By Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel
Published: July 13 2009 19:11 | Financial Times
The core of the problem, the unavoidable truth, is that our economic system is laden with debt, about triple the amount relative to gross domestic product that we had in the 1980s. This does not sit well with globalisation. Our view is that government policies worldwide are causing more instability rather than curing the trouble in the system. The only solution is the immediate, forcible and systematic conversion of debt to equity. There is no other option.
Our analysis is as follows. First, debt and leverage cause fragility; they leave less room for errors as the economic system loses its ability to withstand extreme variations in the prices of securities and goods. Equity, by contrast, is robust: the collapse of the technology bubble in 2000 did not have significant consequences because internet companies, while able to raise large amounts of equity, had no access to credit markets.
Second, the complexity created by globalisation and the internet causes economic and business values (such as company revenues, commodity prices or unemployment) to experience more extreme variations than ever before. Add to that the proliferation of systems that run more smoothly than before, but experience rare, but violent blow-ups.
Our ability to forecast suffers due to this complexity and the occurrence of the occasional extreme event, or “black swan”. Such degradation in predictability should have made companies more conservative in their capital structure, not more aggressive – yet private equity, homeowners and others have been recklessly amassing debt. Such non-linearity makes the mathematics used by economists rather useless. Our research shows that economic papers that rely on mathematics are not scientifically valid. Not only do they underestimate the possibility of “black swans” but they are unaware that we do not have any ability to deal with the mathematics of extreme events. The same flaw found in risk models that helped cause the financial meltdown is present in economic models invoked by “experts”. Anyone relying on these models for conclusions is deluded.
Third, debt has a nasty property: it is highly treacherous. A loan hides volatility as it does not vary outside of default, while an equity investment has volatility but its risks are visible. Yet both have similar risks. Thus debt is the province of both the overconfident borrower who underestimates large deviations, and of the investor who wants to be deluded by hiding risks. Then there are products such as complex derivatives, which in the name of “modern finance” make the system even more fragile.
Against this background, we have two options. The first is to deflate debt, the other is to inflate assets (or counter their deflation with a collection of stimulus packages.)
We believe that stimulus packages, in all their forms, make the same mistakes that got us here. They will lead to extreme overshooting or extreme undershooting. They lead to more borrowing, by socialising private debt. But running a government deficit is dangerous, as it is vulnerable to errors in projections of economic growth. These errors will be larger in the future, so central bank money creation will lead not to inflation but to hyper-inflation, as the system is set for bigger deviations than ever before.
Relying on standard models to build policies makes us all fragile and overconfident. Asking the economics establishment for guidance (particularly after its failure to see the risk in the economy) is akin to asking to be led by the blind – instead we need to rebuild the world to make it resistant to the economist’s mystifications.
Invoking the pre-internet Great Depression as guidance for current events is irresponsible: errors in fiscal policy will be magnified by this kind of thinking. Monetary policy has always been dangerous. Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, tried playing with the business cycle to iron out bubbles, but it eventually got completely out of control. Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.
The only solution is to transform debt into equity across all sectors, in an organised and systematic way. Instead of sending hate mail to near-insolvent homeowners, banks should reach out to borrowers and offer lower interest payments in exchange for equity. Instead of debt becoming “binary” – in default or not – it could take smoothly-varying prices and banks would not need to wait for foreclosures to take action. Banks would turn from “hopers”, hiding risks from themselves, into agents more engaged in economic activity. Hidden risks become visible; hopers become doers.
It is sad to see that those who failed to spot the problem (or helped to cause it) are now in charge of the remedy. Just as the impending crisis was obvious to those of us who specialise in complexity and extreme deviations, the solution is plain to see. We need an aggressive, systematic debt-for-equity conversion. We cannot afford to wait a day.
The writers are with Universa Investments; Prof Taleb is author of ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’
Showing posts with label financial theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label financial theory. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Liquidity injections alone are not enough
By Wolfgang Münchau
Published: July 5 2009 20:05 | Financial Times
Monetary policy’s various guises from near-zero short-term interest rates, to massive liquidity injections, to quantitative easing and its relatives have so far had no traction in this crisis. While the global economy is no longer shrinking at quite the speeds seen at the beginning of the year, it is still trapped in a bad recession.
The main reason for its longevity is the state of the banking sector. The European Central Bank has recently pumped €442bn ($620bn, £380bn) in one-year liquidity into the system, but the money is not reaching the real economy. Japanese-style stagnation is no longer possible – it is already here. The only question is how long it will last. Even in an optimistic scenario, global economic growth will be weighed down by a combination of credit squeeze, rising unemployment, rising bankruptcies, rising default rates, and balance sheet adjustment in the household and financial sectors.
I would expect the US to have something approaching a genuine recovery at some point in the next decade, but probably not in 2010 or 2011. Judging by the co-ordination failure at the level of the European Union, the persistent failure to deal with the continent’s 40 or so cross-border banks at European level, and in particular Germany’s inability to sort out its toxic-asset contaminated Landesbanken, the economic prospects for the eurozone are infinitely worse.
From comments by senior central bankers in the US and Europe, I am sure they understand the gravity of the situation very well. Janet Yellen, present of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, warned last week that the recovery would be agonisingly slow, that unemployment could stay high for many years, and that interest rates might stay low for a long time.
I would also interpret the decidedly downbeat statement last week by Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, as a sign that the ECB is getting more worried – when others are getting more optimistic. In Europe, there is some evidence that the credit crunch has deteriorated in recent weeks. Much of that evidence is anecdotal, but these anecdotes are disquieting.
Companies who file for bankruptcy increasingly blame the banks, and the number of bankruptcies is rising rapidly. Only a fool would take comfort from the strength in economic indicators. During a financial crisis, these indicators could be a metric of its respondents’ degree of delusion.
The problem is that the trillions of dollars and euros in liquidity are not getting through. There is no point in blaming the banks. Mr Trichet appealed to the banks to behave responsibly. Over the weekend, German politicians also made desperate and implausible threats against the banks unless they increased lending. Not only is this a waste of time but the banks are, in fact, behaving responsibly when they deny credit to customers whom they judge to have lost creditworthiness.
Left to its own devices, banking is inherently pro-cyclical. This is one of the reasons restoring the health of the banking sector by whatever means necessary is a precondition for an economic recovery. Liquidity injections by a central bank, however large, cannot restore health to the banking sector in a sufficiently short period of time if the underlying problem is lack of solvency. Nor do accounting tricks that allow banks to freeze their bad assets in bad banks without any resolution mechanism, such as the German law passed last week. And since the European economies are far more dependent on the banking sector than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, the need to sort out the banking sector is even more urgent there.
The interactions between the financial sector and the real economy have both a short-term and a long-term, or structural, component. The European Commission’s most recent quarterly report on the eurozone states bluntly that the crisis will lead to a permanent loss in economic output, unless EU member states begin to pursue very different kinds of economic policies. With several European countries now obsessing with premature crisis exit strategies, which may kick in as early as 2010, the chances of a vicious cycle of fading economic growth, falling tax receipts, deficit cuts and further output losses are high. If Ms Yellen is right about the US economy, there will be no bail-out of the European and Asian economies through the US consumer. If the situation persists even for only five years, it will lead to a structural slump for some of those export-reliant economies on the European continent.
The Europeans have a bigger task and they operate in a more difficult political environment. The economic policy framework of Europe’s monetary union only barely succeeded during a normal economic cycle, during which its most important framework of policy co-ordination, the stability and growth pact, was dislodged. The policy framework proved utterly dysfunctional during this economic crisis, as leaders like Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy have resorted to their nationalist instincts. It would take an even bigger crisis for them to agree on a joint resolution strategy for the banking system.
There is a good chance they might get it.
Published: July 5 2009 20:05 | Financial Times
Monetary policy’s various guises from near-zero short-term interest rates, to massive liquidity injections, to quantitative easing and its relatives have so far had no traction in this crisis. While the global economy is no longer shrinking at quite the speeds seen at the beginning of the year, it is still trapped in a bad recession.
The main reason for its longevity is the state of the banking sector. The European Central Bank has recently pumped €442bn ($620bn, £380bn) in one-year liquidity into the system, but the money is not reaching the real economy. Japanese-style stagnation is no longer possible – it is already here. The only question is how long it will last. Even in an optimistic scenario, global economic growth will be weighed down by a combination of credit squeeze, rising unemployment, rising bankruptcies, rising default rates, and balance sheet adjustment in the household and financial sectors.
I would expect the US to have something approaching a genuine recovery at some point in the next decade, but probably not in 2010 or 2011. Judging by the co-ordination failure at the level of the European Union, the persistent failure to deal with the continent’s 40 or so cross-border banks at European level, and in particular Germany’s inability to sort out its toxic-asset contaminated Landesbanken, the economic prospects for the eurozone are infinitely worse.
From comments by senior central bankers in the US and Europe, I am sure they understand the gravity of the situation very well. Janet Yellen, present of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, warned last week that the recovery would be agonisingly slow, that unemployment could stay high for many years, and that interest rates might stay low for a long time.
I would also interpret the decidedly downbeat statement last week by Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, as a sign that the ECB is getting more worried – when others are getting more optimistic. In Europe, there is some evidence that the credit crunch has deteriorated in recent weeks. Much of that evidence is anecdotal, but these anecdotes are disquieting.
Companies who file for bankruptcy increasingly blame the banks, and the number of bankruptcies is rising rapidly. Only a fool would take comfort from the strength in economic indicators. During a financial crisis, these indicators could be a metric of its respondents’ degree of delusion.
The problem is that the trillions of dollars and euros in liquidity are not getting through. There is no point in blaming the banks. Mr Trichet appealed to the banks to behave responsibly. Over the weekend, German politicians also made desperate and implausible threats against the banks unless they increased lending. Not only is this a waste of time but the banks are, in fact, behaving responsibly when they deny credit to customers whom they judge to have lost creditworthiness.
Left to its own devices, banking is inherently pro-cyclical. This is one of the reasons restoring the health of the banking sector by whatever means necessary is a precondition for an economic recovery. Liquidity injections by a central bank, however large, cannot restore health to the banking sector in a sufficiently short period of time if the underlying problem is lack of solvency. Nor do accounting tricks that allow banks to freeze their bad assets in bad banks without any resolution mechanism, such as the German law passed last week. And since the European economies are far more dependent on the banking sector than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, the need to sort out the banking sector is even more urgent there.
The interactions between the financial sector and the real economy have both a short-term and a long-term, or structural, component. The European Commission’s most recent quarterly report on the eurozone states bluntly that the crisis will lead to a permanent loss in economic output, unless EU member states begin to pursue very different kinds of economic policies. With several European countries now obsessing with premature crisis exit strategies, which may kick in as early as 2010, the chances of a vicious cycle of fading economic growth, falling tax receipts, deficit cuts and further output losses are high. If Ms Yellen is right about the US economy, there will be no bail-out of the European and Asian economies through the US consumer. If the situation persists even for only five years, it will lead to a structural slump for some of those export-reliant economies on the European continent.
The Europeans have a bigger task and they operate in a more difficult political environment. The economic policy framework of Europe’s monetary union only barely succeeded during a normal economic cycle, during which its most important framework of policy co-ordination, the stability and growth pact, was dislodged. The policy framework proved utterly dysfunctional during this economic crisis, as leaders like Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy have resorted to their nationalist instincts. It would take an even bigger crisis for them to agree on a joint resolution strategy for the banking system.
There is a good chance they might get it.
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