May 25, 2010
Back when I learned economics, companies were supposed to make profits and economies were supposed to grow. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. We have “saavy” businessmen like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein who took his company to the edge of bankruptcy only to be rescued by bailouts from the Fed and Treasury. Most of the crew of Wall Street multi-millionaires would be on the unemployment line today without the big helping hand from the Nanny State.
In the same vein, the NYT is now citing research from Deutsche Bank reporting : “that euro-area countries ‘can learn some valuable lessons from the Baltics’ experience over recent quarters.’ Those countries survived drastic budget consolidation without devaluing their currencies.”
The article then continues to quote the Deutsche Bank experts: “Restoration of competitiveness and weighty fiscal consolidation in the absence of currency adjustment is difficult but doable … as long as politicians and the general public are willing to accept some up-front pain in return to longer term gains.”
Just to give a clearer idea of what the Deutsche Bank crew is talking about, the IMF projects that GDP in each of the Baltic countries will drop by close to 20 percent from its 2007 levels. In the United States this would be equivalent to losing $3 trillion in annual output. By 2014, the last year for the projections, GDP is expected to be 7.1 percent lower than its 2007 level in Lithuania, 9.1 percent lower in Estonia, and 14.5 percent lower in Latvia. Unemployment in these countries is more than 15 percent in Estonia and Lithuania and more than 20 percent.
It is nice to see that German bankers applaud this pain. Needless to say, it is unlikely that many bankers will ever have the pleasure of making similar sacrifices for the long-term good of their own countries. Of course, it is not clear how long the Baltic countries will have to endure this pain before GDP is back on a healthy growth path and the unemployment rate is at a more normal level. The IMF tends to be overly optimistic in evaluating the prospects of the countries adopting policies it favors.
It would have been worth explicitly discussing the alternative strategy that some countries may wish to pursue — devaluation and debt restructuring. Argentina pursued this path at the end of the 2001. While the IMF and virtually all economic authorities insisted that this path would lead to disaster, the economy only contracted for six more months. It then turned around and grew robustly for the next six years until it followed the world economy into recession. At its pre-recession peak in 2008 Argentina’s economy was more than one-third larger than it had been in 1998 when its crisis first sent GDP downward.
While the bankers may be more inspired by the tales of sacrifice by the Baltic peoples, many non-bankers may find the Argentine experience more interesting. Responsible reporting should note both options.
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