Preventing a global slump must be the priority

Martin Wolf

Every week, 50 of the world’s most influential economists discuss Martin Wolf’s articles on FT.com

In a more recent note, Professor Roubini predicts a combination of stagnation and deflation*. In doing so he points, with some glee, to the most recent analysis of the global outlook from JPMorgan Chase, once among the most bullish of analysts. Now, under the rubric “A bad week in hell”, JPMorgan states that: “Once again, we have taken an axe to near-term growth forecasts for the developed world and will likely follow up with additional downward revisions for emerging economies in the coming weeks. Already, our forecasts suggest that global gross domestic product will contract at a near 1 per cent annual rate” in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009.

JPMorgan expects shrinkage this quarter at an annualised rate of 4 per cent in the US, 3 per cent in the UK and 2 per cent in the eurozone. It is forecasting 0.4 per cent global growth in 2009, with advanced countries shrinking 0.5 per cent and emerging ones growing 4.2 per cent.
Given the near-disintegration of the western world’s banking system, the flight to safe assets, the tightening of credit to the real economy, collapsing equity prices, turmoil on currency markets, continued steep declines in house prices, rapid withdrawal of funds from hedge funds and ongoing collapse of the so-called “shadow banking system”, these forecasts even look quite optimistic. The outcome next year could be far worse.

If western governments had not intervened to guarantee and recapitalise banking systems, it would surely have been worse. Yet, as the charts show, even this has not halted the turmoil. Consider just two statistics: the capitalisation of world stock markets has halved; and, according to the Bank of England’s latest Financial Stability Report, mark-to-market losses on vulnerable debt instruments now amount to a massive $2,800bn (€2,240bn, £1,790bn)**.

So what should be done? Some would argue: nothing at all. The view is widely held, particularly in the US, that the world needs a big purge of past excesses. Recessions, on this line of argument, are good. People who hold this view also argue that governments caused all the mistakes. The market would, they insist, be incapable of the errors we have seen. To them, Alan Greenspan’s confession last week that “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” was about as welcome as Brutus’s knife was to Caesar.

Intriguingly, the Bank’s Financial Stability Report provides some support for this view: back in 1900, US banks had four times as much capital, relative to assets, as they do today. Similarly, the liquidity of the assets held by UK banks has collapsed over the past half-century. Implicit and explicit guarantees from governments have indeed made the financial system more dangerous than before. The combination of such guarantees with deregulation has proved lethal. Moral hazard is far from meaningless.

Yet the idea that a quick recession would purge the world of past excesses is ludicrous. The danger is, instead, of a slump, as a mountain of private debt – in the US, equal to three times GDP – topples over into mass bankruptcy. The downward spiral would begin with further decay of financial systems and proceed via pervasive mistrust, the vanishing of credit, closure of vast numbers of businesses, soaring unemployment, tumbling commodity prices, cascading declines in asset prices and soaring repossessions. Globalisation would spread the catastrophe everywhere.

Many of the victims would be innocent of past excesses, while many of the most guilty would retain their ill-gotten gains. This would be a recipe not for a revival of 19th-century laisser faire, but for xenophobia, nationalism and revolution. As it is, such outcomes are conceivable. Choosing to risk such an outcome would be like deciding to let a city burn in order to punish someone who smoked in bed. Risking huge damage now in the hope of lowering moral hazard later is mad.

Everything possible must be done to prevent the inescapable recession from turning into something worse. Many of the needed actions were laid out in an article on the FT’s Comment page this week by Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. I would stress five points.

First, as Oxford university’s John Muellbauer argues, deflation is a real danger***. Yet deflation is lethal for indebted economies. Today, short-term interest rates look far too high in the eurozone and the UK. Central banks need to look at their economies afresh and cut rates by at least 1, and ideally 2, percentage points.

Second, the only way to let the private sector deleverage, without mass bankruptcy and huge falls in spending, is by substituting the asset everybody wants: government debt. Contrary to Professor Sachs, I think tax cuts are indeed part of the solution.

Third, it is crucial that lending be sustained both inside and among economies. Having gone to such trouble to recapitalise banks, governments should insist that their money be used to sustain credit lines to those likely to remain solvent. If banks are unwilling to do this, central banks will have to replace them, as the Federal Reserve is now doing.

Fourth, it is in the vital self-interest of the affected high-income countries to keep hard-hit emerging economies afloat through the crisis.

Finally, it is equally evident that the world will not return to equilibrium if countries in strong financial positions do not expand domestic demand. The day of the housing bubbles and huge current account deficits in high-spending high-income countries is gone. Those who rely on current account surpluses to sustain demand must think again.

Decisions made over the next few months may well shape the world for a generation. At stake could be the legitimacy of the open market economy itself. Those who view liquidation of past excesses as the solution fail to understand the risks. The same is true of those dreaming of new global orders. Let us first get through the crisis. The danger remains huge and time is short.

* The Coming Global Stag-Deflation, October 25 2008, www.rgemonitor.com;** www.bankofengland.co.uk; *** The folly of the central banks of Europe, October 27 2008, www.voxeu.org
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

A cure for the coming crisis in auto finance

By Spencer Abraham

Published: November 3 2008 12:37
Last updated: November 3 2008 12:37

The discussion in Washington about facilitating the merger of Chrysler and General Motors highlights the turmoil plaguing the US automobile sector. But there is also an emerging automotive finance crisis. The credit crash has triggered a precipitous decline in new car sales, caused in part by a rapid reduction in automotive financing. This in turn threatens to spark additional large write-downs in the financial sector. Rather than allow this systemic risk to spread through our entire economy, the Federal Reserve should move quickly to draw on past practice and create a conservative, well-established financing body that can bring relief to the auto finance sector, before it is too late.

The automotive industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the US. It accounts for an estimated 20 per cent of all US manufacturing gross domestic product, more than 1m jobs and an estimated 4m-6m additional jobs on an indirect basis. It is a cornerstone of the US economy.
EDITOR’S CHOICE

In depth: Auto crunch - Oct-29
US car sales sink to lowest level for 25 years - Nov-03
Daimler to make its first staff cuts in US - Nov-03
States urge Washington aid for carmakers - Oct-30
Analysis: The wheels come off - Oct-31
Editorial Comment: Why Detroit is not Wall Street - Oct-30

But the sector has been hammered by the freeze in the credit markets. Consumers are facing higher interest rates on loans and dealers cannot obtain the financing needed to purchase inventory. New vehicle sales plunged 23 per cent year-on-year in September and are forecasted to fall by approximately 30 per cent in October. Total sales this year are expected to be just 11m vehicles – the lowest level since 1983.

The fundamental issue is auto loans, or rather the absence of them, since 94 per cent of consumers finance their car purchases. Finance companies cannot sell or finance auto receivables in the wake of the worst financial crisis that the asset-backed securities market (ABS) has ever seen. That has left these companies with little choice but to curtail lending, which is contributing to the precipitous drop in car sales.

The double whammy of declines in lending and in car sales will deal another punishing blow to the already beleaguered auto sector and will create profound risks for the US financial system. Consider this: for the past decade, domestic automotive sales have averaged 16m-17m units per year and that translates in to the extension of approximately $375bn of auto financing each year. Given that the average life of an auto loan is 2 years, an estimated $700bn-$800bn of exposure is currently thrashing around our financial system.

This exposure exists in a variety of forms. Regional and national banks, as well as credit unions and finance companies, are holding these loans on their balance sheets. Banks also have exposure to auto financing through conduits, structured investment vehicles and collateralised debt obligations, whose value is tied to automotive loans or ABS. In recent years, annual issuance of these securities has approached $100bn. And in 2008 these securities have accounted for more than 25 per cent of all ABS (only the credit card sector has issued more). Insurance companies, mutual funds and pension funds alone are estimated to have $80bn of exposure and the banking sector’s exposure is in excess of $200bn.

But reduced auto financing deprives the financial sector of a massive revenue stream and will deliver another shock to our financial system.

Even worse, the pain will be intensified because the banks have not hedged their exposure to auto loans, given the absence of any benchmark index comparable to the asset-backed securities index, which is used for mortgage portfolios. While the causes of the problems facing the auto and real estate sectors are very different – the auto sector has not been hampered by sloppy underwriting standards, for example – the common denominator is that downturns in both sectors threaten the stability of the US economy.

Sounds pretty scary, and it is. But we have the ability to prevent the auto finance crisis from spinning out of control as has been the case with the sub-prime crisis. Allowing the Big Three’s finance companies to become bank holding companies on an expedited basis – a step that press reports indicate is under discussion – is an ideal solution. This would allow them to obtain funding from the myriad programmes established by the Treasury and Fed.

Another way would be for the Fed or Treasury to do what they have done before when restricted markets need financing – provide loans on a direct basis. Here is how it would work: allow troubled auto finance companies to establish a new entity, to which the Fed would provide debt capital that could be used to originate auto loans. In turn, this finance company would manage all new loans. Unlike the sloppy lending standards in the home mortgage industry, auto lenders tend to be much more conservative. The majority of the loans would have highly predictable performance characteristics. So government would be unlikely to sustain any significant losses and could actually earn a very healthy return on its capital.

By providing capital, the Fed would help auto companies increase their loan volume, which in turn would help them reduce their cash burn and would shrink the ultimate size of the riskier government guarantees needed by the Big Three to ensure their survival. The government would simply be serving its appropriate role as “lender of last resort,” against good collateral and in a manner that would be profitable to the taxpayers.

At a time when the US economy is coping with the fallout from a deeply depressed housing market and turmoil in the banking sector, the last thing it needs is another shock to the system in the form of a meltdown in the auto financing sector. The Federal Reserve, having been late to recognise the implications of the subprime mortgage fallout, now has an opportunity to redeem itself and take an important step toward restoring the stability to auto finance.

The writer was US secretary of energy from 2001 to 2005 and senator from Michigan from 1995 to 2001, during which time he was chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Manufacturing and Competitiveness. He is currently chairman and chief executive of The Abraham Group, LLC

Haldane Society Lectures

HALDANE SOCIETY LECTURES2008 – 2009

Thursday 13 November 2008: Crisis for publicly funded legal services, June Venters QC and Laura Janes (Young Legal Aid Lawyers)

Thursday 11 December 2008: Challenging Arms Suppliers in the Courts; the Consequences of the Serious Fraud Office litigation

Thursday 29 January 2009: Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement 40 years on, Richard Harvey and Eamon McCann (invited)

Thursday 19 February 2009: Human rights in civil law cases, Liz Davies and Louise ChristianThursday 12 March 2008: Human rights in criminal cases

Thursday 23 April 2008: Lawyers who go the extra mile, speaking out for their clients: Aamer Anwar and another.

All lectures at the College of Law, 14 Store Street, London WC2, 6.30pm – 8.30pm. Admission free (£10 charge to legal practitioners requiring CPD points).

Not the death of capitalism, but the birth of a new order

The free-market model has been discredited and now its champions are panicking at what might emerge in its wake

Comments (50)

Seumas Milne
The Guardian,

Thursday October 23 2008

Article history

As the dust of the credit crash clears and the real world recession kicks in, the ideologues of capitalism are scaring themselves with spectres. "He's back," the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx's analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope.

In the US, John McCain has been lashing out at Barack Obama for his supposed "socialism", the High Tory writer Simon Heffer excitedly dubbed the state bail-out of the banks "neo-sovietisation", and the BBC broadcast a prime-time debate last week on whether the crisis signalled the "death of capitalism". Meanwhile the Economist, the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy, has been trying to mobilise true believers for a fightback: "Economic liberty is under attack", its current issue thunders. "Capitalism is at bay, but those who believe in it must fight for it."

Of course, they are running ahead of themselves in a panic. If Marx's central ideas about class and exploitation were really taking hold across the western world, you can be sure the mainstream media wouldn't be running quirky, cartoonish pieces and debates about them, but something much more ferocious and alarming.

It's certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by "abuses of capitalism", rather than the "failure of capitalism itself" - only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%.

As Sarkozy has pronounced: "Laissez-faire is finished." It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. "Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense," the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand.

The symbolic significance of this official return to Keynesianism shouldn't be underestimated. It's 32 years since the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan bowed the knee to monetarism, nearly three years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, and announced to his party conference: "We used to believe that we could spend our way out of a crisis, but I tell you ... it is no longer possible." Faced with financial collapse and the threat of a full-scale economic depression, such fancies have now had to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we're talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism - or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism's stark failures.

That has led some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the crisis will be the right, as in the 1930s. There's certainly a danger of growing support for rightwing populism on the back of mass unemployment; but if the new enthusiasm for Keynesian intervention and public ownership can be channelled to protect those most vulnerable to the crash - rather than make them pay the price for it, as now seems more likely - that need not be the case.

What the crisis is bound to do is increase the demand for alternatives both within capitalism and beyond it. It has already discredited the economic model that has dominated the world for a generation at a cost of endemic instability, rampant inequality and environmental devastation. In its defence of free-market capitalism this week, the Economist argued that, in the past 25 years of market liberalisation, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty and speculated that this decade may see the fastest growth of income per head in history.

But most of that growth and poverty reduction has been in China's state-directed and still heavily publicly-owned economy, while India's lesser capitalist success story is so grotesquely unequally distributed that the proportion of its children who are malnourished - at 47% a global leader - has remained almost unchanged for a decade. For the rest of the world, growth was faster and far more equally shared in the postwar decades of Keynesianism and socialism.

An opportunity has now opened up for those political leaders prepared to use this meltdown to reshape the economic system, from Obama to Hugo Chávez. It's often said that the left has no alternative model after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy. But in reality no economic and social model, left or right, has ever come pre-cooked: all of them - from Soviet power to the Keynesian welfare state and Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism - have grown out of ideologically driven improvisation in particular historical circumstances. Marx himself famously offered no blueprint.

Instead, the pressure to respond to economic need - as in the New Deal or postwar Europe - will shape the way the new economic order develops. Already, the forms of intervention have been sharply different from past crises, with bank nationalisations offering a potentially powerful new economic lever. We are no doubt heading into a new kind of capitalism as well as a period of growing support for more far-reaching social alternatives. But what form it takes will be decided by pressure, from above and below.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Money as an illusion

Have a look at a video entitled Money as Debt http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

Borrowers agree to work for years to repay the interest to the banks- effectively rendering themselves slaves to the bank for a certain time. (I've done it myself.) For these reasons, lending at interest - or usury - was for centuries reviled by every major religion and by great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. It's still forbidden by Islam and when Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, talked recently about Britain learning from sharia law, there's evidence to suggest that debt-free money was one of the things he had in mind.

What mystifies me is why the government doesn't simply create more debt-free money instead of borrowing from banks itself, with the result that taxpayers must meet the interest payments - more than all defence spending put together and not much less than the total amount spent on the NHS.

Gratifyingly, it turns out that a (still rather small) cross-bench group of MPs has put down a motion calling on the government to do exactly that - to issue "green credit for green growth". Among other things, they recommend "that the Treasury should use its powers to create non-interest bearing money so as to fund activities to combat climate change along the lines developed by the submission of the Forum for Stable Currencies."

By the way, I'm not going to pretend that the film is short. It's 47 minutes long. But perhaps that's how long it needs to be, to explain the many questions that are thrown up by this complex topic. I very strongly recommend that you download it and watch it when you can. I'd be delighted to hear what you think - but please do watch the film first!

John-Paul Flintoff

CDC - the next big problem?

In the week of the crash in 1929, Wall Street fell by 23 per cent. Last week, it fell by 18 per cent, London and Frankfurt by 21 per cent and Japan's Nikkei by 24 per cent. Every major financial centre's interbank market is frozen. Trust and confidence have collapsed; the global system is paralysed on a scale that now surpasses 1929. There is a combination of a worldwide bank run, seizure of credit markets and collapse of asset values that could plunge the globe into a depression. This is history's joke: the crisis of capitalism long predicted by communists and socialists who are no longer able to take advantage of it.

The scale of what is happening is scarcely credible. On Wednesday morning, the UK government committed itself to an unparalleled £500bn of extra support for Britain's paralysed financial system - up to £50bn of capital, guarantees for £250bn of lending between banks and additional injections of cash. This is the biggest, most comprehensive and best-thought-through operation of its kind mounted by any Western government since 1945. It was rewarded for its pains by a further 10 per cent fall in stock market prices, a further freezing of the already crisis-stricken interbank markets and, most ominously of all, the beginnings of a run on sterling.

One government can do so much; the British plan was simply swept to one side by what is now a financial pandemic which only a global response can address. G7 finance ministers, at last jointly aware of the gravity of the crisis, attempted to produce such a response in their five-point plan announced at the meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Washington on Friday night.

The proposals are distressingly broad brush and hardly add to the markets' knowledge. It is no longer news that governments do not intend to let a major bank fail, nor that they will protect depositors, inject capital from taxpayers, free up liquidity and do whatever is necessary to keep the system going. At best, I fear it will temporarily hold the line; at worst, it will be ignored as platitudinous.

The problem is that the markets no longer have any faith that the world financial system they helped create has any future. The model is bust. It is encouraging that both the Americans and Germans are now moving towards what they considered ideologically unthinkable a fortnight ago - they are preparing to follow the British lead, take big public stakes in banks and offer guarantees to the interbank market.

But while this is a necessary condition for stabilisation it is not sufficient. What needs to happen on top is an assault on the dark heart of the global financial system - the $55 trillion market in credit derivatives and, in particular, credit default swaps, the mechanisms routinely used to insure banks against losses on risky investments. This is a market more than twice the size of the combined GDP of the US, Japan and the EU. Until it is cleaned up and the toxic threat it poses is removed, the pandemic will continue. Even nationalised banks, and the countries standing behind them, could be overwhelmed by the scale of the losses now emerging.

This market in credit derivatives has grown explosively over the last decade largely in response to the $10 trillion market in securitised assets - the packaging up of income from a huge variety of sources (office rents, port charges, mortgage payments, sport stadiums) and its subsequent sale as a 'security' to be traded between banks.

Plainly, these securities are risky, so the markets invented a system of insurance. A buyer of a securitised bond can purchase what is in effect an insurance contract that will protect him or her against default - a credit default swap (CDS). But unlike the comprehensive insurance contract on your car which you have with one insurance company, these credit default contracts can be freely bought and sold. Complex mathematical models are continually assessing the risk and comparing it to market prices. If the risk falls, the CDSs are cheap; if the risk rises - because, say, a credit rating agency declares the issuing company is less solid - the price rises. Hedge funds speculate in them wildly.

Their purpose was a market solution to make securitisation less risky; in fact, they make it more risky, as we are now witnessing. The collapse of Lehman Brothers - the refusal to bail it out has had cataclysmic consequences - means that it can no longer honour $110bn of bonds, nor $440bn of CDSs it had written. On Friday, the dud contracts were auctioned, with buyers paying a paltry eight cents for every dollar. Put another way, there is now a $414bn hole which somebody holding these contracts has to honour. And if your head is spinning now, add the three bust Icelandic banks. They can no longer honour more than $50bn of bonds, nor a mind-boggling $200bn of CDSs.

The implications are global. The UK government might have frozen Icelandic assets in Britain to get some compensation for the losses, but we are only part of the story. Austrian, Danish and Finnish banks all hold near valueless Icelandic bonds on which they will have bought CDSs from heaven knows whom - Deutsche Bank? A two-bit hedge fund in Dubai? Lehman Brother? Kaupthing? Shareholders in Barclays and RBS are rightly concerned; the two banks hold a stunning $2.4 trillion of CDSs each - more than the UK's GDP.

We don't know their exposure to Iceland and Lehman Brothers, but with such enormous credit derivative books it would be amazing if there were none. While every bank tries to pass the toxic parcel on to somebody else, the system has to find the money. So will compensation for the near valueless contracts and thus now uninsured debt ultimately be made - and by whom? And because nobody knows - not the regulators, banks or governments - who owns the swaps and whether they are credit-worthy, nobody can answer the question. Maybe holders of insurance policies will get the cash due to them, but will that weaken somebody else? The result - panic.

This is the ultra-dangerous downward vortex in which the system is locked. It is why share prices are plummeting. As recession deepens, there will be defaults on securitised bonds and the potential collapse of more banks outside the G7 ring-fence. Nobody knows what proportion of the $55 trillion of credit default contracts that have actually been written will be honoured and who might bear losses running into trillions of dollars. Buying new contracts to insure against default has become prohibitively expensive. Securitisation, and insuring against risk, has effectively ceased. And because the markets don't know where the losses will fall, banks cannot borrow from each other except overnight or from their central bank. Credit flows are at a standstill. Property prices are plummeting. A famous economist, Hyman Minsky, foretold that unregulated finance capitalism inevitably ends in a meltdown and slump. The world is facing a Minsky moment.

One element of the necessary response is in the making - giving banks access to unlimited taxpayers' capital, guaranteeing interbank lending and pumping cash into the system. I suspect that only majority government control of the West's major banks will now stabilise matters. But that is not enough. The markets no longer believe in the financial market structures they have invented. As a result, the US Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and Bank of England must become not just lenders, but insurers of last resort, providing the insurance contracts that the markets have stopped. Governments must write CDSs themselves.

In future, the global credit derivative markets will need to be organised into regulated, licensed exchanges rather than conducted in a way that made the Wild West look tame. We will need a global authority to supervise the credit derivative markets, write insurance contracts and stand ready to guarantee that contracts are settled. And we will need a global, independent credit rating agency to assess risk objectively. More immediately, there needs to be deep co-ordinated cuts in interest rates; last week's half per cent cut was useful but inadequate.

I don't know whether politicians and their advisers can move as quickly as they need in so many areas and collaborate across so many countries to restore stability. Most of those who should be leading the world's recovery are, politically speaking, numbered among the politically walking wounded or dead; either near the end of office like George Bush, in a fractious coalition like Angela Merkel, or leading a dysfunctional party like the weak Taro Aso of Japan.

Without collaboration and leadership, we face disaster. On Friday, there were terrifying signs that the contagion was spreading to the foreign exchange markets: for example, the Australian dollar dived 20 per cent against the yen over the week; sterling fell 3 per cent against the dollar. If investors start to think that politicians cannot control the situation and the necessary international action falls short of what is required, then Britain has got neither the GDP nor financial firepower to support the scale of capital flight and financial losses that will hit the City of London.

The pound could fall at least the 30 to 40 per cent that currencies fell during the Asian financial crisis. London could become the centre of the rout. If so, it will not just be complete nationalisation of the banks we will be considering but the reimposition of capital and exchange controls.

For 30 years, greedy, callow, ignorant financiers, supported by no less callow politicians from all the political parties, have proclaimed the wonders of financial innovation and how proud we all should be of the City of London. The price tag for their behaviour is an economic calamity. We should never have bought such snake oil. The consolation in these dark times is that we never will again.

Obama's speech on the economy

Full text of Barack Obama's speech on the economy

Barack Obama
guardian.co.uk,
Monday October 13 2008 19.13 BST
Article history

We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic crisis we face is the worst since the Great Depression. Markets across the globe have become increasingly unstable, and millions of Americans will open up their 401(k) statements this week and see that so much of their hard-earned savings have disappeared.
The credit crisis has left businesses large and small unable to get loans, which means they can't buy new equipment, or hire new workers, or even make payroll for the workers they have. You've got auto plants right here in Ohio that have been around for decades closing their doors and laying off workers who've never known another job in their entire life.
760,000 workers have lost their jobs this year. Unemployment here in Ohio is up 85% over the last eight years, which is the highest it's been in sixteen years. You've lost one of every four manufacturing jobs, the typical Ohio family has seen their income fall $2,500, and it's getting harder and harder to make the mortgage, or fill up your gas tank, or even keep the electricity on at the end of the month. At this rate, the question isn't just "are you better off than you were four years ago?", it's "are you better off than you were four weeks ago?"
I know these are difficult times. I know folks are worried. But I also know this – we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. Because we are the United States of America. We are the country that has faced down war and depression, great challenges and great threats. And at each and every moment, we have risen to meet these challenges – not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans.
We still have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth. We're still home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and our research facilities. It won't be easy, but there's no reason we can't make this century another American century.
But it will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years. And that's why I'm running for president of the United States of America.
My opponent has made his choice. Last week, Senator McCain's campaign announced that they were going to "turn the page" on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead. His campaign actually said, and I quote, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose". Well Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but I'm worried about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings. They can't afford four more years of the economic theory that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. We've seen where that's led us and we're not going back. It's time to turn the page.
Over the course of this campaign, I've laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle-class and strengthen our economy in the long-term. I'll reform our tax code so that 95% of workers and their families get a tax cut, and eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000. I'll bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses by investing in preventative care, new technology, and giving every American the chance to get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress give themselves. We'll ensure every child can compete in the global economy by recruiting an army of new teachers and making college affordable for anyone who wants to go. We'll create five million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years, and we'll create two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools and bridges.
But that's a long-term strategy for growth. Right now, we face an immediate economic emergency that requires urgent action. We can't wait to help workers and families and communities who are struggling right now – who don't know if their job or their retirement will be there tomorrow, who don't know if next week's paycheck will cover this month's bills. We need to pass an economic rescue plan for the middle-class and we need to do it now. Today I'm proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilise our financial system, provide relief to families and communities, and help struggling homeowners. It's a plan that begins with one word that's on everyone's mind, and it's spelled J-O-B-S.
We've already lost three-quarters of a million jobs this year, and some experts say that unemployment may rise to 8% by the end of next year. We can't wait until then to start creating new jobs. That's why I'm proposing to give our businesses a new American jobs tax credit for each new employee they hire here in the United States over the next two years.
To fuel the real engine of job creation in this country, I've also proposed eliminating all capital gains taxes on investments in small businesses and start-up companies, and I've proposed an additional tax incentive through next year to encourage new small business investment. It is time to protect the jobs we have and to create the jobs of tomorrow by unlocking the drive, and ingenuity, and innovation of the American people. And we should fast track the loan guarantees we passed for our auto industry and provide more as needed so that they can build the energy-efficient cars America needs to end our dependence on foreign oil.
We will also save one million jobs by creating a jobs and growth fund that will provide money to states and local communities so that they can move forward with projects to rebuild and repair our roads, our bridges and our schools. A lot of these projects and these jobs are at risk right now because of budget shortfalls, but this fund will make sure they continue.
The second part of my rescue plan is to provide immediate relief to families who are watching their paycheck shrink and their jobs and life savings disappear. I've already proposed a middle-class tax cut for 95% of workers and their families, but today I'm calling on Congress to pass a plan so that the IRS will mail out the first round of those tax cuts as soon as possible. We should also extend and expand unemployment benefits to those Americans who have lost their jobs and are having a harder time finding new ones in this weak economy. And we should stop making them pay taxes on those unemployment insurance benefits as well.
At a time when the ups and downs of the stock market have rarely been so unpredictable and dramatic, we also need to give families and retirees more flexibility and security when it comes to their retirement savings.
I welcome Senator McCain's proposal to waive the rules that currently force our seniors to withdraw from their 401(k)s even when the market is bad. I think that's a good idea, but I think we need to do even more. Since so many Americans will be struggling to pay the bills over the next year, I propose that we allow every family to withdraw up to 15% from their IRA or 401(k) – up to a maximum of $10,000 – without any fine or penalty throughout 2009. This will help families get through this crisis without being forced to make painful choices like selling their homes or not sending their kids to college.
The third part of my rescue plan is to provide relief for homeowners who are watching their home values decline while their property taxes go up. Earlier this year I pushed for legislation that would help homeowners stay in their homes by working to modify their mortgages. When Secretary Paulson proposed his original financial rescue plan it included nothing for homeowners. When Senator McCain was silent on the issue, I insisted that it include protections for homeowners. Now the Treasury must use the authority its been granted and move aggressively to help people avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. We don't need a new law or a new $300bn giveaway to banks like Senator McCain has proposed, we just need to act quickly and decisively.
I've already proposed a mortgage tax credit for struggling homeowners worth 10% of the interest you pay on your mortgage and we should move quickly to pass it. We should also change the unfair bankruptcy laws that allow judges to write down your mortgage if you own six or seven homes, but not if you have only one. And for all those cities and small towns that are facing a choice between cutting services like healthcare and education or raising property taxes, we will provide the funding to prevent those tax hikes from happening. We cannot allow homeowners and small towns to suffer because of the mess made by Wall Street and Washington.
For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I'm also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you are a bank or lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and renegotiate their mortgages, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet.
Finally, this crisis has taught us that we cannot have a sound economy with a dysfunctional financial system. We passed a financial rescue plan that has the promise to help stabilise the financial system, but only if we act quickly, effectively and aggressively. The Treasury Department must move quickly with their plan to put more money into struggling banks so they have enough to lend, and they should do it in a way that protects taxpayers instead of enriching CEOs. There was a report yesterday that some financial institutions participating in this rescue plan are still trying to avoid restraints on CEO pay. That's not just wrong, it's an outrage to every American whose tax dollars have been put at risk. No major investor would ever make an investment if they didn't think the corporation was being prudent and responsible, and we shouldn't expect taxpayers to think any differently. We should also be prepared to extend broader guarantees if it becomes necessary to stabilise our financial system.
I also believe that [the] Treasury should not limit itself to purchasing mortgage-backed securities – it should help unfreeze markets for individual mortgages, student loans, car loans, and credit card loans. And I think we need to do even more to make loans available in two very important areas of our economy: small businesses and communities.
On Friday, I proposed [a] small business rescue plan that would create an emergency lending fund to lend money directly to small businesses that need cash for their payroll or to buy inventory. It's what we did after 9/11, and it allowed us to get low-cost loans out to tens of thousands of small businesses. We'll also make it easier for private lenders to make small business loans by expanding the Small Business Administration's loan guarantee program. By temporarily eliminating fees for borrowers and lenders, we can unlock the credit that small firms need to pay their workers and keep their doors open. And today, I'm also proposing that we maintain the ability of states and local communities that are struggling to maintain basic services without raising taxes to continue to get the credit they need.
Congress should pass this emergency rescue plan as soon as possible. If Washington can move quickly to pass a rescue plan for our financial system, there's no reason we can't move just as quickly to pass a rescue plan for our middle-class that will create jobs, provide relief, and help homeowners. And if Congress does not act in the coming months, it will be one of the first things I do as president of the United States. Because we can't wait any longer to start creating new jobs, to help struggling communities and homeowners, and to provide real and immediate relief to families who are worried not only about this month's bills, but their entire life savings. This plan will help ease those anxieties, and along with the other economic policies I've proposed, it will begin to create new jobs, grow family incomes, and put us back on the path to prosperity.
I won't pretend this will be easy or come without cost. We'll have to set priorities as never before, and stick to them. That means pursuing investments in areas such as energy, education and health care that bear directly on our economic future, while deferring other things we can afford to do without. It means scouring the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don't need and making the ones we do work more efficiently and cost less.
It also means promoting a new ethic of responsibility. Part of the reason this crisis occurred is that everyone was living beyond their means – from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street. CEOs got greedy. Politicians spent money they didn't have. Lenders tricked people into buying home they couldn't afford and some folks knew they couldn't afford them and bought them anyway. We've lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits, to borrow instead of save.
Now, I know that in an age of declining wages and skyrocketing costs, for many folks this was not a choice but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed from China and other creditors to help pay its bills.
But we now know how dangerous that can be. Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what's necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.
It's a serious challenge. But we can do it if we act now, and if we act as one nation. We can bring a new era of responsibility and accountability to Wall Street and to Washington. We can put in place common-sense regulations to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again. We can make investments in the technology and innovation that will restore prosperity and lead to new jobs and a new economy for the 21st century. We can restore a sense of fairness and balance that will give ever American a fair shot at the American dream. And above all, we can restore confidence – confidence in America, confidence in our economy, and confidence in ourselves.
This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way and its purpose? When we allowed our own petty differences and broken politics to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?
Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognising that common stake that we have in each other's success?
This is one of those moments. I realise you're cynical and fed up with politics. I understand that you're disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what's been asked of the American people in times of trial and turmoil throughout our history. I ask you to believe – to believe in yourselves, in each other, and in the future we can build together.
Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes. Not when there are families who can't afford to see a doctor, or send their child to college, or pay their bills at the end of the month. Not when there is a generation that is counting on us to give them the same opportunities and the same chances that we had for ourselves.
We can do this. Americans have done this before. Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can, maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America.
Now it falls to us. Together, we cannot fail. Together, we can overcome the broken policies and divided politics of the last eight years. Together, we can renew an economy that rewards work and rebuilds the middle class. Together, we can create millions of new jobs, and deliver on the promise of healthcare you can afford and education that helps your kids compete. We can do this if we come together, if we have confidence in ourselves and each other, if we look beyond the darkness of the day to the bright light of hope that lies ahead. Together, we can change this country and change this world. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.
Printable version
Send to a friend
Share
Clip
Contact us
larger smaller