ANALYSIS:The Budget aimed to tackle the appalling domestic economic crisis. But the global crisis, measured by employment levels and trade, is unprecedented
WITH ITS emergency Budget, following on from its earlier de facto cut in public sector pay, the Government has begun to take drastic steps to halt the catastrophic slide in the public finances. But any analysis of Government actions requires their framing against the balance of risks facing Ireland.
On the one hand, tightening budgetary policy will further depress a chronically ailing economy. One the other, not tightening enough risks national bankruptcy. To date, the risk of the former has, if anything, been overstated; the risk of the latter understated.
Discussion of Ireland’s risk of bankruptcy must focus first on the wider world, because international conditions will determine whether foreigners will be able and willing to lend to the Irish Government in the short and medium terms.
With the focus in Ireland understandably on the appalling conditions at home, it may be that the awfulness of the international picture is not as clearly in focus as it might be.
That picture is bleak. In all the main economies around the world, domestic trade (as measured by retail sales) is falling rapidly, while trade among those nations (as measured by exports and imports) is in a 1930s-like state of collapse.
For every indicator offering some hope that a bottom is being reached in the global downturn, there are 10 to suggest that freefall continues. A sample of the most up-to-date economic indicators from the world’s three largest national economies gives a sense not only of the gravity of the crisis, but its unprecedented nature.
Civilian employment in the US in the first three months of 2009 fell more sharply than at any time since the current series was compiled in 1948. In Germany, orders for manufactured goods fell by more than a third in January, the worst since records began in 1952. In Japan, manufacturing output in February tumbled by 38 per cent on the same month in 2008, a contraction the like of which has never been recorded in the 56-year history of that series.
If these economies remain on the trajectory of the past six months for another six months, the world economy will likely be in depression. Such an outcome would affect Ireland in many ways. Most immediately, it would give fresh impetus to investors’ flight from risk.
Those countries now facing crises of one sort or another – on their external payments or their domestic budgets – would find it even more difficult to tap sources of finance. Those closest to the edge would fail. Contagion would spread. The cycle of viciousness would feed on itself.
Those affected countries would clamour for bailouts. But international fire-fighting institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, could become overwhelmed. Nobody knows how a world economy as interconnected as ours would function in such circumstances, but the possibility exists that neither private nor public sources of funding would be available to finance governments which are, respectively, close to bankruptcy or already bankrupt.
That risk remains limited, but it is real and should form part of any government decision-making calculus. If the past seven months have taught us anything, it is that worst-case scenarios can all too easily come to pass, and then be exceeded by reality. Nothing can be ruled out now.
The other risk facing Ireland, and one that has been aired more frequently, is of what excessive budgetary tightening might do. There is no doubt that the economy needs stimulating, not austerity, now. But past mismanagement rules that option out.
Debate has therefore focused on how much unpalatable medicine to administer. Analogies can be helpful in communicating a complex message, but if wrongly chosen they can obscure rather than illuminate. This commonly used medical analogy is one such example.
Talk that the “medicine might kill the patient” misleads. An economy comprises of millions of people engaging in dozens of economic transactions each day. To kill an economy would require everyone to do precisely nothing. No government, no matter what action it takes, can produce such an outcome. Therefore, talk of “killing the patient” results in an overstatement of the risks of front-loading the budgetary adjustment process.
The Government’s decision to aim for a budget deficit of almost 10.75 per cent of GDP in 2009 – one of the largest such imbalances in the world – exposes Ireland if the worst happens internationally. It has clearly adjudged this risk to be of a lesser order than the effects of more budgetary tightening. It is to be sincerely hoped that the Government is correct in that judgment.
On another judgment, it is almost certainly not correct. The Government has chosen to place the balance of adjustment more heavily on tax increases than expenditure reductions. This decision may have been clever politics, but it was bad economics.
Evidence internationally shows that stabilising crises in public finances is achieved by bringing spending towards revenues, not vice versa. The chances are that it will not achieve its target of 10.75 per cent of GDP.
These weaknesses have not impressed those who lend to governments. By Thursday afternoon, almost 48 hours after the emergency package of measures had been announced, the bond market had not reacted positively to the measures. Indeed, rather than seeing the rates of interest on Irish Government debt fall, as might have been expected, they have drifted upwards. This does not augur well.
An unrelated observation on Tuesday’s announcements may also be worth making here. The Government’s decision to seek the advice of an outsider regarding who should be appointed to regulate the banking system is a step in the right direction. The individual named, however, is not.
Sir Andrew Large’s background and current role (not his ability or integrity) make him the wrong choice. He is one of the architects of Britain’s failed regulatory framework and a former senior executive of Barclays, a failed financial institution.
At least as important a reason militating against giving Large a role is his non-executive directorship of the Bermuda-headquartered insurance firm, Axis Capital Holdings. Although there is no reason to believe this firm is anything but reputable, its headquartering in a country listed by the OECD at last week’s G20 meeting as having failed to implement substantially internationally agreed tax standards sends all the wrong signals.
Large is of a financial era that has ended in collapse. The new era of finance will be unrecognisable from that which has gone before. Ireland should be looking forward now, not back.
Dan O’Brien is a senior economist and editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. His book, Crisis, Conflict and Progress,will be published in September by Gill Macmillan