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 [转帖]George Soros :Financial Times 01/22/2008 |
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Diamondhorse
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加入时间: 2005/11/01
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作者：Diamondhorse 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
The current financial crisis was precipitated by a bubble in the US
housing market. In some ways it resembles other crises that have
occurred since the end of the second world war at intervals ranging
from four to 10 years.
However, there is a profound difference: the current crisis marks the
end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the
international reserve currency. The periodic crises were part of a
larger boom-bust process. The current crisis is the culmination of a
super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years.
Boom-bust processes usually revolve around credit and always involve a
bias or misconception. This is usually a failure to recognise a
reflexive, circular connection between the willingness to lend and the
value of the collateral. Ease of credit generates demand that pushes up
the value of property, which in turn increases the amount of credit
available. A bubble starts when people buy houses in the expectation
that they can refinance their mortgages at a profit. The recent US
housing boom is a case in point. The 60-year super-boom is a more
complicated case.
Every time the credit expansion ran into trouble the financial
authorities intervened, injecting liquidity and finding other ways to
stimulate the economy. That created a system of asymmetric incentives
also known as moral hazard, which encouraged ever greater credit
expansion. The system was so successful that people came to believe in
what former US president Ronald Reagan called the magic of the
marketplace and I call market fundamentalism. Fundamentalists believe
that markets tend towards equilibrium and the common interest is best
served by allowing participants to pursue their self-interest. It is an
obvious misconception, because it was the intervention of the
authorities that prevented financial markets from breaking down, not
the markets themselves. Nevertheless, market fundamentalism emerged as
the dominant ideology in the 1980s, when financial markets started to
become globalised and the US started to run a current account deficit.
Globalisation allowed the US to suck up the savings of the rest of the
world and consume more than it produced. The US current account deficit
reached 6.2 per cent of gross national product in 2006. The financial
markets encouraged consumers to borrow by introducing ever more
sophisticated instruments and more generous terms. The authorities
aided and abetted the process by intervening whenever the global
financial system was at risk. Since 1980, regulations have been
progressively relaxed until they have practically disappeared.
The super-boom got out of hand when the new products became so
complicated that the authorities could no longer calculate the risks
and started relying on the risk management methods of the banks
themselves. Similarly, the rating agencies relied on the information
provided by the originators of synthetic products. It was a shocking
abdication of responsibility.
Everything that could go wrong did. What started with subprime
mortgages spread to all collateralised debt obligations, endangered
municipal and mortgage insurance and reinsurance companies and
threatened to unravel the multi-trillion-dollar credit default swap
market. Investment banks’ commitments to leveraged buyouts became
liabilities. Market-neutral hedge funds turned out not to be
market-neutral and had to be unwound. The asset-backed commercial paper
market came to a standstill and the special investment vehicles set up
by banks to get mortgages off their balance sheets could no longer get
outside financing. The final blow came when interbank lending, which is
at the heart of the financial system, was disrupted because banks had
to husband their resources and could not trust their counterparties.
The central banks had to inject an unprecedented amount of money and
extend credit on an unprecedented range of securities to a broader
range of institutions than ever before. That made the crisis more
severe than any since the second world war.
Credit expansion must now be followed by a period of contraction,
because some of the new credit instruments and practices are unsound
and unsustainable. The ability of the financial authorities to
stimulate the economy is constrained by the unwillingness of the rest
of the world to accumulate additional dollar reserves. Until recently,
investors were hoping that the US Federal Reserve would do whatever it
takes to avoid a recession, because that is what it did on previous
occasions. Now they will have to realise that the Fed may no longer be
in a position to do so. With oil, food and other commodities firm, and
the renminbi appreciating somewhat faster, the Fed also has to worry
about inflation. If federal funds were lowered beyond a certain point,
the dollar would come under renewed pressure and long-term bonds would
actually go up in yield. Where that point is, is impossible to
determine. When it is reached, the ability of the Fed to stimulate the
economy comes to an end.
Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less
inevitable, China, India and some of the oil-producing countries are in
a very strong countertrend. So, the current financial crisis is less
likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the
global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China
and other countries in the developing world.
The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US
protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into
recession or worse.
作者：Diamondhorse 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [转帖]George Soros :Financial Times 01/22/2008 -- Diamondhorse - (5669 Byte) 2008-1-25 周五, 10:14 (1140 reads)
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