Baseline Scenario for 2/9/2009
Peter Boone, Simon Johnson, and James Kwak, copyright of the authors.
Summary
1) The world is heading into a severe slump, with declining output in the near term and no clear turnaround in sight. We forecast a contraction of minus 1 percent in the world economy in 2009 (on a Q4-to-Q4 basis), making this by far the worst year for the global economy since the Great Depression. We further project no recovery on the horizon, so worldwide 2010 will be “flat” relative to 2009.
2) Consumers in the US and the nonfinancial corporate sector everywhere are trying to “rebuild their balance sheets,” which means they want to save more and spend less.
3) Governments have only a limited ability to offset this increase in desired private sector savings through dissaving (i.e., increased budget deficits that result from fiscal stimulus). Even the most prudent governments in industrialized countries did not run sufficiently countercyclical fiscal policy during the boom and now face balance sheet constraints. The U.S. will provide a moderate fiscal stimulus in 2009 and 2010, amounting to about 2 percent of GDP in each year.
4) The forthcoming (due this week) attempt to deal with banking system problems in the US will be insufficiently forceful. The structure of executive compensation caps introduced last week suggests the Obama Administration currently is unwilling to take on the large banks politically. The degree of recapitalization will be too small and the measures will help existing management stay in place. Large banks will remain “too big to fail” and shareholders will still be unable to constrain executive compensation. Lending will remain anemic.
5) Compounding these problems is a serious test for the Eurozone: financial market pressure on Greece, Ireland and Italy is mounting; Portugal and Spain are also likely to be affected. The global financial sector weakness has become a potential fiscal issue of the first order in these countries. This will lead to another round of bailouts in Europe, this time for weaker sovereigns in the Eurozone. As a result, fiscal policy will be even less countercyclical, i.e., governments will feel the need to attempt precautionary austerity, which amounts to a further increase in savings.
6) At the same time, the situation in emerging markets is moving sharply towards near-crisis, particularly as global trade contracts and there are immediate effects on both corporates and the financial system. Currency collapse and debt default will be averted only by fiscal austerity. The current IMF strategy - most clearly evident in East-Central Europe - is to protect creditors fully with programs that do not allow for nominal exchange rate depreciation. This approach increases the degree of contraction and social costs faced by domestic residents, while also making economic recovery more difficult. These programs will likely prove more unpopular and less successful than were similar programs in Latin America in the 1980s and in Asia in the 1990s. As East-Central Europe slips into deeper recession, there are severe negative consequences for West European banks with a high exposure to the region (including Austria, Sweden and Greece).
7) The global situation is analogous to the problem of Japan in the 1990s, in which corporates attempted to repair their balance sheets while consumers continued to save as before and fiscal stimulus repeatedly proved insufficient. The difference, of course, is that exports were able to grow and Japan could run a current account surplus; this does not work at a global level. Global growth prospects are therefore no better than for Japan in the 1990s.
8) A rapid return to growth requires more expansionary monetary policy, and in all likelihood this needs to be led by the United States. But the Federal Reserve is still some distance from fully recognizing deflation and, by the time it takes that view and can implement appropriate actions, declining wages and prices will be built into expectations, thus making it much harder to stabilize the housing market and restart growth. The European Central Bank still fails to recognize the seriousness of the economic situation. The Bank of England is embarked on a full-fledged anti-deflation policy, but economic prospects in the UK still remain dire.
9) The push to re-regulate, which is the focus of the G20 intergovernmental process (with the next summit set for April 2), could lead to a potentially dangerous procyclical set of policies that can exacerbate the downturn and prolong the recovery. There is currently nothing on the G20 agenda that will help slow the global decline and start a recovery. The Obama Administration will have a hard time bringing its G20 partners to a more pro-recovery policy stance.
10) The most likely outcome is not a V-shaped recovery (which is the current official consensus) or a U-shaped recovery (which is closer to the private sector consensus), but rather an L, in which there is a steep fall and then a struggle to recover. A “lost decade” for the world economy is quite possible. There will be some episodes of incipient recovery, as there were in Japan during the 1990s, but this will prove very hard to sustain.
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http://baselinescenario.com/2009/02/08/baseline-scenario-2909/
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