Anatole Kaletsky

Can economists contribute anything useful to our understanding of politics, business and finance in the real world?

I raise this question having spent last weekend in Toronto at the annual conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a foundation created in 2009 in response to the failure of modern economics in the global financial crisis (whose board I currently chair). Unfortunately, the question raised above is as troubling today as it was in November 2008, when Britain’s Queen Elizabeth famously stunned the head of the London School of Economics by asking faux naively, “But why did nobody foresee this [economic collapse]?”

As John Maynard Keynes observed in 1936, when he challenged the economic orthodoxies that were aggravating the Great Depression: “The ideas of economists, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

This remark is as relevant today as in 1936. Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, asked rhetorically in Toronto: “Why are central banks and governments still trying to predict the effects of their policies with an economic model that is manifestly absurd?”

His answer was that the economic models studied in universities and published in leading academic journals are still largely based on a simplifying concept, known as the Representative Agent, which effectively assumes that “everyone in the economy is the same.”  So these models have nothing to say about lending or borrowing, ignore the existence of banks and treat bankruptcies as unimportant because “when the borrower does not repay, he only defaults on himself.”

The recent economic news has been about as investor-friendly as anyone could imagine.

It started with last week’s strong U.S. employment figures; continued through Tuesday’s reassuring International Monetary Fund forecasts, which put the probability of avoiding a global recession this year to 99.9 percent, and culminated in dovish Federal Reserve minutes, which soothed concerns about an earlier than expected  increase in U.S. interest rates.

Considering all this good news, investors could justifiably feel surprised — even shocked — by Wall Street’s sharp falls this week. By Thursday afternoon, the Standard & Poor’s 500 had given back its entire gain for the year, and the Nasdaq 100 gauge of leading technology stocks had suffered its biggest setback since 2011. Many market analysts interpreted the negative reaction to good news as a classic sign of a market top, warning that the uninterrupted rise in share prices that began more than five years ago is overdue for a sharp reversal.

President Vladimir Putin has disastrously miscalculated and Russia now faces deeper isolation, tougher sanctions and greater economic hardship than at any time since the Cold War. So declared President Obama after the NATO summit in Brussels.

European leaders have sounded even tougher than Obama, though less specific. Some whose countries lie far from Russia — for example, British Prime Minister David Cameron — have whipped themselves into a fury reminiscent of King Lear: “I will do such things — what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

For more specificity we must turn to pundits. Geopolitical experts have predicted global anarchy because of the violation of postwar borders; economists have warned of crippling trade wars as European financial sanctions collide with Russian energy counter-measures, and eminent financial analysts have argued that investors and businesses are dangerously under-pricing enormous geopolitical risks.

Britain’s government budget released this week is not a statement of economic policy. It is a program for winning next year’s general election.

In this sense, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s speech was a natural development from the 2013 Budget, which launched Britain’s current economic recovery. I was one of the few analysts to perceive the remarkable transformation of the British economy that immediately resulted from last year’s budget because what Osborne did was deliberately obscured by what he said.

Osborne’s mantra last year was “you can’t cure debt with more debt.” Yet he did precisely that with his audacious plan to provide $198 billion (£120 billion) in government guarantees for additional mortgage borrowing.

When Janet Yellen chairs her first meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee Tuesday and Wednesday, she will be presented with a once-in-a-generation opportunity that even her predecessors in the world’s most powerful economic position have rarely enjoyed.

Not only can Yellen alter the guidance on interest rates with which the FOMC has been steering global financial markets. Beyond that she could do something far more profound and exciting: transform an entire generation’s way of thinking about economics, market forces and the role of government in achieving and maintaining prosperity.

To start with the obvious, Yellen will almost certainly change or simply abolish the unemployment “threshold” of 6.5 percent announced early last year as a reference point for the FOMC to start considering the possibility of higher interest rates — perhaps setting a threshold of 5 percent or so. More radically, she could supplement the objective of lower unemployment with a range of other indicators that will need to improve before the Federal Reserve even considers any monetary tightening: for example, accelerating gross domestic product growth; strengthening productivity trends and eliminating the excess capacity in many industries that is now discouraging investment, hiring and productivity growth, as well as holding down corporate pricing power.

Which major economy is most likely to disappoint expectations this year, and perhaps even cause a financial crisis big enough to break the momentum of global economic recovery? The usual suspects are China and southern Europe. But in my view the most likely culprit will be Japan.

While Japan no longer attracts much attention these days, it is still the world’s third-largest economy, with a gross domestic product equal to France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal combined. Its industries still pose the main competitive challenge to U.S., European and Korean manufacturers, and its regional weight is still sufficient to trigger financial crises across the whole of Asia — as it did in 1997.

To make matters worse, the Japanese government bond market is in an enormous financial bubble that could burst catastrophically if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s audacious economic program is seen to have failed.

Oscar Wilde described marriage as the triumph of hope over experience. In finance and geopolitics, by contrast, experience must always prevail over hope, and realism over wishful thinking.

A grim case in point is the confrontation between Russia and the West in Ukraine. What makes this conflict so dangerous is that U.S. and EU policy seems to be motivated entirely by hope and wishful thinking. Hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin will “see sense” — or at least be deterred by the threat of sanctions to Russia’s economic interests and the personal wealth of his oligarch friends. Wishful thinking about “democracy and freedom” inevitably overcoming dictatorship and military bullying.

Investors and businesses cannot afford to be so sentimental. Though we should never forget Nathan Rothschild’s advice at the battle of Waterloo — “buy on the sound of gunfire” — the market response to this week’s events in Ukraine makes sense only if we believe that Russia has won.

A severe slowdown in China is viewed as among the greatest risks facing the world economy this year, and Thursday’s dismal news on Chinese manufacturing output exacerbated these fears. But the really important news from Beijing pointed in the opposite direction: Bank lending in China, instead of slowing dramatically as many economists had expected, accelerated in January to its fastest growth in four years.

This means China is unlikely to act as a brake on the global economy in the months ahead — despite the recent weak manufacturing figures. It also suggests that predictions of a credit crunch or financial crisis in China will likely prove wrong — or at least premature.

To welcome stronger bank lending in China is not to deny that credit growing at double the gross domestic product growth is unsustainable and will ultimately have to be curbed. The Chinese authorities themselves clearly believe this. The government and the central bank want to reduce credit growth and to replace the unregulated, opaque “shadow lending” system with properly supervised, well-capitalized modern banks.

This has been a banner week for the world economy, inspired largely by events in the United States.

In Washington, the first congressional testimony from Janet Yellen in her position as new Federal Reserve Board chairwoman reassured and impressed two notoriously petulant audiences: Tea Party congressmen, who had assembled a posse of hostile witnesses to attack the Fed’s “easy money” policies; and panicky Wall Street investors, who had spent the previous month swooning on fears that monetary policies might not be easy enough.

The significance of Yellen’s testimony lay not in the fact that she was a bit more “dovish” than former Chairman Ben Bernanke, or seemed more committed to the new central bankers’ fad for “forward guidance,” as opposed to “quantitative easing.” More striking, if subtle, was the change in economic philosophy that Yellen represented.

What has caused the sudden anxiety attack that overwhelmed financial markets after the New Year? We may find out the answer at 8.30 on Friday morning, Eastern Standard Time.

Almost all agree that the market turmoil has been linked to alarming events in several emerging economies — including Turkey, Thailand, Argentina and Ukraine — that has spilled over into concerns about more important economies, such as China, Russia, South Africa, Indonesia and Brazil.

But why has near-panic hit so many emerging markets at the same time?

There seem to be four broad explanations. Whether this current volatility marks the end of the straight-line ascent in asset prices that started in March 2009, or whether it is just another opportunity to “buy on dips,” will largely depend on the relative importance of each of these factors.