So the sky did not fall in. While the Chicken Littles of the world economy, led by Gordon Brown, George Soros and Warren Buffett, may still repeat mechanically the IMF’s surprising judgment that the world - especially America - faces its worst financial crisis since the 1930s, their hearts are no longer in it. Mr Brown, after last week’s election woe, can no longer blame the world economy for his political failure. Mr Buffett, having speculated against the dollar for years and declared that credit derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, has finally begun to find attractive opportunities to invest his money and told his shareholders last week that the worst of the credit crisis was probably over. Mr Soros, in his forthcoming book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, states unequivocally: “We are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression.” But after making $3 billion for Quantum Endowment Fund by anticipating last year’s bear markets, he is now hedging his bets, as is only to be expected from the world’s most successful hedge fund manager. “I may well be proven wrong,” he told The New York Times last week, adding that he might yet again turn out to be “the boy who cried wolf”.
The main explanation for all this revisionism is simply the change in facts. The near-unanimity of a few weeks ago that the US was sinking into a deep, prolonged recession has been dispelled by recent data on jobs, GDP, business confidence, industrial orders and consumer spending – all telling a consistent story that although the US economy weakened abruptly last autumn, it is not nearly as weak as at the start of previous recessions, and that there have been no signs of further deterioration since February in the key economic variables apart from house prices.
Moreover, the time of greatest risk of a US recession is almost past, since tax rebates worth more than 1 per cent of disposable income will start landing in US taxpayers’ bank accounts from this week, almost guaranteeing that consumer spending will pick up, at least temporarily, in the year’s second half. And just as the stimulus to consumption from tax cuts runs out, benefits of the Fed’s big cuts in interest rates should start to be felt fully in the first few months of 2009. So, it is increasingly likely that the US economy will not experience even a minor recession, at least as defined in the official statistics, as a result of the credit crunch last year.
Even more important than the relatively benign statistics is the news from the financial markets. Signs that the worst of the banking crisis may be over appeared to be confirmed by rallies in financial markets worldwide last week. Financial markets’ better mood is partly related to stabilisation in US economic statistics. But mainly it is a consequence of radical steps by governments and central banks all over the world since it became clear that private financial markets would not resolve the credit crunch.
As a result of these government interventions, culminating in the Bear Stearns rescue and nationalisation of Northern Rock, one financial market after another has started to return to something nearing normality. Straight after the Bear rescue, there was a narrowing of credit spreads on top-quality securities such as government-backed mortgages in the US. Next, two weeks after liquidity returned to credit markets following the Bear rescue, the yield on US Treasury bonds stopped collapsing and reversed, implying that markets no longer saw need for panic cuts in US interest. In turn, the steepening of the US yield curve that followed the return of more normal conditions to the bond market helped to put a floor under the dollar two weeks ago. Finally – though this is still a more tentative conclusion - dwindling fears of a freefall in the dollar seemed to take some of the wind out of speculation in commodities and oil.
Of course, it is impossible to be sure of the sustainability of improvement in the four markets that have been causing all the trouble - credit, bonds, currencies and commodities. But what seems fairly clear is that the real economy of jobs, profits, investment and consumer spending in America has so far suffered almost entirely as a direct result of weaker housebuilding and construction employment – and not in response to the negative wealth effects and bank-credit contractions in the nightmare scenarios of Wall Street analysts.
To pessimists, this means that the worst is still to come, since the real consumer reaction to falling housing wealth and bank deleveraging has not even started. An alternative view more consistent with economic theory and historic experience was suggested by the Bank of England’s Stability Report last week: “Credit markets are likely to overstate significantly the losses that will ultimately be felt by the financial system and the economy as a whole . . . They will exaggerate to an even greater extent the potential damage to the real economy.”
As noted in that report, the pricing of many bonds and credit derivatives in financial markets already assumes bigger losses from US sub-prime mortgages and other dubious assets than anything implied by plausible worst-case scenarios. This is true of highest-quality credits, with AAA and AA ratings, whose unexpected collapse has done the greatest damage to bank balance sheets. The Bank’s sums suggest that the highest-quality mortgage-backed bonds are now undervalued by 25 per cent (see chart). It now seems that, contrary to the Chicken Little rantings of many analysts in the City and Wall Street, these bonds face almost no risk of serious defaults even in the event of far bigger falls in US housing prices than any that have happened so far.
Indeed, the Bank’s calculations suggest that present pricing of mortgage-related bonds in financial markets has probably overstated the future losses on US sub-prime lending by about double.
None of this means that the credit crunch has been a storm in a teacup, as I originally thought. Changing attitudes to borrowing and lending will have a dramatic impact on the world economy, reducing long-term growth in consumption in economies that have been driven by powerful housing and mortgage cycles, including Britain, Spain and France. As Mr Soros says in his book, global growth can no longer rely on these economies and must depend on consumption and infrastructure investment in China, India and other emerging markets. These are momentous changes, and while they are quite far advanced in America, they have hardly started in Britain and Europe. But if economic news continues to deteriorate for a while - as it almost certainly will in the UK – investors and business should realise that the really important story in the world economy today is not the threat of a sudden collapse in the financial system, but a gradual long-term adjustment in the world economy in favour of emerging markets. This may at times be an uncomfortable process – but the sky will not fall in.
This is Anatole Kaletsky's
Times Column for this week.
Labels: Anatole Kaletsky, credit crunch, global economy analysis, Gordon Brown, Warren Buffett
