Facing Reality

Rosa Brooks, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, sees the U.S. economy in the same situation as The Titanic bearing down on the iceberg (Obama's, and Our, Iceberg). She faults both McCain and Obama for underestimating the seriousness of the economic situation and the long term prospects for recovery from the crisis. Addressing the October 7 debate, she writes:

And when asked by Brokaw if the economy will get "much worse before it gets better," Obama's response was quick: "No. I'm confident about the American economy."

Really? I'm not.

The main problem, as I see it, is the inability or refusal of our political leaders to recognize what all this means for the United States and for its citizens. We have reached the end of a long period of prosperity--but it was a prosperity built on debt. The current crisis signals the end of the line. As Rosa Brooks astutely points out, nobody "yet" knows how to solve these problems. But the first step in solving a problem is recognizing it. Only then can we begin to fix it.

(Thanks to Vivian Deno for sending this column to me).

America Loses Global Economic Leadership

Over the last decade, the U.S. has lost political, military and international influence in the world; now it has lost its economic clout as well. The collapse of the financial system in the United States, the very linchpin of both the American and global economies, has evoked comments of gleeful retribution from some countries, and worrisome concern from others. But everywhere, now, there is a recognition that the U.S. economy is weak and vulnerable, and hardly a model for emulation by others. The collapse of this final pillar of U.S. global leadership is also encouraging other countries to assume a more assertive role.

Some of the sharpest criticism, and even sarcasm, came from the usual suspects. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez mocked Lehman Brothers

“They were always producing negative reports about Venezuela. . . .They forgot about themselves ... and 'boom!' they were bankrupt." (Toronto Star, 9/16/08)

and then skipped the opening of the UN General Assembly to visit China instead, saying that Beijing was now much more relevant than New York.

At a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that

“the big powers are going down. . . .They have come to the end of their power, and the world is on the verge of entering a new promising era.” (NYT 7/30/08).

But even more moderate leaders have echoed such sentiments. The president of Argentina, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner declared that

“We are witnessing the First World, which at one point had been painted as a mecca we should strive to reach, popping like a bubble.” (NYT 10/3/08)

In Latin America, according to the New York Times (10/3/08), governments “have been working for the past decade to reduce their dependence on the American economy,” have “diversified trade with the rest of the world,” and have set aside funds “for times when international conditions turn sour.”

In Moscow, both former President (now Premier) Putin and his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, have been flexing Russia’s diplomatic and military muscles for several years. The Kremlin has repeatedly rejected U.S. global dominance in a “unipolar” world, and with its landmark conflict with Georgia in August, asserted its own “privileged” sphere of influence in the world, “just like other countries in the world.”(NYT 8/31/08). With the U.S. economic crisis, Medvedev, like Kirchner, has called into question even U.S. economic leadership. He asserted last week that U.S. global economic leadership was drawing to a close. “The times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good.” (NYT 10/3/08).

While the U.S. financial crisis has accelerated these moves away from the U.S. economy, the trend had begun years before, and is an integral part of the decline of U.S global influence more generally. Surveys in recent years by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found surprisingly little support in other countries for “the American ways of doing business.” Antipathy to the U.S. business model is particularly widespread and strong in Latin America and western Europe. In the 2007 Pew survey, in only a third of the 46 countries surveyed did a majority of respondents like the American ways of doing business. Most of those were in Africa.

For most of the postwar era, the United States has been both a political and economic model for countries and peoples around the world. This began to wane in recent years, especially in the face of the belligerent and unilateralist policies of the Bush administration. The financial collapse of the U.S. is one more nail in the coffin of U.S. supremacy and global dominance.

U.S. Economic Future Looks Bleak, Even With Bailout

A slightly revised version of my previous blog ("This sucker could go down") has been published in The Indianapolis Star (9/30/08), the day after the biggest stock market decline in U.S. history.

This Sucker Could Go Down

"This sucker could go down,” declared President Bush, after the White House leadership summit failed to reach agreement on a bailout plan for the financial services sector. The President is one of the last to recognize how bad the economic situation really is. But the U.S. economy has been tiptoeing on quicksand for years, and the current problems will not be solved quickly, even with an infusion of $700 billion, as the President proposes.

The root of the problem is this: the U.S. has been living on borrowed money for an entire generation; this debt has been serviced internally by a mushrooming but shaky financial services sector, and externally by foreign governments (especially the Chinese); and now both of these sources are evaporating. Whether or not the bailout package is approved, the U.S. economy and American consumers are going to take a bit hit.

First--the borrowed money. Both government and consumers have been spending beyond their means, almost continuously, for two decades. The federal government has had huge budget deficits every year since 1980, except for a few years during the Clinton presidency. The deficits have built the federal debt up to some $10 trillion, accounting for two-thirds of GDP, compared to only one-third in the 1970s. Next year’s budget deficit will add almost $500 billion to that debt. The bailout package will probably add another trillion dollars. Just the interest on the federal debt is one of the largest items in the federal budget, draining over $400 billion annually.

Government profligacy is matched by consumers: the household savings rate in the U.S. has been declining for two decades, is the lowest among all developed countries, and in 2005 fell below zero for the first time ever. Credit card and mortgage debt are both at record levels, as are bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures. Most Americans, even those near retirement age, have almost no retirement savings. The Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” are actually unfunded, to the tune of some $41 trillion. The government is unlikely to find resources to meet these liabilities, which will put further strains on seniors.

Consumer spending now accounts for two-thirds of all economic activity in the U.S. This growth in spending has been possible only by borrowing. The consumer spending and borrowing binge has been fueled by the growth of the financial services industry, which has increasingly replaced manufacturing as the mainstay of the U.S. economy. Banks, mortgage companies, loan agencies and credit card companies make their money by making loans, and they are constantly seeking new customers and encouraging existing ones to borrow more. It is this symbiotic relationship between binging consumers and profit seeking financial companies that has created the piles of consumer debt and subprime mortgages.

All of this is starting to unravel now. People borrowed more than they could afford; the mortgage crisis undercut their ability to repay loans and mortgages; the banks and loan agencies faced mounting defaults and declining profits and stock prices. Banks are increasingly unable or unwilling to extend loans to businesses or individuals, which will crimp both consumer spending and economic growth, accelerating the economic downturn.

The U.S. government is not really in a position to rescue bankrupt companies, because it is itself bankrupt. And just as the financial industry has been an enabler of consumer deficit spending, foreign governments have enabled the U.S. government to spend more than it brings in, by buying up U.S. debt. Over half of U.S. debt is now owned by foreigners—compared to just 5 percent that was owned by foreigners twenty years ago. The biggest outside holder of U.S. debt is the government of China. Holding such debt only makes sense if you are sure you can redeem the funds when you need to. As you can imagine, foreign governments and banks are increasingly worried about this, and have already started shifting such investments to other countries, and other currencies, especially the euro. This is one of the reasons for the sharp drop in the value of the dollar, to record low levels against the euro and other currencies.

So this $700 billion bailout, as large as it is, will only scratch the surface of these multiple dimensions of debt and economic weakness. We cannot continue to grow, based on borrowing against the future. The domestic financial pot is empty, and our foreign enablers are wising up. The economy will contract, our standard of living will decline, and more people will join the ranks of the poor and unemployed. This sucker could go down. The U.S. is in for tough times.

CEO Pay and the Bailout

Even in Congress, a lot of people are concerned that President Bush’s proposed $700 billion bailout for the financial sector will unduly benefit the superrich CEOs who contributed so much to this mess in the first place. Most Americans are appalled by the bloated CEO compensations that we occasionally hear about.

But maybe you didn’t hear about the CEO pay for the very firms that are most in the news these days.Last year, for example, AIG’s Martin Sullivan received compensation of $13.9 million, including a performance based bonus of $5.6 million. And this was after a 50% cut in his compensation from 2006! Who topped the list of CEO compensation in 2007? John Thain of Merrill Lynch, another failed enterprise. His compensation in 2007 was $83.1 million.

These amounts are breathtaking, but most people don’t realize, I think, how much this has changed over the last twenty years, and how out of line US CEO salaries are with those in other countries. I raise this in my book, in Chapter 2 on “The End of Affluence and Equality,” which I excerpt here:

In the 1950s, big-company CEOs in the U.S. earned about fifty times the pay of an average worker. Even then, that ratio was very high compared to other countries. But since then, CEO pay in the U.S. has skyrocketed in comparison to average salaries. By 1990, average CEO pay was about 100 times the average worker’s salary, and by 2000, it was more than 500 times that of the average worker.

These benefit packages are far out of line with those in other wealthy countries.

In 2004, the New York Times reported comparative ratios of CEO pay to employee averages. In Japan, CEOs earned about ten times that of the average employee. In Germany, the ratio was 11 to 1, in the UK 25 to 1, and in the United States, 531 to 1! It is difficult to see how American companies can justify these huge executive compensations when these other countries, which much smaller CEO pay, have generally managed faster economic growth, greater productivity increases, and greater gains in their stock markets.

CEO pay is another glaring example of how far out of kilter the U.S. economy is, how eroded is the sense of fairness in this country, and how out of sync the U.S. is with the rest of the world. It is yet another example of The End of the American Century.

Is The U.S. Becoming Third World?

Rosa Brooks, writing in the Los Angeles Times, has a clever but sobering column entitled "Hey, U.S., Welcome to the Third World!":

It's not every day that a superpower makes a bid to transform itself into a Third World nation, and we here at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to be among the first to welcome you to the community of states in desperate need of international economic assistance.

She also points out the many aspects of domestic decline in the U.S.:

Now you are facing the consequences. Income inequality has increased, as the rich have gotten windfalls while the middle class has seen incomes stagnate. Fewer and fewer of your citizens have access to affordable housing, healthcare or security in retirement. Even life expectancy has dropped.

Partly tongue-in-cheek, she offers World Bank and IMF assistance to help bail out the U.S. economy.

But this is not so far-fetched after all. In fact, in 2004, the International Monetary Fund issued a report (see p. 17 of my book) raising concern, even then, about the consequences of the U.S. debt for the stability of the world economy. It fretted about the potential insolvency of the U.S., warning that "large U.S. fiscal deficits posed a significant risk for the rest of the world." The IMF economists calculated that closing the deficit gap in the U.S. would require a permanent 60 percent hike in taxes, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

So while the U.S. is far from Third World status, it's fiscal and economic problems pose serious problems for the whole world.

(Thanks to my Butler colleague Vivian Deno for calling my attention to the column by Rosa Brooks).

The Unraveling of the U.S. Economy

Since I posted “Bankrupt America” here ten days ago, major pillars of America’s financial edifice have come crashing down. First, the federal government had to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies. Then the prominent securities firm Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, and the even more venerable Wall Street firm, Merrill Lynch avoided the same by selling itself to Bank of America. Today the Federal Reserve announced that it was taking over the insurance giant, A.I.G., in a bailout that will cost taxpayers $85 billion.

These are all huge companies—mainstays of the U.S. economy. It is difficult to make much sense of Senator John McCain’s assertion that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” These companies were the fundamentals, and they are all bankrupt. Most people, even most financial analysts, I think, do not quite grasp how elemental these developments are. They signal a shift that is as fundamental for the United States as global warming is for the planet.

The collapse of these financial institutions are part of the bigger picture of economic weakness that I describe in The End of the American Century. The United States has been overspending and under saving for a generation or more, and this has led to borrowing, deficit spending, and debt inside and outside the government. As I write near the end of Chapter One of the book, “where the U.S. once drove the world economy through economic growth, invention, and productivity, now it is doing so almost entirely by consumption but at levels it cannot pay for.”

The consumer spending and borrowing binge has been fueled by the growth of the financial services industry, which has increasingly replaced manufacturing as the mainstay of the U.S. economy. The shrinking manufacturing sector now accounts for only about 10 percent of corporate profits in the U.S., compared to 44% of such profits from the financial sector. Banks, mortgage companies, loan agencies and credit card companies make their money by making loans, and they are constantly seeking new customers and encouraging existing ones to borrow more.

It is this symbiotic relationship between binging consumers and profit seeking financial companies that has created the piles of consumer debt—the largest in U.S. history. All of this is starting to unravel now. People borrowed more than they could afford; the mortgage crisis undercut their ability to repay loans and mortgages; the banks and loan agencies faced mounting defaults and declining profits and stock prices. And as goes the financial sector, so goes the rest of the economy.

This is not some episodic financial downturn. The chickens are coming home to roost, and they have nowhere to land. The U.S. government has record budget deficits and is deeply in debt; Social Security is unfunded; households have zero savings (literally); the dollar is at record lows; energy at record highs; and now the stock market is taking a bashing. Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan told ABC that this is a “once-in-a-century type of event.” And former Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson, who I invoke in my “Bankrupt America” post, admitted that “these are the most extraordinary events I’ve ever seen.” (NYT 9/15/08).

In The End of the American Century, first written a year ago, and appearing next month, I wrote this at the conclusion of my Chapter One on “Imperial Overstretch and Economic Decline”:

A serious recession, perhaps even a depression, is the probable outcome. Such a recession will actually be necessary, however, for the long-term viability of the American economy. It will cause unemployment in the short run and declining wages and incomes in the long run, but this is inevitable if balance is to be restored. The U.S. economy will shrink, as will the country’s standard of living. This will simply reflect the actual economic situation in the U.S., which for so many years has been obscured by mortgaging the future with deficits and debt. The U.S. will no longer be the dominant economic power in the world, and with economic decline will come military, diplomatic, and political decline.”

What does all this mean for us? Stay tuned. (And your comments and thoughts are welcomed).

U.S. Intelligence Predicts Reduced U.S. Dominance

A Washington Post article this week (9/10/08) reports on a forthcoming U.S. intelligence agencies report that “envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades.” Thomas Finger, a top analyst for the U.S. intelligence community, delivered the preview in a speech in which he saw U.S. global leadership rapidly eroding in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.” The one area of continued U.S. dominance—military power—was becoming increasingly irrelevant as an asset in global power and influence.

These are all themes of The End of the American Century, so should not be terribly surprising, except for the source—the U.S. government itself—and the sweep of the conclusions. It is not just U.S. diplomatic influence that is on the wane, but political, economic, cultural and military leadership as well. The multidimensional and interrelated aspects of U.S. decline are the central theme of my book, but it is startling to hear it expressed so bluntly from the top intelligence analysts of the federal government.

The intelligence report, however, misses a key element of the declining global influence of the U.S.: its domestic weakening. Fingar’s speech saw the decline in U.S. dominance coming from exclusively global trends: globalization, climate change, resource shortages. All of these are important, of course, but the root of America’s declining global influence is here at home. Just as at the global level, the domestic decay is multidimensional—it is political, social and (especially) economic; and affects education, health care, infrastructure, and competitiveness.

The United States has become the world’s largest debtor, and the governments of other countries are increasingly worried about the scope and scale of U.S. debt and fiscal weaknesses. Even the International Monetary Fund, normally concerned about debt and insolvency in Third World countries, has warned that the continuing large budget deficits of the U.S pose “a significant threat for the rest of the world.” Other countries are beginning to turn away from the United States, both for investments and for global economic leadership, and are increasingly abandoning the dollar as the favored international currency. This is one reason for the sharp and steady decline of the dollar compared to the euro and other international currencies.

In many other respects, as well, the United States is no longer seen as the standard for emulation by other countries. The U.S. has among the highest rates of both poverty and inequality in the developed world. This poverty and inequality contribute to highly uneven access to health care, so the U.S. ranks near the bottom of developed countries in most measures of health and medical care. Even our vaunted democracy, the “beacon on the hill” for centuries, is now so dominated by money and special interests that it is rarely cited by other countries as a model for political development. Global public opinion polls in the past showed foreign populations skeptical and wary of the U.S. government; increasingly now they reveal negativity toward the U.S. population, and even to U.S. ideals. All aspects of American “soft power” are withering away.

The Fingar report, like Fareed Zakaria’s new book The Post-American World, sees this global shift coming because of “the rise of the rest”—global powerhouses like China, India and Brazil that increasingly cut into the U.S. lead on the world stage. Zakaria asserts, indeed, that the shift is not about the decline of America, and writes about the many elements of this country’s continuing strength. Solidly within the U.S. establishment, both of these analyses ignore the sand shifting beneath their own feet. Only by confronting and addressing our own domestic weaknesses and problems can we begin to solve our international ones.