Trump’s hostile behaviour is reinvigorating efforts to turn the euro into an alternative to the world’s dominant currency. If only the Europeans could find some way to do it.
After years of low inflation, investors and policymakers have settled into a cyclical mindset that assumes advanced economies are simply suffering from insufficient aggregate demand. But they are ignoring structural factors at their peril.
A growing number of Chinese have rushed to obtain long-stay visas or property in friendly foreign countries as an insurance policy against a worsening of domestic conditions. Spurred on by a lack of investment options at home and rattled by the sweeping anti-corruption campaign of President Xi Jinping, those with significant assets are looking for ways to move their money overseas, by legal means or otherwise.
Over the past decade, the world’s largest central banks — in the United States, Europe, China and Japan — have expanded their balance sheets from less than $5 trillion to more than $17 trillion in an effort to promote the recovery. Much of that newly printed money has found its way into the financial markets, where it often follows the path of least regulation.
Ten years ago this week, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the world suddenly changed. That date, Sept. 15, 2008, was hardly the starting point of the Depression-sized financial crisis that would soon threaten to sink the entire world economy; it had begun more than a year earlier. But most scholars agree Lehman’s failure marked the moment when everyone realized at once that the so-called experts had no idea how deep the interconnections ran.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the global financial crisis, the world economy has registered stronger growth than many realize, owing in large part to China. But in the years ahead, global economic imbalances and troubling trends in the business world will continue to pose economic as well as political risks.
Thanks to US President Donald Trump and his “America first” policy, the global economic and trade outlook perhaps has never been so uncertain. Nowhere are these economic and policy shock waves being felt more than in China. And, Beijing is responding the same way it does every time it anticipates trouble – by pumping cash into its system.
The legacy of 2007 is still with us. Its most devastating and destructive effect was to put a premium on unconventional monetary measures. Unfortunately, when policymakers scrambled in search of “big bazookas” ten years ago, they set the stage for the return of an old character: a strongman willing to pull the trigger.
The new central bank network created since 2008 is of a piece with the new networks for stress testing and regulating the world’s systemically important banks. The international economy they regulate is not one made up of a jigsaw puzzle of national economies, each with its gross national product and national trade flows. Instead they oversee, regulate and act on the interlocking, transnational matrix of bank balance sheets. This system was put in place without fanfare. It was essential to containing the crisis, and so far it has operated effectively. But to make this technical financial network into the foundation for a new global order is a gamble.
Reform is always easier when a crisis leaves policy makers no other options. But without further change, Asia will continue to rely too much on debt instead of productivity gains for growth. In poorer nations, improvements in household welfare will lag. As in the years before 1997, economic irregularities could build up to the point where the region faces another crisis. Will the next Kim Dae-jungs be there when you need them?
