pipeline, the United States could see several more percentage points of household deleveraging in the months and years ahead as the foreclosure process continues. [Mish Note: notice the key phrase "months and years ahead"] Even when US consumers finish deleveraging, however, they probably won't be as powerful an engine of global growth as they were before the crisis. One reason is that they will no longer have easy access to the equity in their homes to use for consumption. From 2003 to 2007, US households took out $2.2 trillion in home equity loans and cash-out refinancing, about one-fifth of which went to fund consumption. Without the extra purchasing that this home equity extraction enabled, we calculate that consumer spending would have grown about 2 percent annually during the boom, rather than the roughly 3 percent recorded. This “steady state” consumption growth of 2 percent a year is similar to the annualized rate in the third quarter of 2011. US government debt has continued to grow because of the costs of the crisis and the recession. Furthermore, because the United States entered the financial crisis with large deficits, public debt has reached its highest level—80 percent of GDP in the second quarter of 2011—since World War II. The next phase of deleveraging, in which the government begins reducing debt, will require difficult political choices that policy makers have thus far been unable to make. That last sentence, coupled with the fact that consumer deleveraging is only 1/3 finished is precisely why the headline title by Pritchard that "America Overcomes the Debt Crisis ..." is quite inaccurate. Not only that, but growth assumptions remain absurdly high as do earnings forecasts. The McKinsey study is certainly supportive of my employment thesis: Fundamental and Mathematical Case for Structurally High Unemployment for a Decade; Shrinking Job Opportunities and the Jobs Gap; The Real Employment Situation Moreover, and importantly, risks are all skewed to the downside because the European recession is going to prove to be a major disaster as noted in Italy Faces 2-Year Recession says IMF; European Recession Neither Mild Nor Short: Spotlight on UK and Spain 10 Largest Economies Composition of Debt - Includes all loans and fixed-income securities of households, corporations, financial institutions, and government.
- Q1 2011 data.
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