China in the Debt-Deflation Trap

HONG KONG – In the wake of a global stock-market sell-off triggered by economic turmoil in China, the US Federal Reserve has just decided to postpone raising interest rates. Indeed, China is facing the huge challenge of dealing with the risk of a global debt-deflation trap.
In 1933, Irving Fisher was the first to identify the dangers of over-indebtedness and deflation, demonstrating their contribution to the Great Depression in the United States. Forty years later, Charles Kindleberger applied the theory in a global context, emphasizing the problems that arise in a world lacking coordinated and consistent monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies, as well as an international lender of last resort. In 2011, Richard Koo used Japan’s experience to highlight the risks of a prolonged balance-sheet recession, when over-stretched debtors deleverage in order to rebuild their balance sheets.
The debt-deflation cycle begins with an imbalance or displacement, which fuels excessive exuberance, over-borrowing, and speculative trading, and ends in bust, with procyclical liquidation of excess capacity and debt causing price deflation, unemployment, and economic stagnation. The result can be a deep depression.
In 2000, the imbalance was America’s large current-account deficit: the world’s largest economy was borrowing heavily on international capital markets, rather than lending, as one might expect. According to then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the problem was that countries running large surpluses were buying so many US Treasuries that they were negating the Fed’s monetary-policy efforts. But, as Claudio Borio, Hyun Shin, and others have pointed out, excessive off-balance-sheet and offshore lending by US and European banks also added procyclical pressure.
As a result, risk-taking and leverage grew, facilitated by inadequate regulation, culminating in the global financial crisis of 2008. To prevent asset bubbles from collapsing and buy time for more sustainable policy fixes, advanced-country central banks implemented massive monetary easing and cut interest rates to zero. Unfortunately, policymakers in most countries wasted the time they were given; moreover, so-called quantitative easing had far-reaching spillover effects.
Within China, a second displacement occurred: the government implemented a ¥4 trillion ($680 billion) stimulus package in November 2008 to offset weak demand in its major export markets. While the Chinese authorities had the right idea, two of the policy’s outcomes have complicated the reform prcoess today.
First, instead of reducing excess capacity and encouraging a structural shift to higher-productivity activities, the authorities’ investment-led strategy increased manufacturing capacity further, along with excess capacity in global commodity production.
Second, the stimulus was funded by a debt binge, especially among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and local governments. The private sector, too, built up debt, with its limited access to equity capital driving firms to the shadow banking sector. The result is a debt overhang of 282% of GDP.
In short, China now faces the same debt-deflation challenge that much of the rest of the world must address. The question, of course, is how. Some argue that the answer is more of the same: continued monetary easing and additional fiscal stimulus. Accumulating more debt (at lower interest rates) can indeed buy time for economic restructuring. But it will merely make matters worse if politicians do not use the time to implement effective reforms.
There is no politically painless way out of the debt trap. Indeed, the first step in that process is to face up to losses, both in accounting and in real terms. In the short run, even efforts to spur technological progress and innovation, which might generate recovery through new profits, are likely to have a negative overall impact on employment, owing to the creative destruction of obsolete industries. Recognizing this, some argue that the way to force reform is to allow interest rates to reflect credit risks.
For China, whose net international investment position at the end of last year was a surplus of $1.8 trillion , or 17% of GDP, it will be possible to implement internal debt restructuring through debt/equity swaps at the project level. Far-reaching governance and structural reforms in the state and private sectors should follow.
According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the central and local governments’ net assets amounted to ¥93 trillion, or 164% of GDP, at the end of 2013. Because SOEs and local governments accounted for more than half of the credit issued through the banking system, proper debt restructuring of state-owned assets would strengthen the projects they were funding, by allowing private or professional management teams to improve overall returns.
Such reforms are crucial, because, ultimately, escaping the debt-deflation trap will require China to rejuvenate total factor productivity – an effort that the private sector is better equipped to lead. As the Scandinavian experience has shown, state ownership need not be an obstacle to productivity growth, provided that public assets are professionally and transparently managed, for example, by placing them in the portfolios of pension funds.
The advanced countries have fallen into the debt-deflation trap because they were unwilling to accept the political pain of real-sector restructuring, relying instead on financial engineering and loose monetary and fiscal policies. Here, China’s one-party system provides a clear advantage: the country’s leaders can take politically painful decisions without worrying about the next election. One hopes that they do.
Irving Fisher’s Debt Deflation Theory and Its Relevance Today
Posted on February 12, 2009 by Yves Smith
I’m sure readers have noticed that talking about the global economic downturn as a depression is suddenly respectable. A mere three months, use of that term would have gotten one branded as a alarmist (even Nouriel Roubini, who has a taste for drama, often used the code of “L shaped recession”).
As a result, economists and commentators are re-examining the Great Depression, particularly since some doubt that the officialdom has drawn the correct lessons from it.
One respected economist from that era whose work is often praised but seldom followed is Irving Fisher. In a VoxEU article, Enrique Mendoza argues in favor of Fisher’s debt deflation theory, and explains its policy implications. Fisher is appealing because he sees the unwinding of excessive leverage as the driving force of a depression, while most other theories see it as an outcome.
From VoxEU:
Economists read the literature about the Great Depression with deep intellectual curiosity and savour in particular the still ongoing debate about its causes and remedies. Keynesians argue that price and wage rigidities and a failure of aggregate demand were the main culprits for the biggest economic catastrophe recorded in modern history. Monetarists posit that the main culprit was a terrible mistake on the part of the monetary authority, because it allowed the supply of money to contract. The new generation of Neoclassical economists argue that serious policy mistakes on the “real side” of the economy, such as the deployment of major trade barriers, turned a cyclical downturn into the Great Depression, and that issues of price rigidities, demand failures, credit, or monetary policy are at best of second-order importance.
In a seminal 1933 article, Mr. Irving Fisher offered a very different and innovative view. He focused on the meltdown of financial markets, the devastating effects of a downward spiral connecting the deflation of assets and goods prices, the process of deleveraging by households and firms, and contraction of economic activity.
Until about eighteen months ago, this was just one more of many unsettled economic questions that academic economists love to dwell on, largely because we don’t have a lot of data on Great Depressions to test our theories and because intellectual arrogance prevented us from taking seriously 1990s meltdowns in emerging markets and the Nordic countries as harbingers of what could happen to the US. Today, as we go through the catastrophic process of Fisher’s debt-deflation mechanism, there is no doubt that Fisher was right and the rest are just stories. If anything, we are left wishing prices were rigid!
But declaring a winner in the Great Depression debate is unimportant. The critical issue is to use the diagnosis that Fisher offered in his article – and what we have learned about debt deflations since then – to guide policy making. In this climate of hiring gurus for an ever-growing number of “top” economist posts in the US government, I would be very happy if we could just hire Irving Fisher!
Here are the lessons I learned after reading Fisher’s piece again and reflecting on our current dilemmas from its perspective.
Lesson 1: Fiscal stimulus is a band-aid. We need – now and for the next two years –massive government spending to support the unemployed and prevent the implosion of state and local governments. Beyond that, spending will not stimulate anything, and it has nothing to do with the causes of the crisis or with putting an end to it. It is the strong pain killer that the economy needs for the infection that afflicts it, but it is just a pain killer, not a cure. Well-crafted tax adjustments can be useful, but only if targeted to address the deflationary pressures and/or the fragility of the financial system (see Lesson 2). By the same token, trade protection and other similarly “brilliant” ideas floating around need to be opposed. They will do nothing to attack the causes of the crisis, and they could make the recession deeper and more protracted.
Lesson 2: Deflation must be halted and reversed, and the credit system restarted. Today, as in the early 1930s, these two parts of the puzzle are tightly interrelated, as Fisher explained. Deflation will not stop if the collapse of the credit system is not contained, and the collapse of the credit system will not stop until the deflation of asset and goods prices is controlled. A trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus today will not avoid catastrophe if the financial stabilisation fails. Conversely, the sooner a credible, comprehensive, and effective financial stabilisation plan is implemented, the lower the actual cost of “true” fiscal support needed for the social safety net.
Being realistic, however, even if we had this ideal situation in place tomorrow, a major recession – unlike anything most Americans alive today have ever seen – is unavoidable. Catastrophe is here and we will not escape it. But even the 18-to-24-months catastrophe we are in is not the worst outcome. The worst outcome would be a full repeat of the Great Depression. The worst of the Great Depression was not so much the initial economic collapse, as dramatic as that was, but its persistence for several years. This is what we still have time to avoid and where our energy should be invested. The political spin about pushing for reforms and bailouts to “avert disaster” needs to be corrected, so that everyone’s expectations are not biased towards thinking that a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus means back to business as usual. The emergency is real and present, but not to escape catastrophe. All the numbers we have about employment, production, world trade, the financial system, etc. show that we are already in a catastrophe. The emergency is to avoid the persistence of the stagnation that occurred during the Depression. The emergency is to prevent most of the next decade from looking like 2008.
Lesson 3: Prevention. We got into this mess because financial development advanced way ahead of not only regulators and government officials, but the actors in financial markets themselves, including the geniuses who created the innovative financial products that we have now come to know (and fear) by their acronyms – CDOs, MBSs, CMOs, and the greatest villain of all, CDSs!
Preventing the next debacle, however, requires careful thinking. Imposing regulations and controls that would return the financial system to its 1960s structure would be a major mistake. The challenge is to identify where things went very wrong and plug the deep holes that exist while preserving the enormous potential that the securitisation of financial assets has for enhancing efficiency and standards of living worldwide. A starting point is to recognise that government made two huge mistakes in (a) directing regulators to ignore products like CDSs, by pretending that simply by an act of law they could be declared not to be standard securities or a form of gambling (both of which they were!), and (b) instituting and enlarging the implicit government guarantee backing the fast expansion of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Had the wisdom of people like Mrs. Brooksley Born prevailed in the late 1990s, the CDS market would have been at least supervised, if not regulated. This alone would have saved us enormous pain today, because the jump from the mid-billions problem that sub-prime mortgages were to the mid-trillions debacle we are suffering occurred largely due to the casino-like setup in which AIG and other financial companies conducted the CDS business.
So I end with the lesson that the master himself gave to conclude his article:
“Finally, I would emphasise the important corollary, of the debt-deflation theory, that great depressions are curable and preventable through reflation and stabilisation.”