G20, en attendant les barbares...

Voici deux analyses passionnantes.

Sombres précurseurs? OUI.

Lanceurs d'alerte? OUI.

Analyses et prospectives? OUI.

Futuribles? Peut-être...

Un nouveau monde se dessine, mais certainement pas celui imaginé lors de la dernière réunion du G 20.

Il est évident que quels que puissent être les plans de relance budgétaire ou monétaire, le redémarrage de l'économie ne pourra se faire qu'au prix d'une remise sur pied fondamentale du système financier mondial.

Le G20 aura soigneusement contourné les sujets brûlants : l'assainissement des systèmes financiers, la relance fiscale et la réforme de la gouvernance mondiale.

Faute de prendre le réel par la main tant qu'il est encore temps, il finit toujours par vous sauter à la gorge.

01

The Aftermath of Financial Crises

Carmen Reinhart (Obfuscate( 'umd.edu', 'creinhar' )creinhar@umd.edu) and Kenneth S Rogoff

No 14656, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines the depth and duration of the slump that invariably follows severe financial crises, which tend to be protracted affairs. We find that asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. On a peak-to-trough basis, real housing price declines average 35 percent stretched out over six years, while equity price collapses average 55 percent over a downturn of about three and a half years. Not surprisingly, banking crises are associated with profound declines in output and employment. The unemployment rate rises an average of 7 percentage points over the down phase of the cycle, which lasts on average over four years. Output falls an average of over 9 percent, although the duration of the downturn is considerably shorter than for unemployment. The real value of government debt tends to explode, rising an average of 86 percent in the major post-World War II episodes. The main cause of debt explosions is usually not the widely cited costs of bailing out and recapitalizing the banking system. The collapse in tax revenues in the wake of deep and prolonged economic contractions is a critical factor in explaining the large budget deficits and increases in debt that follow the crisis. Our estimates of the rise in government debt are likely to be conservative, as these do not include increases in government guarantees, which also expand briskly during these episodes.

JEL-codes: E32 E44 F3 N20  (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-fdg, nep-fmk, nep-his, nep-mac and nep-ure
Date:  Written 2009-01
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02

A Tale of Two Depressions

   

Barry Eichengreen   Kevin H. O’Rourke   6 April 2009   http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421

US Often cited comparisons – which look only at the US – find that today’s crisis is milder than the Great Depression. In this column, two leading economic historians show that the world economy is now plummeting in a Great-Depression-like manner; indeed, world industrial production, trade and stock markets are diving faster now than during 1929-30. Fortunately, the policy response to date is much better.

 The parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930s and our current Great Recession have been widely remarked upon. Paul Krugman has compared the fall in US industrial production from its mid-1929 and late-2007 peaks, showing that it has been milder this time. On this basis he refers to the current situation, with characteristic black humour, as only “half a Great Depression.” The “Four Bad Bears” graph comparing the Dow in 1929-30 and S&P 500 in 2008-9 has similarly had wide circulation (Short 2009). It shows the US stock market since late 2007 falling just about as fast as in 1929-30.

Comparing the Great Depression to now for the world, not just the US

This and most other commentary contrasting the two episodes compares America then and now. This, however, is a misleading picture. The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.)  Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.