The United States lived in Lever-Lever Land too long. Like Peter Pan, the
country has refused to grow up. The object of the stimulus plans offered by the
present and the next US administrations is to return to Lever-Lever Land, that
is, to debt-financed consumption. It won't work. Leverage is for the young, who
borrow to build homes and start businesses. The financial crisis forces
Americans to act their age, that is, to save rather than borrow and spend.
For a world economy geared to servicing the once-insatiable maw of American
consumption, that is very bad news for 2009. Recovery cannot begin until
Americans have restored their decimated wealth by saving - an effort that will
take years - or until
the youthful emerging markets start importing from the US, rather than
exporting to it.
America's leaders haven't yet had the required moment of clarity. Its financial
leaders still think the problem is a mere matter of confidence. These were the
same people who swallowed their own sales pitch.
The crisis began in June 2007 with the failure of a Bear Stearns hedge fund
backed by partners' money, and peaked in September 2008 with the failure of
Lehman Brothers, a shop where managers famously had to drink the Kool-Aid. Wall
Street fell on its own sharp elbows and died. Firms that survived the Great
Depression have failed or merged into a mockery of their former piratical
selves. Why did the kidders succeed in kidding themselves? Don't blame them:
think of a middle-aged Peter Pan unwilling to admit that he shouldn't be
flying.
Like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, who was not evil at the beginning,
the instruments of monetary destruction that caused the present crisis began as
the agents of upward mobility and entrepreneurial change. Mortgage-backed
securities (MBS), leveraged buyouts (LBOs), collateralized debt obligations
(CDOs), asset-backed securities (ABS) and even subprime mortgages unleashed
American energy during the 1980s, and made the US economy the wonder of the
world.
At the outset, the alphabet soup of finance helped entrepreneurs and households
to leap over barriers to market entry and make markets more efficient. Because
financial innovation had done so much good, its practitioners refused to
believe that it could do so much harm.
America was younger then. The Baby Boomers were in their 20s and 30s when
Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, and they needed all the capital they would
borrow. All the instruments of monetary destruction that rained ruin on
American markets in 2008 came into the world as good things. They arrived at a
moment when America need more debt.
Can America return to Lever-Lever Land? Not a chance. America is much an older
country than it was during the tech boom of the 1990s. J M Keynes's "animal
spirits" are made mainly of testosterone, and America had loads of that.
Figure 1: Young (25-50) vs older (50-64) American workers
In the mid-1980s, America was young, and was getting younger. Its ratio of
younger (25-50) to older (50-65) workers peaked in the mid-1990s, when it had
1.5 citizens aged 25-50 for every one citizen aged 50-64. Those were heady
times. The children of the baby boomers were happy to work for stock options,
live on pizza, and spent 20 hours a day in a loft launching an Internet
startup. Joining a startup was a rite of passage for bright young college
graduates, and the exuberant young people of America momentarily persuaded the
world that they had discovered a fountain of youth.
Ten years later, the number of aging workers and young workers is about even.
The young programmer who worked for stock options during the 1990s still owns
them, and all of them are worthless. He or she is pushing 40, with teenaged
children who need money for college.
Youth needs leverage. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which launched the
quarter-century expansion of 1983-2007, rested on three kinds of leverage: home
mortgages, junk bonds and leveraged buyouts. Turning mortgages into
mortgage-backed securities made it easy for young families to buy homes and
easy for entrepreneurs to draw working capital from the value of their homes.
Junk bonds allowed emerging companies without the balance-sheet strength of
their big competitors to enter the market and take on entrenched interests. And
leveraged buyouts allowed clever upstarts to evict stodgy managers and make
capital more efficient. The financiers who created these markets were giants.
The mortgage-backed securities market allowed savers in the aging rustbelt
states of America to lend money to young families in the sunbelt. Later, it
allowed investors around the world to invest in American homes. Federal
agencies that standardized and guaranteed US mortgages made securitization
possible, by creating a generic form of mortgage that could be bundled into
securities.
The world's appetite for American mortgage-backed securities, though, grew out
of bounds as an entire generation neared retirement in Europe and Japan, and
the newly prosperous savers of Asia sought secure investments. America could
not produce enough of the standardized, government-backed home mortgages to
satisfy demand.
Mortgages with risky credit comprised a tiny portion of total issuance during
the 1990s, but grew to $800 billion a year of issuance by 2006 before the
market crashed to zero during 2008. Wall Street appropriate Milken's old idea
of pooling credit risk and selling different grades of risk to different
investors and applied it with a vengeance to risky mortgages, creating the sub
prime disaster of 2008.
Michael Milken, the creator of the modern high-yield bond market, might have
been history's best judge of credit. By the time Milken went to jail on largely
technical securities infractions in 1989, an army of imitators had turned the
high-yield market into a manufacturing machine for soon-to-default credits,
which helped trigger the recession of 1990. Milken invented the collateralized
bond obligation - a pool of securities whose credit risk could be assigned to
different investors willing to assume different degrees of risk in return for
more or less income.
During the 1980s, junk bonds gave entrepreneurs access to clubby capital
markets that had favored the stodgy Fortune 500. Sadly, this market financed a
wave of telecom startups during the technology bubble of the late 1990s. At the
peak of the bubble in 1999, telecom comprised a third of high-yield issuance,
and the vast majority of the sector defaulted with little recovery for
investors. The technology debacle discredited the market's original mission,
namely to promote entrepreneurship; it had done far too good a job with the
wrong sort of risks.
By the mid-2000s, Wall Street had stood the junk bond market on its head: if
investors were once burned and twice shy of new market entrants with low credit
ratings, they would buy junk bonds long-established companies that used to have
investment grade ratings. Wall Street proceeded to issue vast amounts of
low-quality debt to fund leveraged buyouts of industry-leading giants: US$33
billion for Health Care Associates in 2006, $36 billion for Equity Office
Properties Trust, nearly $40 billion for the utility TXU, for a total of $350
billion of leveraged buyouts in 2006, compared with just $50 billion in 2003.
Wall Street sold junk bonds to finance the LBOs, and the junk bonds in turn
were sold into alphabet-soup trusts such as collateralized debt obligations.
Michael Milken's old vehicle for dealing out risks to different classes of
investors became an assembly-line for levering up corporate balance sheets.
To accommodate the leverage boom in American and overseas corporate finance,
issuance of collateralized debt obligations rose almost 10-fold between 2002
and 2006, before falling to zero this year.
Figure 3: Global issuance of collateralized debt obligations (quarterly)
Nearly $1 trillion of these structured instruments have been written off in the
past year. The US Federal Reserve has added more than $1 trillion to its
balance sheet, buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of structured
instruments from banks, not to mention roughly $300 billion of commercial paper
issued by US corporations who otherwise could not raise money. The Treasury has
injected over $300 billion of capital into the banking system and insurance
companies, with full-dress bailouts for two of the largest players in the
structured finance market, American International Group and Citigroup.
Some analysts worry that inflation is lurking behind the Fed's exploding
balance sheet. I am less concerned. Aging people buy future goods (securities)
for their retirement rather than current goods. Demographic decline is
deflationary, as Japan should have taught the world by now.
Aging workers, who soon will predominate in the American workforce, missed
their chance to accumulate savings for retirement and education during the boom
years of 2002-2008. Instead, they borrowed cheap money from foreigners and
gambled on real estate. Many analysts have drawn attention to the link between
America's zero-percent personal savings rate and the current account deficit
(Figure 4). Americans' home equity probably is worth half of what it was three
years ago, and fall a great deal further. If they had a retirement savings
plan, it is probably down by 40% or so. If they still have a job, they need to
save as much as they can and make up for lost time. All the stimulus in the
world won't persuade them to spend now that they know that they can't retire on
the price of their houses.
Figure 4: US current account deficit vs savings rate
America's aging Peter Pans have discovered that happy thoughts and fairy dust
no longer entitle them to fly. The young people of America led the world
economy during the 1980s and 1990s, but now they are older, struggling to pay
down mortgages that might be worth more than their homes, and to put something
aside for a retirement that they never may be able to afford.
The world needs more young people to restore "animal spirits" to the market
place, and America no longer has enough of them. That is why emerging markets
must become more than an outsourcing shop for cheap manufactures, or an
oilwell-cum-ethanol plantation. Harnessing the potential productivity of the
world's young people is the challenge for next year and the next decade.
Without them, America will endure a lost decade more depressing than Japan's
during the 1990s.
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