There’s an unpleasant calm before the storm feel to British politics at the minute. Anyone who remembers the period from the end of 2006 through to the debacle of autumn 2008, with the failure of Northern Rock as a half-way point, will be familiar with the sensation: of watching an increasing number of the proverbial warning lights start to flash.
This isn’t, however, a repeat of 2008. (In critical respects, it’s worse – a more fundamental malaise.) Back then, from around 2006 onwards, multiplying defaults in the US housing market were amplified by the complex financial products the same mortgage debts had been packaged into, and then traded between major global financial institutions. Over 2007 and right up to the 15 September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Bros, these highly leveraged packages of debt were exploding and bringing down larger and larger financial institutions. By autumn that year, the crisis had spread into the dead-centre of the financial system: the giant, world-spanning investment banks, headquartered in the larger developed economies on both sides of the Atlantic, which now faced bankruptcy. Lehman Bros was allowed by the US government to fail; the shockwaves from the overnight disappearance of one of the world’s largest investment banks were so great as to then mobilise panicked support from the world’s major-economy governments. Various packages were rapidly assembled and, by spring 2009, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve had embarked on unprecedented money-printing exercise of Quantitative Easing. (Although sometimes presented as a crisis of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism, or some similar story about the more risk-taking and unstable US/UK version of capitalism, major European banks like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, had seriously overreached themselves.)
Crucially, the mechanism of crisis here was “endogenous”- meaning it was generated primarily inside the financial system itself. It was a classic debt bubble, as described by Hyman Minsky and others, that was bursting. The years of stability over the 2000s had encouraged the taking of more and more risks by financial institutions in the belief that the bubble would never best. But, as in Minsky’s description of the mechanism for crisis, stability generated later instability: the “Minsky moment” occurred when just a few of those debts could not be repaid – in this case, it was the US “subprime” mortgages that defaulted first – and this wobble was amplified by the huge amounts of debt that the earlier period of stability had built up. That financial crisis was then pushed into the wider economy – a sharp retrenchment of lending leading to less spending which, in turn, pushed economies rapidly into recession.
IMF warnings
This time round, the mechanism is (mostly) running the other way: that succession of disruptions to the real economy might provoke a financial crisis which would act as amplifier for the disruption, but not itself operate as a trigger. In addition, the regulations and additional support for financial systems that have been put in place since 2008 have reduced the presence of “systemic risks”, or at least reduced the systemic risks of the kind that played a crucial role in 2008. The system has been subjected to one, immense shock, when covid first erupted in spring 2020, and, whilst there was a brief wobble in financial markets across the globe, nothing like 2008 recurred.
This doesn’t mean there are no financial risks, with the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report highlighting rising leverage (indebtedness) in corporate and household sectors across the world, the weakly-regulated space of cryptoassets, and the unevenness of the recovery from 2020-21 between the advanced and “emerging market” economies. The latter is already producing strains. Sri Lanka, hard hit by covid, is facing shortages of “food, fuel and medicines” and is heading towards a default on its government debt. The government has approached China and the IMF for additional support, with China already offering a $1bn “swap line” of cheap credit – this arriving on top of the $3.5bn its government already owes to Chinese concerns.
One specific risk highlighted by the IMF across “emerging markets” is a version something that was already seen inside the eurozone in the aftermath of the 2008 crash: the “sovereign-bank nexus” turning rotten. With governments borrowing more, it has been banks in the global south who have loaned the money, leaving them with huge amounts of high-risk government debt on their balance sheet. Should a sovereign default, those banks themselves are at risk of failure. This could lead them to (at the very least) reign in their lending to households and businesses, provoking a recession – and then of course bringing the risk of sovereign default that much closer. Coupled with a slowdown in global trade, and the tightening of monetary policy in the advanced economies, particularly the US, which squeezes export markets for the less-developed world, and makes lending into the less developed less attractive, and the stage is set for an economic slowdown followed, in some cases, by default.
This is a relatively familiar story – one that fits easily into our existing ways of understanding economic crises. Either (as in 2008) a financial crisis causes a shock to demand, provoking recession, or a shock to demand provokes a financial crisis, worsening recession. In both cases the mechanism operates on the demand side. (This, incidentally, is what made austerity such a perverse response to the crash: a crisis driven by a collapse in spending was to be countered by… further cuts in spending.)
Supply-side crisis
Instead, the coming recession is emerging primarily as a result of supply-side factors. The rise in inflation, at least for the large, advanced economies in the OECD, is appearing because of rising import prices of essentials like oil, gas and food. It is not the product of “excess” domestic demand – retail sales are falling in the UK, but the prices paid by consumers are continuing to rise. And then there is the impact of concentration in different industries, enabling mark-ups on goods to stay high, and the hoarding of wealth, particularly of housing wealth: whilst consumers have seen their real incomes squeezed hard by rising prices, many large corporations have enjoyed a bumper few years. House prices, meanwhile, continue their upward march, assisted by the production of vast quantities of new, Quantitative Easing money since early 2020.
In all these cases, the causality runs from supply-side disruptions, led by covid-19, now joined by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, increasingly, by extreme weather across the world, that then feed into a grossly unequal distribution of ownership and finally turn into a squeeze on most people’s purchasing power as prices rise faster than their incomes. Throw in, on top of that, rising debt – in part as a result of attempting to maintain purchasing power, but itself turning quickly, via rising repayments, into a squeeze on spending – and the stage is set for a significant downturn in the UK and other advanced economies over the next 12 months.
This may not, as in the textbook demand-side recession, produce huge increases in unemployment, at least in the UK, where the “flexible” labour market has enabled the explosion of bogus self-employment, zero hours contracts, and other more insecure forms of work since 2008. We might well anticipate that if real wages are falling (since prices are rising faster than wages), the incentive for employers will be to maintain existing employment, or at least moderate their attempts to reduce costs by making redundancies. But seeing millions of people maintained in increasingly precarious employment, forced to cut back on their own spending as prices continue to rise, would hardly be a good thing.
The short-run solutions depend on two things, neither of which this government seem willing to achieve: rapid increases in wages and salaries, over and above the rate of inflation, and restrictions on price rises in key goods. Rapid increases in public sector pay, and the National Living Wage, both of which the government can control, would induce pay rises across the rest of the economy. Capping energy price rises in October – which, again, the government can determine – would significantly ease pressure on households. Down the line, a restructuring or simple write-off of unpayable household debt may well prove necessary, freeing up additional consumer spending. A short-run programme of rapid redistribution, from capital to labour and from creditors to debtors, would help get over the immediate hump. In the longer term, a more fundamental shift is needed – away from increasingly expensive non-renewable sources of energy and into cheap, domestically-generated renewables, matched to a programme of efficiency improvements such as providing proper loft insulation.