Tag: g20

What Could the US Achieve at the G20 in Cannes?

By Simon Johnson

The April 2009 London summit of the G20 is widely regarded as having been a great success.  The world’s largest economies agreed on an immediate coordinated approach to the global financial crisis then raging and promised to work together on banking reforms that would support growth.  At the time, President Obama got high marks for his constructive engagement.

The G20 heads of government have met twice a year since London and in Cannes this week they meet again (November 3-4).  Could this summit also help stabilize the world economy?  And can President Obama again play a leading role?  The answer to both questions is likely the same: No. Continue reading “What Could the US Achieve at the G20 in Cannes?” →

G20: Profound And Complete Disappointment For The US Treasury

By Simon Johnson

Early Friday I went through the G20 communique for the Wall Street Journal; a marked up copy is available on-line.

It is hard to imagine how the summit could have gone any worse for the US Treasury and the president.  The spin machine is now working overtime – and you’ll see big efforts to get more positive stories over the coming week – but on all fronts the outcome is very bad.

  1. There was no substantive progress on anything to do with exchange rates.  The “indicative guidelines” to be agreed next year are just a way to kick the can down the road.  The Chinese are digging in hard on their exchange rate; this is headed towards a mutually destructive trade war.
  2. There was less disagreement at the summit regarding the “regulation” of global megabanks – but only because this had been gutted so effectively by the bankers’ lobby and officials who bought their specious arguments.  There is nothing here that will prevent or limit the impact of another major worldwide financial crisis. Continue reading “G20: Profound And Complete Disappointment For The US Treasury” →

Top Finance Experts To G20: The Basel III Process Is A Disaster

By Simon Johnson

The Group of 20 summit for heads of government this weekend will apparently “hail bank reform,” particularly as manifest in the Basel III process that has resulted in higher capital requirements for banks. According to leading authorities on the issue, however, the Basel process is closer to a disaster than a success.

Bank capital can be best thought of as the amount of financing of a bank’s operations (lending and investment) that is covered by equity and not by debt obligations. In other words, it describes how much of the assets of the bank are subject not to the “hard claim” of debt but rather to a residual or equity claim, which would not lead to distress or insolvency when the value of the asset goes down. For global megabanks, equity capital is thus a key element in preventing the failure of an individual institution (or a couple of banks) from bringing down the financial system.

The framing of the Basel “success,” according to officials, is that the big banks wanted to keep capital standards down — and this is definitely true — but that governments pushed for requirements that are as high as makes sense. The officials implicitly conceded the banks’ main intellectual point, that higher capital requirements would be contractionary for the economy. Continue reading “Top Finance Experts To G20: The Basel III Process Is A Disaster” →

Who’s In Charge Here? Not The G20

By Simon Johnson

Most accounts of the ministerial meeting last weekend of the Group of 20 — 19 nations plus the European Union that represent the world’s wealthiest economies —implied that it continued to perform sterling service – heading off currency wars, keeping explicit protectionism under control and deftly managing the process of reforming governance at the International Monetary Fund.

Post-financial crisis, middle-income countries continue to rise in economic importance, and the recent shift in global leadership from the Group of 7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) to the G-20 is commonly supposed to accommodate the growing claims of “emerging markets” on the world stage.

This interpretation is correct as far as it goes, but it also misses the main story, which is that emerging markets have two primary goals that are increasingly at odds with each other. These goals – to hold large stocks of American dollars and to stave off a flow of capital from abroad – add up to wanting to retain the emerging markets’ recently achieved status of collective net creditors (i.e., being owed more than they owe). Unfortunately, this contributes to the serious vulnerability of the world economy as we head into the next credit cycle. Continue reading “Who’s In Charge Here? Not The G20” →

The G20’s China Bet

By Simon Johnson

The G20 communiqué, released after the Toronto summit on Sunday, made it quite clear that most industrialized countries now have budget deficit reduction fever (see this version, with line-by-line comments by me, Marc Chandler and Arvind Subramanian).  The US resisted the pressure to cut government spending and/or raise taxes in a precipitate manner, but the sense of the meeting was clear – cut now to some extent and cut more tomorrow.

This makes some sense if you think that the global economy is in robust health and likely to grow at a rapid clip – say close to 5 percent per annum – for the foreseeable future.  With high global growth, it will matter less that governments are cutting back and unemployment will come down regardless.  Taking this into account, the IMF is actually predicting (as cited prominently by the G20) that budget “consolidation” actually raise growth over a five-year horizon.

There is no question that some weaker European countries, such as Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, had budget deficits that were out of control.  Particularly if they are to pay back all their foreign borrowing – a controversial idea that remains the conventional wisdom – these countries need some austerity.  But what about those larger countries, which remain creditworthy, such as Germany, France, the UK, and the US?  If these economies all decide to reduce their budget deficits, what will drive global growth? Continue reading “The G20’s China Bet” →

Warren Buffett And The G20

The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank governors are meeting today in St. Andrews, talking about the data they will need to look at in order to monitor each other’s economic performance and sustain growth (seriously).

The underlying idea is that if you talk long enough about the US current account deficit and the Chinese surplus, stuff happens and the imbalances will take care of themselves – or move on to take another form.

Warren Buffett seems to agree. Continue reading “Warren Buffett And The G20” →

The G20, The IMF, And Legitimacy

Strong advocates of our new G20 process are convinced that it will bring legitimacy to international economic policy discussions, rule-making, and crisis interventions.  Certainly, it’s better than the G7/G8 pretending to run things – after all, who elected them?

But who elected the G20?  The answer is: No one.  And, in case you were wondering, there is no application form to join the G20 (although you can crash the party if you have the right friends, e.g., Spain).  The G20 has appointed themselves as the world’s “economic governing council” (to quote Gordon Brown).

Is this a good idea? Continue reading “The G20, The IMF, And Legitimacy” →

Was The G20 Summit Actually Dangerous?

It is easy to dismiss the G20 communique and all the associated spin as empty waffle.  Ask people in a month what was accomplished in Pittsburgh and you’ll get the same blank stare that follows when you now ask: What was achieved at the G8 summit in Italy this year?

Perhaps just having emerging markets at the table will bring the world closer to stability and more inclined towards inclusive growth, but that seems unlikely.  Should we just move on – back to our respective domestic policy struggles?

That’s tempting, but consider for a moment the key way in which the G20 summit has worsened our predicament. Continue reading “Was The G20 Summit Actually Dangerous?” →

The G20 Summit in Pittsburgh: Should You Care?

On Thursday evening and all day Friday, heads of government from countries belonging to the G20 will meet in Pittsburgh.  On paper, this looks important – 90 percent of world economic output and 67 percent of world population will be at the table: the G7 (US, Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, France, and Italy), plus the European Union, the largest emerging market countries (including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa) and a few others.  And unlike the G7, which is really a club for rich industrialized countries, every continent and almost all income levels are represented in the G20. Continue reading “The G20 Summit in Pittsburgh: Should You Care?” →

G20 Thinking: “In The Medium Run We Are All Retired”

It looks like the G20 on Friday will emphasize its new “framework” for curing macroeconomic imbalances, rather than any substantive measures to regulate banks, derivatives, or any other primary cause of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

This is appealing to the G20 leaders because their call to “rebalance” global growth will involve no immediate action and no changes in policy – other than in the “medium run” (watch for this phrase in the communiqué).

When exactly is the medium run? Continue reading “G20 Thinking: “In The Medium Run We Are All Retired”” →

G20 Summit, IMF Meeting: What To Expect?

As we wade through a long line of international economic meetings – G20 ministers of finance last week, G20 heads of government in Pittsburgh coming up, IMF-World Bank governors meeting in Istanbul early October (and all the associated “deputies” meetings, where the real work goes on) – it seems fair to ask: where is regulatory reform of our financial system heading?

Long documents have been produced and official websites have become more organized.  Statements of principle have been made.  And the melodrama of rival reform proposals has reared its head: continental Europeans for controlling pay vs. the US for raising capital vs. the UK not really wanting to do anything.  But what does all of this add up to, and what should we expect from the forthcoming summit sequence?

Nothing meaningful. Continue reading “G20 Summit, IMF Meeting: What To Expect?” →

Obama Wins At G20: Europeans Lose Control of IMF

The big news at the G20 was obviously about the IMF, with the Americans pulling out an impressive deal on funding (compare with our predictions…). But the money is not the biggest achivement. The big move was in terms of who will run the IMF in the near future – as I explain my NYT.com column this morning, there is an implicit and almost immediate shift towards emerging markets.

President Obama had just the right tone yesterday.  Admittedly, he was helped by the fact that we no longer have anything to be arrogant about, but still the way he reached out to other countries – while also pointing out that they made big mistakes and are currently in trouble – conveyed exactly the right message.  The US will do much better if it lets emerging markets and developing countries have a serious and permanent place at the big table. 

Among other things, this will fundamentally change the way the IMF operates.  As a symbol and for its potential impact on the international economy moving forward, yesterday’s final loss of European control over the IMF really matters.

By Simon Johnson

Obama Takes The Lead: G20 Viewer’s Guide

With our myriad banking problems, rapidly rising unemployment, looming political battles over the budget and much more on the pressing domestic agenda, is the G20 summit in London (dinner Wednesday and meeting Thursday) really worth all the time and effort that the President and his team have devoted to it?  And, granted that President Obama has to attend this heads of government meeting for protocol reasons, is there much that this summit can realistically achieve – i.e., are there actions that will be taken as a result of the summit that would not otherwise have happened and that can really make a difference to the parlous state of our economy?

These are all reasonable questions.  And the answer is simple: in terms of the obvious major issues of the day, this summit is unlikely to achieve much.

But every global economic recovery has to start somewhere and it probably has to begin small.  And there are some slight glimmers of hope because (a) President Obama is taking a global leadership role, (b) he is doing this in a creative way that might seem surprising, but which should reduce the chance of a further global meltdown. Continue reading “Obama Takes The Lead: G20 Viewer’s Guide” →

Is The G20 Summit Worth Holding?

We know already much of what the G20 will produce: a communique that looks very much like the last one (dubious reassurances about the great progress being made along vague dimensions), no progress on fiscal stimulus (as we have been projecting for some time), and promises to clamp down on regulation for hedge funds and the like (fine, but how relevant is this to either what caused the crisis or what can sustain a recovery?)

Almost all the important issues are kept off the table by anachronistic diplomatic niceties: monetary policy around the world, Europe’s impending crisis, and how to escape the overweening power of major banks in almost all industrial countries.  The G20 summit has substantially failed even before it begins. Continue reading “Is The G20 Summit Worth Holding?” →

Political Will: Bernanke On The True Cost Of Banking

Stabilization programs in emerging markets often come down to this: the government needs to do something unpopular, e.g., reduce some subsidies, privatize an industry, or eliminate the crazy credit that goes to oligarchs – no one likes oligarchs, but their factories employ a lot of people.  There is naturally resistance – pushback from legislators, riots in the streets, or oligarchs calling their friends in the US foreign policy establishment.  The question becomes: does the government have the “political will” to get the job done?

In fall 1997, a key issue for Indonesia’s IMF program was whether the government could close the banking operations belonging to one of President Suharto’s sons.  There was an epic and fascinating struggle and, in the end, the government did not have sufficient political will or power.  The subsequent loss of US support, and further currency and economic collapse is (messy and painful for many) history.

It is striking that Ben Bernanke now asks whether the United States today has sufficient political will. Continue reading “Political Will: Bernanke On The True Cost Of Banking” →