Critique of Central Banking By Henry C K Liu Part I:         Monetary theology Part II:       The European Experience Part III-a:   The US Experience Part III-b:   More on the US Experience Part III-c:   Still More on the US Experience Part III-d: The lessons of the US experience   This article appeared in AToL on December 21, 2002 Hyper-inflation is destructive to the economy generally but it hurts wage earners more because of wage stickiness and inelasticity, causing wages to fall constantly behind the hyper-inflation rate. Hyper-inflation keeps prices rising so fast that it tends to reduce the volume of business transactions and to restrain economic activities. Hyper-inflation has brought down many government throughout history, and thus monetary-policy makers have developed a special sensitivity toward it. For private business, loss of sales under hyper-inflation can sometimes be temporarily compensated by inventory appreciation if the interest rate is below the inflation rate, but under such conditions credit to finance inventory would soon dry up. Moderate inflation benefits both the rich and the poor, though not equally, because it not only keeps asset prices rising, of which the rich own more, it also equalizes wealth distribution, making the rich less privileged. Moderate inflation enables the middle class to raise its standard of living faster through borrowing that can be paid back with depreciated dollars, as most homeowners in the United States have done in recent decades. Lenders would continue to lend under moderate inflation even if real interest rates yield a narrower or even a slightly negative spread over the inflation rate, because idle money would suffer more loss under moderate inflation and because moderate inflation reduces the default rate, thus making even a narrow spread between interest rate and inflation rate profitable to lenders. Moderate inflation also stimulates growth, which means a larger economic pie for all even if the slice of the pie for lenders may be smaller. Moderate inflation negates the fatalistic American folklore that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and enables the American dream of social and economic mobility. Deflation increases the purchasing power of money, but it puts upward pressure on unemployment and downward pressure on aggregate income. Thus, given a choice between deflation and hyper-inflation, owners of real assets tend to prefer hyper-inflation, under which wage earners are forced to into lower real wages after inflation. Policy makers always hope that hyper-inflation can be brought back under control within a short period of crisis management, before political damage sets in. Central banks in desperate times would look to hyper-inflation to "provide what essentially amounts to catastrophic financial insurance coverage," as US Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan suggested in a November 19 address on International Financial Risk Management to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington. Over the past two and a half years, since February 2000, the draining impact of a loss of US$8 trillion of stock-market wealth (80 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP), and of the financial losses associated with September 11, 2001, has had a highly destabilizing effect on the aggregate debt-equity ratio in the US financial system, and has pushed the ratio below levels conventionally required for sound finance. Total debt in the US economy now runs to $32 trillion, of which $22 trillion is private-sector debt. This private debt now is backed by $8 trillion less in equity, an amount in excess of one-third of the debt. Greenspan attributed the system's ability to sustain such a sudden rise of debt-to-equity ratio to debt securitization and the hedging effect of financial derivatives, which transfer risk throughout the entire system. "Obviously, this market is still too new to have been tested in a widespread down-cycle for credit," Greenspan allowed. In recent years, the rapidly growing use of more complex and less transparent instruments such as credit-default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and credit-linked notes has had a net effect of transferring individual risks to systemic risk. Greenspan acknowledged that derivatives, by construction, are highly leveraged, a condition that is both a large benefit and an Achilles' heel. It appears that the benefit has been reaped in the past decade, leading to a wishful declaration of the end of the business cycle. Now we are faced with the Achilles' heel: "the possibility of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that will culminate in financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked. Only a central bank, with its unlimited power to create money, can with a high probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive. Hence, central banks have, of necessity, been drawn into becoming lenders of last resort," explained Greenspan. Greenspan asserted that such "catastrophic financial insurance coverage" should be reserved for only the rarest of occasions to avoid moral hazard. He observed correctly that in competitive financial markets, the greater the leverage, the higher must be the rate of return on the invested capital before adjustment for higher risk. Yet there is no evidence that higher risk in financial manipulation leads to higher return for investment in the real economy, as recent defaults by Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Tyco, Conseco and sovereign Argentine credits have shown. Higher risks in finance engineering merely provided higher returns from speculation temporarily, until the day of reckoning, at which point the high returns can suddenly turn in equally high losses. The individual management of risk, however sophisticated, does not eliminate risk in the system. It merely passes on the risk to other parties for a fee. In any risk play, the winners must match the losers by definition. The fact that a systemic payment-default catastrophe has not yet surfaced only means that the probability of its occurrence will increase with every passing day. It is an iron law understood by every risk manager. By socializing their risks and privatizing their speculative profits, risk speculators hold hostage the general public, whose welfare the Fed now uses as a pretext to justify printing money to perpetuate these speculators' joyride. What kind of logic supports the Fed's acceptance of a natural rate of unemployment to combat inflation while it prints money without reserve to bail out private speculators to fight deflation created by a speculative crash? It has been forgotten by many that before 1913, there was no central bank in the United States to bail out troubled commercial or investment banks or to keep inflation in check by trading employment for price stability. The House of Morgan then held the power of deciding which banks should survive and which ones should fail and, by extension, deciding which sector of the economy should prosper and which should shrink. At least the House of Morgan used private money for its predatory schemes of controlling the money supply for its own narrow benefit. The issue of centralized private banking was part of the Sectional Conflict of the 1800s between America's industrial North and the agricultural South that eventually led to the Civil War. The South opposed a centralized private banking system that would be controlled by Northeastern financial interests, protective tariffs to help struggling Northeast industries and federal aid to transportation development for opening up the Midwest and the West for investment intermediated through Northeastern money trusts. Money, classical economics' view of it notwithstanding, is not neutral. Money is a political issue. It is a matter of deliberate choice made by the state. The supply of money and its cost, as well as the allocation of credit, have direct social implications. Policies on money reward or punish different segments of the population, stimulate or restrain different economic sectors and activities. They affect the distribution of political power. Democracy itself depends on a populist money policy. The concept of a Federal Reserve System was first championed by Populists, who were ordinary citizens, rather than sophisticated economists or captured politicians or powerful bankers. In 1887, a group of desperate farmers in Lampasas county, Texas, formed the Knights of Reliance to resist impending ruin by "more speedily educating themselves" about the day when "all the balance of labor's products become concentrated into the hands of a few". It became the Farmers Alliance, which by 1890 had flowered into the Populist Movement. The Populist agenda was a major reform platform for more than five decades, giving the nation a progressive income tax, federal regulation of railroads, communications and other public utilities, anti-trust regimes, price stabilization and credit programs for farmers. Lyndon B Johnson was the last president with strong populist roots but tragically his populist domestic vision of the Great Society was torpedoed by the Vietnam quagmire. The core issue behind the Populist Movement was money. Populists attacked the "money trusts", the gold standard, and the private centralized banking system. The spirit of this brief movement was captured by Lawrence Goodwyn in his book Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America. Falling prices of farm produce were the catalyst of protest. Falling prices were also inevitably accompanied by usurious interest rates. Both flowed from one condition: a scarcity of money. Most Americans today do not remember what historians call the Great Deflation that lasted three decades between 1866 and 1896. The Great Deflation worked in reverse of inflation. Inflation puts the rich at a disadvantage and spreads wealth more widely, allowing the middle class to grow and to enjoy higher standards of living. Deflation reconcentrates wealth and reduces the living standard of the middle and working classes. Borrowers face ballooning nominal debts from falling prices and wages. Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) in his epic chronicle of the rise of capitalism showed that cycles of price inflation and deflation were recurring rhythms in the world's economies long before the founding of the United States. The very discovery of America was a great inflationary development by the increase of money supply in Europe through the plundering of Inca gold mines. Gold inflation lasted three centuries and was instrumental to the rise of Europe. The US Federal Reserve System was founded in 1913 presumably to represent the financial interest of all Americans. In its obsessive phobia of inflation, the Fed has betrayed its original mandate. The chairman of the Fed in a true democracy should be a member of the common folks, supported by a technically competent but ideologically neutral staff, not a Wall Street economist who applauds "creative destruction" as a preferred path for growth. Greenspan himself allowed the view of an European leader in his November address: "What is the market? It is the law of the jungle, the law of nature. And what is civilization? It is the struggle against nature." The creation of the Federal Reserve System was the result of a confluence of political pressures. Fundamental among these pressure was the new awareness, as Braudel hinted, of a heretical proposition that capitalism cannot sustain price stability through market forces. That proposition may not be valid, but centuries of experimentation and innovation have yet to devise a monetary system that can provide permanent market price stability. It was increasingly recognized that the process of capital accumulation inherently produces periodic cycles of fluctuating money value: inflationary "easy money" stimulating economic growth, spreading wealth from the top down, followed by its depressant opposite "tight money" slowing down growth, reconcentrating wealth. Just as there is a business cycle in a market economy, there is a monetary cycle in a capitalistic system. This peculiar nature of capitalism was allowed to work untamed until the arrival of political democracy. Any government adopting any money system that makes stable money a permanent feature would eventually confront political upheaval. There were no golden means of money value where all economic participants could be treated equally and justly. Technically, the rules of capitalism decree that money that is fixed in perpetual equilibrium is a formula for permanent stagnation. The tight money in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century was caused by the restoration of the full gold standard (the Gold Standard Act of 1900) from the bimetallism that had been used in the US through much of the 19th century. Bimetallism had the fault of "bad money driving out good" as stated in Gresham's Law, named after Sir Thomas Gresham (1619-79), although it was controversial as to whether he in fact formulated the concept. The law states that the metal that is commercially valued at less than its face value tends to be used as money, and the metal that is commercially valued at more than its face value tends to be used as metal, and thus is withdrawn from circulation as money. It is an indirect confirmation of the validity of fiat money, as all commodities with intrinsic value would not be used as money given the option. Permanent tight money means permanent high interest rates. And the money supply based on the gold standard after 1900 was inflexible for meeting the fluctuating demands of the economy. The resultant illiquidity rendered the financial system inoperative. The liquidity squeeze typically started in the South and the West when farmers brought their crops to market and traders and merchants needed short-term loans to finance a seasonal ballooning of trade. Rural banks were forced to turn to New York for additional funds. Country bankers and their farm clients learned from experience that life-or-death decisions over the economies of Kansas, Texas and Tennessee resided in the Wall Street offices of the likes of J P Morgan. Thus the term "money trusts" was no radical sloganeering or activist hysteria. It was a very mainstream term that everyone in the West and the South understood in the 1900s. The Populists first proposed a solution to the money question in August 1886 at Cleburne, Texas, where the Farmers Alliance held a convention. The "Cleburne Demand" borrowed from the Greenback Party, which in the previous decade had fought against the gold standard and defended president Abraham Lincoln's fiat money, known as greenbacks, backed not by gold but by government credit, on which the North won the Civil War. Among the "radical" demands were federal regulation of the private banking system and a national fiat currency not retrained by gold. The Populists distrusted both Wall Street and Washington and wanted an independent institution to carry out this task. They were openly inflationist, and advocated an expanding money supply to serve the growing economy and a federal issue to replace all private banknotes. Their slogan, "legal tender for all debts, public and private", appears today on Federal Reserve notes. Orthodox economists of the day scoffed at the proposals. A return to a populist monetary policy today would be a very constructive alternative to Greenspan's distortion of Schumpeterean creative destructionism. The Fed has always considered it its sacred duty only to fight inflation. Still, there was a time it forced on the economy the pains of fighting inflation only after inflation had appeared, as then chairman Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s. But the Greenspan Fed in the late 1990s was shadow-boxing phantom inflation based on a theoretical anticipation of inflation from the wealth effect of an equity-market bubble that was at least producing a benefit of having unemployment trending below the so-called natural rate. The Greenspan bubble was actually accompanied by pockets of deflation, most visibly in the manufacturing and commodity sectors, mostly caused by excess investment that led to global overcapacity that fed low-priced imports to the US economy. Deflation has practically destroyed the farming and several other commodity and basic-material sectors in the past decade, including steel. It has eliminated much of US manufacturing. The deflation that faced selected sectors of the US economy in the past decade had not been market-induced as much as it was policy-determined. The Fed's fixation on driving inflation lower, regardless of economic consequences, has caused untold damage to the economy and forced its restructuring toward an unsustainable debt bubble. It is an economic truism that low inflation for a large, complex economy can only be achieved by driving certain sectors into deflationary levels. Businesses in these unfortunate sectors are held in a state of protracted if not perpetual loss to face bankruptcy and liquidation. This detachment of profit from real production and the dubious linkage of profit to financial speculation and manipulation Greenspan accepts happily as Schumpeterean "creative destruction" (from economist Joseph A Schumpeter, 1883-1950). Pockets of deflation and bankruptcy are integral parts of systemwide disinflation that inevitably produces losers who allegedly made wrong business bets. It turned out that these wrong bets were not against market forces as much as they were against Fed policy bias. The stable value of money is to be maintained at all cost, except for speculative growth, which is translated to mean ever-rising share prices. Rising share prices, unlike rising wages, are not viewed by the Fed as inflation, a rationale hard to understand. But the negatives of selective deflation are considered by the Fed as secondary and acceptable systemwide. These losses at various deflationary phases have included the farmer belt, the oil patch, the timber industry, the mining sector, steel, the manufacturing sector, transportation, communication, high technology and even defense. In 1984-85, deflation had became a fundamental disorder in the economy. Income loss and shrinking collateral squeezed debtors in deflationary sectors facing fixed nominal levels of debt that required appreciated dollars to repay. Raw-material prices fell by 40 percent from their peaks in 1980. It was a repeat of the 1920s' selective economic damage. Overall prices throughout the 1980s as reflected by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) remained around 3 percent and the economy expanded moderately and continuously. What actually happened was a structural shift of wealth distribution toward polarization of rich and poor. A split-level economy was instituted by government policy, between the favored and the dispensable. In the 1880s and again the 1890s, similar developments produced political agrarian revolts that historians call American Populism. In 1830, there were only 32 miles (51 kilometers) of railroads in the United States. By 1860, at the start of the Civil War, there were more than 30,000 miles. The three decades after the Civil War was called the Railroad Age by historians, a period that saw a fivefold increase in rail mileage. The rail sector dominated the investment market and was the chief source of new wealth and baronial fortunes. The Age of Robber Barons, represented by the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D Rockefeller (oil) and Morgan (finance), with the birth of big monopolistic corporations and interlocking holding companies, was inseparable from railroad expansion. The private railroads received free public land in amounts larger than the size of Texas. The scandalous Credit Mobilier, which built the Union Pacific, paid a dividend of 348 percent in one year to watered-down shares given to corrupt members of Congress and state officials, a hundred times that of convention, even after having billed the company double for runaway construction cost. The price-fixing and selective price-gouging, government corruption, stock and business fraud, cost-padding, stock-watering and manipulation such as insider trading and sweetheart loans of the Railroad Age made the so-called crony capitalism of which the United States now accuses a developing Asia looks like child's play. Notwithstanding the disingenuous neo-liberal claim that the Asian financial crises of 1997 that devastated the economies in the region were the inevitable result of Asian crony capitalism, and not of unregulated market fundamentalism, the scandalous railroad boom of the 1860s in the United States did not hurt the US economy. Far from it, it heralded in the age of finance capitalism. The difference was that in the 1860s, the US opposed free trade and adopted high protective tariffs, government support of industrial policy and infrastructure development and national banking. But most important of all, the US of the 1860s was not victimized by the tyranny of a foreign-currency hegemony, as Asia is today by dollar hegemony. Just as pimples are the symptoms of hormone imbalance and not the cause, corruption is often the symptom of fast growth. The point here is not to apologize for corruption but to point out that corruption is part and partial of finance capitalism, as the savings and loan (S&L) crisis, the Milken junk-bond scandal and Enrontitis of recent times continue to show clearly. The real culprit was not corruption but deregulation. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, for example, which aimed to create competitive markets for voice, data and broadband services, unleashed a flood of investment in wireless licenses, fiber-optic cable networks, satellites, computer switches and Internet sites, and accounted for much of the new capital that poured into the economy through Wall Street's equity and credit markets. The same was true in the energy sector. But the biggest culprit was financial deregulation. The deregulation program under the administration of president Ronald Reagan phased out federal requirements that set maximum interest rates on savings accounts. This eliminated the advantage previously held by savings banks in financing home ownership. Checking accounts that paid interest could now be offered by savings banks. All depository institutions could now borrow from the Fed in time of need, a privilege that had been reserved for commercial banks. In return, all banks had to place a certain percentage of their deposits at the Fed. This gave the Fed more control over state chartered banks, but diluted the Fed's control of the credit market. The Garn-St Germain Act of 1982 allowed savings banks to issue credit cards, make non-residential real-estate loans and commercial loans - actions previously only allowed to commercial banks. Deregulation practically eliminated the distinction between commercial and savings banks. It caused a rapid growth of savings banks and S&Ls that now made all types of non-homeowner-related loans. S&Ls could then tap into the huge profit centers of commercial-real-estate investments and credit-card issuing and unsavory entrepreneurs looked to the loosely regulated S&Ls as a no-holds-barred profit center. As the 1980s wore on, the US economy appeared to grow. Interest rates continued to go up as well as real-estate speculation. The real-estate market was in a bubble boom. Many S&Ls took advantage of the lack of supervision and regulations to make highly speculative investments, in many cases lending more money then the value of the projects, in anticipation of still-rising prices. When the real-estate market crashed dramatically, the S&Ls were crushed. They now owned properties that they had paid enormous amounts of money for but weren't worth a fraction of what they paid. Many went bankrupt, losing their depositors' money. In 1980, the US had 4,600 thrifts; by 1988, mergers and bankruptcies left 3,000. By the mid-1990s, fewer than 2,000 survived. The S&L crisis cost US taxpayers $600 billion in "bailouts". The indirect cost was estimated to be $1.4 trillion. Money supply is a complex issue and at this moment in history it is a term of considerable chaotic meaning. The official definition by the Federal Reserve of M1, 2 and 3 is clear (see note 1), but its usefulness even to the Fed is as limited as it is clear. Greenspan, at the 15th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University on September 5, 1997, with Milton Friedman in the audience, in defense of the accusation that Fed policy failed to anticipate the emerging inflation of the 1970s and, by fostering excessive monetary creation, contributed to the inflationary upsurge, and the claim that some monetary-policy rules, such as the Taylor rule, however imperfect, would have delivered far superior performance, admitted that the Fed's (indeed economics') knowledge of the full workings of the system is quite limited, so that attempts to improve on the results of policy rules will, on average, only make matters worse. Greenspan observed that the monetary policy of the Fed has involved varying degrees of rule-based and discretionary-based modes of operation over time. Very often historical regularities have been disrupted by unanticipated change, especially in technologies, both hard and soft. The evolving patterns mean that the performance of the economy under any rule, were it to be rigorously followed, would deviate from expectations. Such changes mean that we can never construct a completely general model of the economy, invariant through time, on which to base our policy, Greenspan asserted. It was an apology for muddling through. Greenspan admitted that in the late 1970s, the Fed's actions to deal with developing inflationary instabilities were shaped in part by the reality portrayed by Friedman's analysis that ever-rising inflation rate peaks, as well as ever-rising inflation rate troughs, followed on the heels of similar patterns of average money growth. The Fed, in response to such evaluations, acted aggressively under the then newly installed chairman Paul Volcker. A considerable tightening of the average stance of policy, based on intermediate M1 targets tied to reserve operating objectives, eventually reversed the surge in inflation. Greenspan was careful not to draw attention to the high cost of the reversal. The 15 years before the Asian financial crises that began in 1997 had been a period of consolidating the gains of the early 1980s and extending them to their logical end, ie, the achievement of price stability. Although the ultimate goals of monetary policy have remained the same over the past 15 years, the techniques used by the Fed in formulating and implementing policy have changed considerably as a consequence of vast changes in technology and regulation. The early Volcker years focused on M1, and following operating procedures that imparted a considerable degree of automaticity to short-term interest-rate movements, resulting in wide interest-rate volatility. But after nationwide NOW (negotiable order of withdrawal) interest-bearing checking accounts were introduced, the demand for M1, in the judgment of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC), became too interest-sensitive for that aggregate to be useful in implementing policy. Because the velocity of such an aggregate varies substantially in response to small changes in interest rates, target ranges for M1 growth, in the FOMC's judgment, no longer were reliable guides for outcomes in nominal spending and inflation. In response to an unanticipated movement in spending and hence the quantity of money demanded, a small variation in interest rates would be sufficient to bring money back to path but not to correct the deviation in spending. As a consequence, by late 1982, M1 was de-emphasized and policy decisions per force became more discretionary. However, in recognition of the longer-run relationship of prices and M2, especially its stable long-term velocity, this broader aggregate was accorded more weight, along with a variety of other indicators, in setting the Fed policy stance. By the early 1990s, the usefulness of M2 was undercut by the increased attractiveness and availability of alternative outlets for saving, such as bond and stock mutual funds, and by mounting financial difficulties for depositories and depositors that led to a restructuring of business and household balance sheets. The apparent result was a significant rise in the velocity of M2, which was especially unusual given continuing declines in short-term market interest rates. By 1993, this extraordinary velocity behavior had become so pronounced that the Fed was forced to begin disregarding the signals M2 was sending. Greenspan recognized that, in fixing on the short-term rate, the Fed lost much of the information on the balance of money supply and demand that changing market rates afforded, but for the moment the Fed saw no alternative. In the current state of knowledge, money demand has become too difficult to predict. In the United States, evaluating the effects on the economy of shifts in balance sheets and variations in asset prices have been an integral part of the development of monetary policy. In recent years, for example, the Fed expended considerable effort to understand the implications of changes in household balance sheets in the form of high and rising consumer debt burdens and increases in market wealth from the run-up in the stock market. And the equity market itself has been the subject of analysis as the Fed attempted to assess the implications for financial and economic stability of the extraordinary rise in equity prices, a rise based apparently on continuing upward revisions in estimates of US corporations' already robust long-term earning prospects. But, unless they are moving together, prices of assets and of goods and services could not both be an objective of a particular monetary policy, which, after all, has one effective instrument: the short-term interest rate. The Fed chose product prices as its primary focus on the grounds that stability in the average level of these prices was likely to be consistent with financial stability as well as maximum sustainable growth. History, however, is somewhat ambiguous on the issue of whether central banks can safely ignore asset markets, except as they affect product prices. Greenspan discovered that he had been very wrong about the "robust" long-term earning prospects of US corporations by 2000. Greenspan also admitted that over the coming decades, moreover, what constitutes product price and, hence, price stability will itself become harder to measure. In the years 1997 through 2000, M3 increased by about 460, 600, 500 and 600 billions per year, respectively. In 2001 M3 expanded much more rapidly - by about $1.1 trillion - to a total of about $8 trillion. The surge in the money supply since the attacks on September 11, 2001, was equal to about $300 billion, which significantly represents about 3.0 percent of GDP, this after the Fed injected $1 trillion into the banking system in the days following the terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. Since the beginning of 2000, $8 trillion of stock market wealth has vanished, that is 80 percent of annual GDP, or the entire M3 in 2001. Another way to look at these figures is that the entire face value of the US money supply has vanished through market correction. Market participants look at money supply differently. To M1, 2 and 3, they add L, which is M3 plus all other liquid assets, such as Treasury bills, saving bonds, commercial paper, bankers' acceptances, non-bank eurodollar holdings of non-US residents and, since the 1990s, derivatives and swaps, generally coming under the heading of structured finance instruments. The term MZM (money with zero maturity) came into general use. The Fed has poor, if any, information on L and it does not seem to want to know as it persistently declines to support its regulation or reporting on it. Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives now are estimated to involve notional values of more than $150 trillion. No one knows the precise amount. The Office of Controller of Currency (OCC) quarterly report on bank derivatives activities and trading revenues is based on call-report information provided by US commercial banks. The notional amount of derivatives in insured commercial bank portfolios increased by $3.1 trillion in the third quarter of 2002, to $53.2 trillion. Generally, changes in notional volumes are reasonable reflections of business activity but do not provide useful measures of risk. During the third quarter, the notional amount of interest-rate contracts increased by $3 trillion, to $45.7 trillion. Foreign-exchange contracts increased by $27 billion to $5.8 trillion. The number of commercial banks holding derivatives increased by 17, to 408. Eighty-six percent of the notional amount of derivative positions was composed of interest-rate contracts, with foreign exchange accounting for an additional 11 percent. Equity, commodity and credit derivatives accounted for only 3 percent of the total notional amount. Holdings of derivatives continue to be concentrated in the largest banks. Seven commercial banks account for almost 96 percent of the total notional amount of derivatives in the commercial banking system, with more than 99 percent held by the top 25 banks. OTC and exchange-traded contracts comprised 87.9 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively, of the notional holdings as of the third quarter of 2002. The notional amount is a reference amount from which contractual payments will be derived, but it is generally not an amount at risk. The risk in a derivative contract is a function of a number of variables, such as whether counterparties exchange notional principal, the volatility of the currencies or interest rates used as the basis for determining contract payments, the maturity and liquidity of contracts, and the creditworthiness of the counterparties in the transaction. Further, the degree of increase or decrease in risk-taking must be considered in the context of a bank's aggregate trading positions as well as its asset and liability structure. Data describing fair values and credit risk exposures are more useful for analyzing point-in-time risk exposure, while data on trading revenues and contractual maturities provide more meaningful information on trends in risk exposure. Monetary economists have no idea if notional values are part of the money supply and with what discount ratio. As we now know, creative accounting has legally transformed debt proceeds as revenue. With the telecoms, the Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) contracts, or capacity swaps, were perfectly legal means to inflate revenue. The now disgraced and defunct Andersen White Paper in 2000, well known in telecom financial circles, defined IRU swaps between telecom carriers by accounting each sale as revenue and each purchase of a capital expense which is exempted from operating results emphasized by Wall Street analysts and investors. While common sense would see this as inflation of revenue by hiding underlying true cost, Andersen argued that these capacity exchanges are not barter agreements, but are sales of operating leases and purchases of capital leases. Thus by creative accounting logic, swaps are not acquisition of "equivalent interests" because risks and rewards of buying a capital lease are greater than those of an operating lease. Since operating leases are not similar assets as capital leases, there is logic in booking revenues over the life of a contract when they are fully paid at closing. It can also be argued that such accounting logic on the operating leases misleadingly strengthens the value of the capital assets. Which was exactly what happened. GE Capital on March 13, 2002, launched a multi-tranche dollar bond deal that was almost doubled in size from $6 billion to $11 billion, making it the largest-ever dollar-denominated corporate bond issue. Officially the bond sale was explained as following the current trend of companies with large borrowing needs, such as GE Capital, locking in favorable funding costs while interest rates are low. On March 18, Bloomberg reported that GE Capital was bowing to demands from Moody's Investors Service that the biggest seller of commercial paper should reduce its reliance on short-term debt securities. The financing arm of General Electric, then the world's largest company, sought bigger lending commitments from banks and replacing some of its $100 billion in debt that would mature in less than nine months with bonds. GE Capital asked its banks to raise its borrowing capacity to $50 billion from $33 billion. Moody's, one of two credit-rating companies that have assigned GE Capital the highest "AAA" grade, has been increasing pressure on even top-rated firms to reduce short-term liabilities since Enron filed the biggest US bankruptcy to that date in December. Moody's released reports analyzing the ability of 300 companies to raise money should they be shut out of the commercial paper market. GE Capital and H J Heinz Co said they responded to inquiries by Moody's by reducing their short-term debt, unsecured obligations used for day-to-day financing. Concerns about the availability of such funds have grown this year after Qwest Communications International Inc, Sprint Corp and Tyco International Ltd were suddenly unable to sell commercial paper. Moody's lowered a record 93 commercial paper ratings last year as the economy slowed, causing corporate defaults to increase to their highest in a decade. One area of concern for the analysts is the amount of bank credit available to repay commercial paper. While many companies have credit lines equivalent to the amount of commercial paper they sell, some of the biggest issuers do not. GE Capital, for example, has loan commitments backing 33 percent of its short-term debt. American Express has commitments that cover 56 percent of its commercial paper. Coca-Cola supports about 85 percent of its debt with bank agreements, according to Standard & Poor's, the largest credit-rating company, which said it is also focusing more attention on risks posed by short-term liabilities, though it hasn't yet decided whether to issue separate reports. Companies have sold $107 billion of investment-grade bonds in the first half of this year, up from $88 billion during the same period in 2001. The amount of unsecured commercial paper outstanding has fallen by a third to $672 billion during the past 12 months. GE Capital, which has reduced its commercial paper outstanding from $117 billion at the beginning of the year, plans to continue to reduce short-term debt. It took one step in that direction last week when it sold $11 billion of long-term bonds, some of which will be used to reduce its outstanding commercial paper. As part of the sale, GE Capital sold 30-year bonds with a coupon of 6.75 percent. The company usually swaps some or all of those fixed-rate payments for floating-rate obligations. Last year, GE Capital paid on average 3.23 percent for its floating-rate, long-term debt, 70 basis points more than on its commercial paper, according to a company filing. The bottom line of all this is that the funding cost of GE Capital will go up, which will hit GE Capital profit, which constitutes 60 percent of its parent's profit. This in turn will hit GE share prices, which in turn will force rating agencies to pressure GE further to shift from low-cost commercial papers to bonds or bank loans, which will further reduce profit, which will further increase rating pressure, and so on. PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Co), the world's largest bond fund, having dumped $1 billion in GE commercial paper from its holdings, publicly criticized GE for carrying too much debt and not dealing honestly with investors. GE announced it might sell as much as $50 billion in bonds only days after investors bought $11 billion of new bonds in the biggest US sale in history. PIMCO director Bill Gross disputed GE's contention that the new bond sales were designed not to capture low rates, but because of troubles in its commercial paper market. If the GE short-term rate rises because of a poor credit rating, the engine that drives GE earnings will stall. Gross dismissed GE earning growth as not being from brilliant management, former GE chairman Jack Welch's self-aggrandizing books not withstanding, but from financial manipulation, selling debt at cheap rates and using inflated GE stocks for acquisition. GE had $127 billion in commercial paper as of March 11, 2002, according to Moody's. This amounts to 49 percent of its total debt. Banks' credit line only covers one-third of the short-term exposure. The erosion of market capitalization value does impact money supply. Asset valuation is the collateral for debt. As asset value falls, credit ratings fall, which affect interest costs, which affect profits, which affect asset value. Moreover, a major counterparty default in structured finance will render the Fed helpless in keeping the money supply from sudden contraction, unless the Fed is prepared to depart from its traditional practice of relying solely on interest-rate policy to effectuate monetary ease, a move Greenspan apparently has served notice he is prepared to make. The logic of fighting inflation by raising interest rates is mere conventional wisdom. Furthermore, interest-rate policy is merely a single instrument that cannot possibly be relied upon to play the complexity of a symphony like the economy. The debate on whether a high interest rate is inflationary or deflationary seems to be a puzzling controversy in economics. Within the current international financial architecture, interest rates cannot be fully understood without taking into account their impact on exchange rates and credit markets. Nor can inflation be understood in isolation. In a globalized financial market, if the exchange rate is artificially sustained by high interest rates, there is little doubt that the impact would be deflationary on the local economy. This logic is also supported by empirical data in recent years. Yet many astute economists insist that a high interest rate causes inflation, at least in the long run. Perhaps this can be true in closed economies, but it is no longer necessarily true in open economies in a globalized financial market. Interest rates are the prices for the use of money over time. These prices do not always track the purchasing power of money, which is the monetized expression of the market value of commodities (the transaction price) at a specific time. The purchasing power of money fluctuates over time, expressed by the prices of futures and options, which are functions of the uncertain elasticity between interest rates and inflation rates. As the price for the use of money over time rises, the general effect will be deflationary if money is viewed as a constant store of value. Otherwise, money will forfeit its function as a constant store of value. On the other hand, if money is viewed as a medium of exchange, the ultimate liquidity agent, then rising price for its use over time is inflationary as a cost. Now, in any economy, money tends to play both roles, though not equally and not consistently over time. For market participants, depending on their positions (borrower or lender) at specific points of the economic cycle (expanding or contracting liquidity), they will find different views of money (exchange medium or value storer) to be to their financial advantage. Thus borrowers generally consider a high interest rate as leading to cost inflation (bad), and lenders consider a high interest rate as leading to asset deflation (good up to a point). Asset deflation offers good buying opportunities for those who have money or have access to credit, but bad for those who hold assets but need money, and the pain is proportional to asset illiquidity. Since most holders of ready cash also hold assets, deflation has only a limited and short-term advantage for them. For inflation to be advantageous, continued expansion of credit is required to keep asset appreciation ahead of cost inflation. The problem is further complicated by the fact that inflation is defined mostly by mainstream economics only as the rising price of wages and commodities, and not by asset appreciation. When it costs 10 percent more to buy the same share of a company than it did yesterday, that is considered growth - good economic news. When wages rise 5 percent a year, that is viewed as inflation - bad economic news by the Fed, despite the fact that the aggregate purchasing power is increased by 5 percent. Therein lies the fundamental cause of a bubble economy - growth and profit are generated by asset inflation rather than by increased aggregate demand stimulating aggregate supply. Thus the relationship of interest rate to inflation is dependent on the definition of money, which raises questions about the Fed preoccupation with interest-rate policy as a tool to achieve price stability. But that is not the end of the story. Under finance capitalism, inflation is not merely too much money chasing too few goods, as under industrial capitalism. Under financial capitalism, two elements - credit availability and credit markets - have overshadowed the traditional goods and equity markets of industrial capitalism. This makes it necessary to re-examine the traditional relationship of interest rate and inflation. In a bull market, the buyer has the advantage because the buyer has the final upside. In a bear market, the seller has the advantage because the buyer is left holding the downside bag. Of course one must avoid buying at the peak and selling at the bottom. And such strategies have self-fulfilling effects, as technical analysts can readily testify. These effects are magnified in long-run bull or bear markets, which are represented by a rising or falling sine curve. However, the buyer's advantage in a bull market may be neutralized by the inflation that usually accompanies bull markets. Thus a true bull market must yield net capital gain after inflation and real interest cost, ie, interest cost after inflation. And in a deflationary bear market, the seller's advantage is reinforced by deflation, for he can repurchase at a later date with only a fraction of his realized cash from what he sold previously. Not only would the seller avoid additional loss of holding the unsold asset in a falling market, the cash from the sale appreciates in purchasing power with every passing day in a bear market. Thus money plays a passive role as a medium of exchange and an active role as a store of value on the movement of prices. The conventional view that inflation is caused by, or is a result of (the two are connected but not identical), too much money chasing too few goods then is not always operative. This is because the availability of credit and the operational rules of credit markets can distort the traditional relationship. Credit markets, which have expanded way beyond traditional credit intermediated by the banking system, operate on the theory that money generally must earn interest, whether it is actually put to use or not. There are of course abnormal times when money actually earns negative interest because of government policy or foreign exchange constraints, as in Hong Kong in the early 1990s and Japan since 2000. When idle money earns no interest, credit reserve dries up, because it creates greater incentive to put money to work, ie, investing it in productive enterprises. For money to remain idly waiting for better opportunity, the interest rate must equal or exceed the opportunity cost of idle cash. Interest then acts as a penalty for idle money. When idle money earns interest, the interest payment comes ultimately from the central bank, which alone can create more money with no penalty to itself, though the economy it lords over is not immune. Since late 1999, the Japanese monetary authorities have repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining their zero-interest-rate policy until deflationary forces have been dispelled. The result is a great deal of idle money in Japanese banks with no creditworthy borrowers, for no one is interested in borrowing money to buy one widget that needs to be paid back with appreciated money that could buy two widgets in the future. Japanese savers are forgoing interest income for the increasing purchasing power of their idle money in an unending deflationary spiral. Efficiency in the credit markets pushes money toward the highest use and willingness to pay the highest interest. Thus when the central bank tightens money supply, the market will drive up interest rates and vice versa. Thus interest rate is a credit market index. When central banks such as the Fed use interest-rate policy to manage the money supply, they are in fact using a narrow market index to manipulate the broader market. It is not different from the Fed fixing the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) by buying or selling blue-chip shares to influence the broad S&P. When prices fall, one reason may be that consumers do not have money to buy with, as in most recessions with high unemployment. Or it may be the result of potential consumers withholding their money for still lower prices, as in Japan now and in some degree in China in 1998-2000. So deflation is caused by too many goods trying to attract too little money entering the market, but not necessarily too little money in the economy. But if every seller can realize a cash surplus in a subsequent repurchase in a bear market, where does all the surplus money go? Obviously it goes to pay interest on the idle money waiting for a cheaper price, reducing the central bank's need to issue more money to carry the interest cost on idle money. The net effect is a removal of money from the market and an increase in the amount of idle money in the economy. So deflation actually pushes up interest rates without necessarily altering the aggregate money supply. The effect is that until prices fall at a lesser rate than the interest rate on idle money, there is no incentive to buy. Thus a deflation-driven rising interest rate creates more deflationary pressure in a bear market. High interest rates move more wealth from borrowers to lenders and from bottom to top in the wealth pyramid. Moreover, the impact of a high interest rate modifies economic behavior differently in different groups and even on different activities within the same individual. When the prime rate at leading banks exceeded 20 percent in 1980, credit continued to expand explosively. The opposite happened when the Bank of Japan reduced the interest rate to zero. High rates only work to slow credit expansion if the rates are ahead of inflation. And zero rate only works to stimulate credit expansion if there is no deflation. So raising interest rates to combat inflation or lowering rates to combat deflation can be self-defeating under certain conditions. Now if two economies are linked by floating exchange rates, free trade and free investment flows, the one with a high rate of inflation will see the exchange rate of its currency fall. But a fall in its currency will increase the cost of its imports, thus adding to its inflation rate, and the further rise in the inflation rate will push up interest rates further. But a rise in domestic interest rates will stop or slow the fall of its currency and attract more fund inflows to buy its goods and assets. It also increases its exports, which reduces the supply of goods and assets in the domestic market, thus pushing up domestic prices, while pushing down the price of imports. The net inflation/deflation balance will then depend on the trade balance between exports and imports. This had been given by the European Central Bank (ECB) as the logic of raising euro interest rates to fight inflation. But this effect does not work for the United States because of dollar hegemony, which enables the US to run a recurring trade deficit with moderating inflation impacts. That is why the policies of the ECB and the Fed are constantly out of sync. The availability of financial derivatives further complicates the picture, because both interest rates and foreign-exchange rates can be hedged, obscuring and distorting the fundamental relations among interest rates, exchange rates and inflation. The recurring global financial crises in the past decade were manifestations of this distortion. The theory of market equilibrium asserts that a market tends to reach "natural" equilibrium as it approaches efficiency, which is defined as the speed and ease with which equilibrium is reached. Equilibrium is an abstract concept like infinity. It is a self-extending conceptual end state that has no definitive form or reality. Yet the market is complex not only because the relationship of market elements is poorly defined or even undefinable, but also the very instruments designed to enhance market efficiency tend to create wide volatility and instability. Thus a "natural" equilibrium state can in fact be defined as the actual state of the fluctuating market at any moment in time. With 24-hour trading, the notion of a milestone moment of equilibrium is problematic. Further, the very financial instruments created to enhance market efficiency toward its "natural" equilibrium state make the equilibrium elusive. Such instruments are mainly designed to manage risk generated by both broad market movements and momentary disequilibrium. Structured finance mainly involves unbundling financial risks in global markets for buyers who will pay the highest price for specific protection. Because users of these instruments look for special payoffs through unbundling of risk, the cost of managing such risk is maximized. The disaggregating renders the notion of market equilibrium not unifiable. The unbundled risks are marketed to those with the biggest appetite for such risks, in return for compensatory returns. Thus market equilibrium is not any more merely a large pool of turbulent transactions with a level surface. It is in fact a pool of transactions with many different levels of interconnected surfaces, each serving highly disaggregated specialty markets. Equilibrium in this case becomes a highly complex notion making the impact and prospect of externalities highly uncertain. That uncertainty caused the demise of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), for a while the world's most successful hedge fund based on immaculate quantitative logic. Interest swaps, for example, are not single-purpose transactions for managing interest-rate risks. They can be structured as inflation risk hedges, or foreign-exchange risk hedges, or any number of other financial needs or protection. And the impact is not limited to the two contracting counterparties, since each party usually hedges again with a third counterparty who in turn hedges with another counterparty. That is what makes hedging systemic. A further irony is that the very objective of insuring against volatility risk by covering the market broadly increases risks of illiquidity. Monetary-policy decision makers in the past decade have tended to be fixated on preventing inflation. Some questions come to mind over this fact. Is inflation the worst of all economic evils; and specifically, is current US monetary policy consistent with maintaining a low rate of inflation, assuming a low inflation rate is desirable? Or, to put it another way, is there any empirical evidence that inflation can be controlled by the central bank at a cost less than that exacted by inflation itself? Would the establishment of price stability as the Fed's sole objective hinder long-run growth prospects for the US and the global economy? The answers to these questions are critical for the assessment of monetary policy. Two Nobel laureates from the Chicago School, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, have influenced mainstream economics on these issues. Friedman, the 1976 Nobel economist, emphasized the role of monetary policy as a factor in shaping the course of inflation and business cycles. In the popular press, he also was known for his advocacy of deregulated markets and free trade as the best option for economic development. Lucas, the 1995 Nobel economist, also made fundamental contributions to the study of money, inflation, and business cycles, through the application of modern mathematics. Lucas formed what came to be called a theory of "rational expectations". In essence, the "rational expectations" theory shows how expectations about the future influence the economic decisions made by individuals, households and companies. Using complex mathematical models, Lucas showed statistically that the average individual would anticipate - and thus could easily undermine - the impact of a government's economic policy. Rational expectation theory was embraced by the Reagan White House during its first term, but the doctrine worked against the Reagan voodoo economic plan instead of with it. In 1976, the long-run relationship between inflation and unemployment was still under debate in mainstream economics. During the 1960s, mainstream economics leaned toward the belief that a lower average unemployment rate could be sustained at the cost of a permanently higher (but stable) rate of inflation. Friedman used his Nobel lecture to make two arguments about this inflation-unemployment tradeoff. First, he advanced the logic of why short-run tradeoff would dissolve in the long run. Expanding nominal demand to lower unemployment would lead to increases in money wages as firms attempted to attract additional workers. Firms would be willing to pay higher money wages if they expected prices for output to be higher in the future due to expansion and inflation. Workers would initially perceive the rise in money wages to be a rise in real wages because their "perception of prices in general" adjusts only with a time lag, so nominal wages would be perceived to be rising faster than prices. In response, the supply of labor would increase, and employment and output would expand. Eventually, workers would recognize that the general level of prices had risen and that their real wages had not actually increased, leading to adjustments that would return the economy to its natural rate of unemployment. Yet Friedman only described a partial picture of the employment/inflation interaction. Events since 1976 have shown the relationship to be much more complex. Friedman neglected the possibility of increased productivity and quantum technological innovation resulting from more research and development (R&D) in an expanding economy in containing price increases. Higher wages do not necessarily cause inflation in an economy with expanding production or overcapacity. He also did not foresee the effects of globalization, ie, the shift of production to low-wage regions, on holding down domestic inflation in the core economies. Friedman's second argument was that the Phillips Curve slope might actually be positive - higher inflation would be associated with higher average unemployment. He argued that only low inflation would lead to a natural rate of unemployment. This for policy makers was the equivalent of "when unemployment is unavoidable, relax and enjoy it". At the core of modern macroeconomics is some version of the famous Phillips Curve relationship between inflation and unemployment. The curve serves two purposes for economists and policy makers: 1) In theoretical models of inflation, it provides the "missing equation" to explain how changes in nominal income divide into price and quantity components; and 2) on the policy front, it specifies conditions contributing to the effectiveness of expansionary/disinflationary policies. The idea of an inflation/unemployment tradeoff is not new. It was a key component of the monetary doctrines of David Hume (1752) and Henry Thornton (1802), and identified in 1926 by Irving Fisher, who saw causation as running from inflation to unemployment (but not low unemployment causing inflation, as most modern central bankers do). It was stated in the form of an econometric equation by Jan Tinbergen in 1936 and again by Lawrence Klein and Arthur Goldberger in 1955. It was not until 1958 that modern Phillips Curve analysis began when A W Phillips published his famous article in which he fitted a statistical equation w = f(U) to annual data on percentage rates of change of money wages (w) and the unemployment rate (U) in the United Kingdom during 1861-1913, showing the response of wages to the excess demand for labor as proxied by the inverse of the unemployment rate. Zero wage inflation occurred at 4.5 percent of unemployment historically. In the pre-globalized 1970s, many economies were experiencing rising inflation and unemployment simultaneously. Friedman attempted to provide a tentative hypothesis for this phenomenon. In his view, higher inflation tends to be associated with more inflation volatility and greater inflation uncertainty. This uncertainty reduces economic efficiency as contracting arrangements must adjust, imperfections in indexation systems become more prominent, and price movements provide confused signals about the types of relative price changes that indicate the need for resources to shift. Three reasons contributed to the wide acceptance of Phillips' curve, despite critics' attack that it was a mere empirical correlation masquerading as a tradeoff. First, the curve shows remarkably temporal stability of the relationship, fitting both the pre-World War I period of 1861-1913 and the post-World War II period of 1948-57. Second, the curve can accommodate a wide variety of inflation theories. While the curve explains inflation as resulting from excess demand that bids up wages and prices, it remains neutral about the cause of that phenomenon. Both demand-pull and cost-push theorists can accept the curve as offering insights into the nature of the inflationary process while disagreeing on the causes of and therefore the appropriate remedies for inflation. Finally, policy makers like it because it provides a convenient and convincing rationale for the failure to achieve full employment with price stability, twin goals that were thought to be compatible before the advent of Phillips Curve analysis. Also, the curve, by offering a menu of alternative inflation/unemployment combination from which the authorities could choose, provided a ready-made justification for discretionary central bank intervention and activist fine-tuning, not to mention the self-interest of the economic advisors who supply the cost-benefit analysis underlying the central bank's choices. Yet the Phillips Curve is now widely viewed as offering no tradeoff, thus it supports the notion of policy futility. Unemployment then is considered a natural phenomenon with no long-term cure. It is an amazing posture for the economic profession given that even as conservative a profession as medicine has not accepted the existence of any incurable diseases. All the "scientific" pronouncements on the natural rate and inevitability of unemployment fall into the same category of insight as that by US president Calvin Coolidge: "When large numbers of people are unable to find work, unemployment will result." The parallel correlation between inflation and unemployment that Friedman noted was subsequently replaced by an opposite correlation as the early 1980s saw disinflations accompanied by recessions. After that, many economists would view inflation and unemployment movements as reflecting both aggregate supply and aggregate demand disturbances as well as the dynamic adjustments the economy follows in response to these disturbances. When demand disturbances dominate, inflation and unemployment will tend to be opposingly correlated initially as, for example, an expansion lowers unemployment and raises inflation. As the economy adjusts, prices continue to increase as unemployment begins to rise again and return to its natural rate. When supply disturbances dominate (as in the 1970s), inflation and unemployment will tend to move initially in the same direction. In the 1990s, a new phenomenon known as the wealth effect came into play in extending the business cycle. As credit became liberalized and risk socialized, asset prices began to outstrip both earnings and wages. Consumption became driven by capital gain rather than rising income from wages. Inflation, which mainstream economics never defined as including capital gain, remained unrealistically low as wages fell behind asset appreciation. Yet the Fed was unable to prevent the bubble expansion by a monetary tightening because inflation was mysteriously low while both share and real-estate prices doubled yearly. When the Fed finally launched in 1999 its preemptive fight against potential inflation, the result was a drastic deflation of the equity markets and a hard landing for the bubble economy. A sizable number of economists have followed Friedman in accepting that there is no long-run tradeoff that would allow permanently lower unemployment to be traded for higher inflation. And a part of the reason for this acceptance is the contributions of Lucas. In his Nobel lecture, Lucas noted that some evidence exists that average inflation rates and average money growth rates are tightly linked: "The observation that money changes induce output changes in the same direction receives confirmation in some data sets but is hard to see in others. Large-scale reductions in money growth can be associated with large-scale depressions or, if carried out in the form of a credible reform, with no depression at all." Lucas drew this conclusion largely from work on episodes of hyper-inflations in which major institutional reforms had been associated with large changes in inflation; when major reforms are not involved, the evidence shows a more consistent effect of monetary policy expansions and contractions on real activity. Recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) insistence on punitive "conditionalities" for financial bailouts of distressed sovereign debt is strongly influenced by Lucas's "credible reform" notion. Pain is extracted as proof of commitment. While Friedman also stressed that the real effects of changes in monetary policy would depend on whether they were anticipated or not, Lucas demonstrated the striking implications of assuming that individuals form their expectations rationally. Lucas abandoned Friedman's notion of a gradual adjustment of expectations based on past developments and instead stressed the forward-looking nature of expectations. Expectations of future monetary easing or tightening will affect the economy now. And this means that the real effects of an increase in money growth could, in principle, be expansionary or contractionary, depending on the public's expectations. Nowadays this phenomenon is visible every day in the equity markets. The Fed's interest-rate moves have become a cat-and-mouse game with market participants and are one of the prime factors behind market volatility. One consequence of this insight has been a new recognition of the importance of credibility in policy; that is, a credible policy - one that is explicit and for which the central bank is held responsible - can influence the way people form their expectations. Thus, the effects of policy actions by a central bank with credibility may be quite different from those of a central bank that lacks credibility. Even though the empirical evidence for credibility effects was weak in the past, the emphasis on credibility has been one factor motivating central banks to design policy frameworks that embody credible commitments to low inflation. In this respect, it is a puzzlement why the Fed insists on keeping its interest-rate policy a suspenseful surprise for market participants, leading to increased market volatility and uncertainty. Moreover, if a credible long-term price-stability policy produces no tradeoff in unemployment, it follows that the reverse may be true: that a credible policy goal of full employment may not even lead to long-term inflation. Some economists have begun to question the natural unemployment rate result that Lucas's work helped to promote. They argue that even credible low-inflation policies are likely to carry a cost in terms of permanently higher unemployment and that a stable Phillips Curve tradeoff exists at low rates of inflation. They argue that employee resistance to money wage cuts will limit the ability of real wages to adjust when the price level is stable. But the influence of Friedman and Lucas has clearly shifted the debate since the early 1970s. Now it is the proponents of a tradeoff who represent the minority view. There are some who uses the TINA (there is no alternative) argument against efforts to reform the Fed's approach to monetary policy. Yet it is clear that the very structure of the Fed leans toward a particular political theory of inflation that seems out of phase with reality. The Fed, while independent within government, has seen its legislative mandate for monetary policy change several times since its founding in 1913. The most recent revisions were in 1977 and 1978 (Humphrey-Hawkins), which require the Fed to promote both price stability and full employment. The past changes in the Fed's mandate appear to reflect both economic events in the United States and advances in understanding of how the economy functions. In the two decades since the Fed's mandate was last changed, there have been further important economic and financial developments made possible by shifts in economic thought that have been ideologically influenced, and these raise the issue of whether the goals for US monetary policy need to be modified once again in view of current data. Indeed, a number of other countries - notably those that adopted the euro as a common currency - having accepted price stability as the original primary goal of their unified monetary policy, are raising similar questions. Japan, having suffered a decade-long recession that begins to look perpetual, has been pushing its central bank to undertake drastic stimulative policies. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 did not incorporate any macroeconomic goals for monetary policy, but instead required the Fed to "provide an elastic currency". This meant that the Fed should help the economy avoid the financial panics and bank runs that plagued the 19th century by serving as a "lender of last resort", which involved making loans directly to depository institutions through the discount windows of the Reserve Banks. During this early period, most of the actions of monetary policy that affected the macro-economy were determined by the US government's adherence to the gold standard. The trauma of the Great Depression, coupled with the insights of John Maynard Keynes, led to an acknowledgment of the obligation of the US government to prevent recessions. The Employment Act of 1946 was the first legislative statement of these macroeconomic policy goals. Although it did not specifically mention the Fed, it required the federal government in general to foster "conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment opportunities ... for those able, willing, and seeking to work, and to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power". Therein lies the fundamental flaw in the wisdom of the political independence of the Federal Reserves. Congress has never legislated unemployment as a legitimate tool to fight inflation, economic theory notwithstanding. There is a whole list of antisocial programs that, if made legal, could lead to economic efficiency, such as terminating unproductive life, genetic engineering to raise intelligence-quotient (IQ) scores or to eliminate costly genetic diseases, selective education opportunities based on potential economic performance, etc. Yet societal value condemns such programs. Why is unemployment an exception? The Great Inflation of the 1970s was a major US economic dislocation. This problem was addressed in a 1977 amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, which provided the first explicit recognition of price stability as a national policy goal. The amended act states that the Fed "shall maintain long-run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy's long-run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". The goals of "stable prices" and "moderate long-term interest rates" are related because nominal interest rates are boosted by a premium over real rates equal to expected future inflation. Thus, "stable prices" will typically produce long-term interest rates that are "moderate". The objective of "maximum" employment remained intact from the 1946 Employment Act; however, the interpretation of this term may have changed during the intervening 30 years. Immediately after World War II, when conscription and price controls had produced a high-pressure economy with very low unemployment in the United States, some perhaps believed that the goal of "maximum" employment could be taken in its mathematical sense to mean the highest possible level of employment. However, by the second half of the 1970s, it was well understood that some "frictional" unemployment, which involves the search for new jobs and the transition between occupations, is a necessary accompaniment to the proper functioning of the economy in the long run. This understanding went hand in hand in the latter half of the 1970s with a general acceptance of the natural rate hypothesis, which implies that if policy were to try to keep employment above its long-run trend permanently or, equivalently, the unemployment rate below its natural rate, then inflation would be pushed higher and higher. Policy can temporarily reduce the unemployment rate below its natural rate or, equivalently, boost employment above its long-run trend. However, persistently attempting to maintain "maximum" employment that is above its long-run level would not be consistent with the goal of stable prices. Thus, in order for maximum employment and stable prices to be mutually consistent goals, maximum employment should be interpreted as meaning maximum sustainable employment, referred to also as "full employment". Moreover, although the Fed has little if any influence on the long-run level of employment, it can attempt to smooth out short-run fluctuations. Accordingly, promoting full employment can be interpreted as a countercyclical monetary policy in which the Fed aims to smooth out the amplitude of the business cycle. This interpretation of the Fed's mandate was later confirmed in the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation. As its official title - the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 - clearly implies, this legislation mandates the federal government generally to "... promote full employment and production, increased real income, balanced growth, a balanced federal budget, adequate productivity growth, proper attention to national priorities, achievement of an improved trade balance ... and reasonable price stability ...". Besides clarifying the general goal of full employment, the Humphrey-Hawkins Act also specified numerical definitions or targets. The act specified two initial goals: an unemployment rate of 4 percent for full employment and a CPI inflation rate of 3 percent for price stability. These were only "interim" goals to be achieved by 1983 and followed by a further reduction in inflation to 0 percent by 1988; however, the disinflation policies during this period were not to impede the achievement of the full-employment goal. Thereafter, the timetable to achieve or maintain price stability and full employment was to be defined by each year's Economic Report of the President. The Fed, then, has two main legislated goals for monetary policy: promoting full employment and promoting stable prices. The transparency of goals refers to the extent to which the objectives of monetary policy are clearly defined and can be easily and obviously understood by the public. The goal of full employment will never be very transparent because it is not directly observed but only estimated by economists with limited precision. For example, the 1997 Economic Report of the President (which has authority in this matter from the Humphrey-Hawkins Act) gives a range of 5-6 percent for the unemployment rate consistent with full employment, with a midpoint of 5.5 percent. Research suggests that there is a very wide range of uncertainty around any estimate of the natural rate. Price stability as a goal is also subject to some ambiguity. Recent economic analysis has uncovered systematic biases, say, on the order of 1 percentage point, in the CPI's measurement of inflation. In fact, it would not be far wrong to conclude that the Fed has a policy to keep unemployment from falling below 4 percent, as evident in Greenspan's raising the Fed Funds Rate in the late 1990s in response to falling unemployment. The Wall Street Journal on October 3, 2000, reported that the Fed had come under the influence of Johan G K Wicksell (1851-1926) on the relationship among interest rates, growth and inflation. The Fed had pushed inflation-adjusted real rates historically high. Monetarists, who have dominated the Fed throughout its history, subscribe to the theory that inflation can only be prevented either by high rates to contain growth or by high unemployment to depress wages, which are two faces of the same coin. Wicksell argued that monetary policy works best at containing inflation by pegging interest rates to investment returns rather than money supply. That theory provides a needed cover for Greenspan's high-interest-rate policy at the height of the debt bubble. Of course, the Treasury, with the patriotic support of the Fed, has repeatedly declared that a strong dollar is in the US national interest. And a strong dollar requires high US interest rates in the international finance architecture. But now, in addition to national-interest justifications, a scientific theory has been resurrected to support Greenspan's policy. Field data have demolished the claim that low unemployment (below 6 percent) causes inflation. Greenspan calls his high rates "equilibrium interest rates". The Fed, notwithstanding its intellectual pretense, has always been a political institution. The politics of economics repeatedly resurrects from the intellectual wasteland, the theoretical Siberia as it were, new gurus to support its latest ideology. Nobel winners are proponents of theories that explain "scientifically" last year's political expediency. The list includes Friedrich von Hayek (free market), Friedman (monetary theory), Robert Mundell (global capital), Schumpeter (creative destruction) etc. Wicksell makes it respectable for Greenspan to abdicated his responsibility as Fed Chairman, by pretending to follow the market, to treat interest rates as prices of money set by market forces, and not as a tool to promote employment or growth, an if necessary only as a tool to bail out banks in distress. The embarrassing question of why then the United States needs a Federal Reserve is never asked. The fact is that the monetarists at the Fed are fervently intervening in the market - the only difference between monetarists and Keynesians is that monetarists intervene to safeguard the value of capital while Keynesians intervene to protect labor from unemployment and low wages. As post-Keynesians economist Paul Davidson said, everyone has an income policy; they just don't like the other fellow's income policy but claim their own as "free" market determined. This creates rethinks on Wall Street. Traders and investors may have to reverse their knee-jerk reaction to sell when the Fed raises rates. Unless, of course, corporate profit falls amid rising rates, as they are beginning to. Wicksell was born in Stockholm. His book Value, Capital and Rent (1893) was not translated into English until 1954. His Lectures on Political Economy (two volumes, 1901-06) and Selected Papers on Economic Theory (1958) were read only by professionals. Wicksell did rigorous work on the marginalist theory of price and distribution and on monetary theory. Lectures on Political Economy has been aptly called a "textbook for professors". In an unusually checkered career (including a brief spell of imprisonment for exercising his right of free speech) he wrote and lectured tirelessly of radical issues, which did not figure among the qualities that Greenspan admired. He was an advocate of social and economic reforms of various kinds, most notably neo-Malthusian population controls. In his later years he was revered by the new generation of economists, who became known as the Stockholm School. They developed his ideas on the cumulative process into a dynamic theory of monetary macroeconomics simultaneously with but independently of the Keynesian revolution. Greenspan's selective use of other people's idea is notorious. His fondness of Schumpeterean "creative destruction", which he cites in every speech, always leaves out the second half of Schumpeter's conclusion: that creative destruction tends to encourage monopolies (a la Microsoft) and accelerates the coming of socialism. Paul Volcker's monetary policy was identical to that of Benjamin Strong, who was president of the all-powerful New York Fed, and whose stewardship of which was hailed by Friedman as the era of "high tide" for the Fed. The policy was: save the banking system at all cost, including the health of the economy. Depressions will eventually recover, but a banking system is like Humpty Dumpty, all the king's men cannot put it together again once it collapses. The stable value of money is a defining ingredient of economic order, a sine qua non. Both times, the Fed not only forced deflation on parts of the economy to maintain overall low inflation, it managed monetary policy to ensure perpetual surplus capacity to suppress prices and wages. In the 1980s, one of the high-growth areas of the service sector was bankruptcy law and distress debt restructuring. Vulture funds such as Apollo, corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and LBO (leveraged buyout) firms such as KKR prospered. Post-bankruptcy DIP (debtor in possession) financing was highly profitable and the bank that pioneered it, Chemical of New York, became such a powerhouse from its dominance in this lucrative activity that it was eventually able it to take over Manufactures Hannover and Chase and J P Morgan to become JP Morgan/Chase. Yet stable money is ultimately an illusion, a statistical artifact. In the quest for monetary order, stable money in reality creates economic disorder in the real economy. Within the conservative political context of capitalism, stable money produces a complacency of moral satisfaction. The winners are credited with financial genius and rewarded with the right to practice conspicuous consumption, taking on celebrity status. The losers are condemned for their mistakes. It fits neatly into Spencerian Social Darwinism of survival of the fittest, notwithstanding that the criteria for fitness have been defined by policy. The tilted market is hailed as the indiscriminate crucible of perpetual economic revitalization, while in fact a handful of men in the paneled boardroom of the Fed play God to decide who lives and who dies. Deflationary pressure does force management to downsize and cut costs, cutting out the weak and the marginal. But the central effect is the consolidation of ownership through mergers and acquisition. M&A, the legal process of wealth concentration, has been the driving force of the growth of capitalism since the late Middle Ages. With globalization, we are heading toward an economic order in which every sector can accommodate only five megafirms, two real players, market leaders as they are called, in a carefully choreographed condominium that appears to be managed competition to stay on the good side of antitrust laws, with three minor players permitted to survive for appearance' sake. The essence of monetary policy, like all policies, despite technical complexities, is ultimately reduced to social values that determine goals and priorities. It comes down to welfare economics and power politics. Yet the Fed operates on ideology exclusively. As Preston Martin, Fed vice chairman, declared more than once in the '80s: a growth recession is a real threat. Global capital will stay in the United States for the same reason that people stay in jobs they don't like: there are no better alternatives. The euro reinforced that sentiment. The last joyride with the yen ended with much pain in 1998. One cannot predict when capital flight will hit the United States, because US hegemony deprives any incentive to move capital elsewhere and global prosperity cannot revive without US prosperity. There is the catch 22. Yet despite the abundance of capital funds, the system can implode. The only uncertainty is when, not if. Global capital now treats local markets as parking lots only and increasingly unlike physical parking lots, for financial virtual parking, the one nearest to your office is not necessarily the most convenient. If the United States will lower interest rates, regulate credit allocation, permit a higher rate of inflation, and raise wages substantially to keep up purchasing power, both domestically and globally, the boom may last another decade. But US policy makers are not yet on this track. The disparity of income will doom this debt economy. Note 1 The three customary monetary aggregates are: M1 = currency in circulation, commercial bank demand deposits, NOW (negotiable order of withdrawal) and ATS (auto transfer from savings), credit-union share drafts, mutual-savings-bank demand deposits, non-bank traveler's checks; M2 = M1 plus overnight repurchase agreements issued by commercial banks, overnight eurodollars, savings accounts, time deposits under $100,000, money market mutual shares; M3 = M2 plus time deposits over $100,000, term repo agreements. Next: The Asian Experience     Part III-d:   The Lesson of the US Experience Part 4a: The Asian experience This article appeared in AToL on June 18, 2003   Since the beginning of the new millennium, the world's three leading economies, the United States, the European Union and Japan, have experienced a rare synchronous slowdown while much of the developing world, including Asia, remained mired in economic and financial difficulties that started in Asia in 1997. This development has rendered inoperative the strategy of having the global economic engine stabilized by sequential boosts from the synchronized phasing of domestic business cycles in connected yet independent economies, like the well-timed sequential firing of a multi-cylinder internal combustion engine. The current global economic stagnation is not an accidental breakdown. It is the visible result of the coordinated operation of global central banking, burning out the economic spark plugs with super-rich gas in the form of universal and reflexive tight monetary measures, which have produced overlapping long-term imbalances in the global economy's major regional dynamos. The decade-long post-bubble deflation in Japan was linked to financial globalization that challenged the efficacy of the traditional Japanese financial system. The Tokyo Big Bang (financial deregulation) on April 1, 1998, crowned with a Central Bank Law on the same day, was designed to boost the value of the Japanese stock market, aiming to re-establish Tokyo's position as one of the top three global financial centers. Once the largest stock market in the world, Tokyo by 1998 had fallen steadily to less than half the size of New York in contrast with the latter's astronomical expansion. Although the Japanese had savings of about US$9 trillion in 1998, a third of the world total, most savings were held in low-interest bank and postal accounts on which the Japanese government traditionally relied for low-cost capital to fund its national economic plans. The population was aging rapidly and the government was worried there would not be enough money in the economy to support future pensioners because of the low return on savings. Neo-liberal market fundamentalists pushed through a series of radical reforms designed to change the way money traditionally flowed around the Japanese economy, recycling more savings into the stock market to boost yield. The government hoped to bring Tokyo back in line with the high trading levels of London and New York, pulling the value of the recycled savings up with it by increasing their rate of return. The reforms were called the Big Bang after a similar exercise in Britain 12 years earlier on October 27, 1986, which in turn was inspired by May Day in the US in 1975, which ended fixed minimum brokerage commissions that marked the beginning of diversification into electronic trading. Instead of bringing new prosperity and high returns to fund exploding pension obligations, the Tokyo Big Bang reduced Japanese banks, which earlier had been operating with spectacular success in a national banking regime in support of Japanese industrial policy, to near-terminal cases in a global central banking environment. Subsidized policy loans that had served postwar national purposes for half a century suddenly became non-performing loans (NPLs) as defined by new international standards set by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), as corporate borrowers were forced by dollar hegemony to sacrifice profit margin to expand market share, while financial deregulation put downward pressure on the traditional norm of high price-earning ratios of Japanese equity. The banks' traditional holding of significant equity position in their corporate borrowers and the tradition of a controlled domestic market caused structural problems for the Japanese financial system in the new globalized competitive environment. The banks were squeezed by falling cash flow from loan service payments by their distressed debtors and by the falling market value of loan collateral and capital held in the shares of their borrowers. The Tokyo stock market's key Nikkei index tumbled from an all-time high of 21,552.81 recorded on June 13, 1994, to below the psychologically crucial 15,000 level in July 1995 when the yen's sharp appreciation hit manufacturers and exporters. The Nikkei is now around 8,500 and Japanese officials would kill to get it back to 15,000, but it seems to be an impossible dream because global central banking has forced deregulated markets to discount the market value of the Japanese system that had worked so miraculously for the previous half-century. The government tried to solve the problem with Keynesian deficit financing, only to be hit with international credit-rating downgrades on government bonds, despite the fact that Japan remains the world's biggest credit nation. Concurrently in Europe, persistently high levels of unemployment and anemic growth plagued the euro zone, whose European Central Bank (ECB) came into being on June 1, 1998, two months after Japan's. And in the United States, by the beginning of 2000, a steady collapse of the debt bubble began, generated by unsustainably high consumer, business and external debt levels that had been first engineered by the Federal Reserve (Fed) through regulatory indulgence and then later deflated through sharp rises in interest rates. Since then, the global economic engine has been stalled in all three cylinders by the efforts of the world's three dominant central banks to impose on the global economy destructively inoperative monetary policies. After allowing regulatory indulgence on the part of the US Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) to feed a historic bubble in US asset prices inflated by accounting fantasies, fraudulent analyses, and financial manipulation, the Fed, reversing its loose monetary policy since 1997, conducted a pre-election monetary tightening, repeatedly raising interest rates in quick succession during the second half of 1999 and the first half of 2000 to slow down the real economy. The Fed also spurred the ECB to follow suit, despite already slow growth and high unemployment in EU member economies. The Fed had discovered that for the United States, domestic consumer price stability in an expanding economy could be achieved through a strong-currency policy that would generate a capital account surplus to finance a current-account deficit that produced a low inflation reading through low-cost imports, as long as key commodities, such as oil, were denominated in US currency. For a whole decade, wealth has been created primarily through financial acrobatics, not real economic expansion either within the US or around the world. Conspicuous consumption along chic shopping boulevards, cruised by gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles, to fill homes that rose in price by 60 percent annually, supported by the wealth effect of a stock-market bubble that made office clerical workers millionaires, buoyant by a trade regime that enabled a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the super rich, is mistaken for economic growth. Fed chairman Alan Greenspan proudly called this US financial hegemony and told Congress that the financial crises that hit Asia in 1997 would have "salutary" effect on the US economy. During the past decade, central banks worldwide have achieved unprecedented heights of policy dominance through their function as chief guardians of strong national currencies in globalized, unregulated financial markets. Simultaneously, monetary authorities the world over have been promoting the doctrine of central-bank independence from duly constituted national governments and their national economic policies, as if populist government and people-oriented policies are financial evils that must be resisted. Poverty and unemployment are hailed as the foundation of sound money that should not be jeopardized by political pressure. This elitist doctrine is fundamentally incompatible with a political world order of independent nation states and the principle of consent of the governed. Any nation that forfeits its monetary prerogative also forfeits its political independence. The ECB's institutional structure represents the ultimate real-world application of this doctrine on a regional scale. In the name of central-bank autonomy, the Maastricht Treaty explicitly prohibits the ECB from seeking or taking instruction from constituent national governments, or European Community institutions such as the European Parliament, or "any other body", and bars constituent national governments from attempting to influence the decisions of the ECB. Critics have pointed out that those same rules place no reciprocal restrictions on the ECB's policy advocacy. ECB president Wim Duisenberg has unreservedly pushed euro zone economies to refashion their labor, product, services, capital and credit markets along neo-liberal market-fundamentalist lines, even in economies under social democratic governments. This has contributed to the EU's slow growth and high unemployment. Germany, the dominant economy in the EU, has persistently suffered high unemployment, which hit 9.7 percent in November, rising above the politically sensitive 4 million level; in eastern Germany, the unemployment rate was 17.6 percent. Article 105 of the Maastricht Treaty states clearly: "The primary objective of the European System of Central Banks shall be to maintain price stability." The wording of the Maastricht Treaty was not so much influenced by economic insights as it was written in a very specific political context: to persuade an inflation-averse Germany to exchange the deutschmark for the euro, by guaranteeing the stability of the new currency. This explains the focus on price stability and the fact that other objectives were mentioned separately and secondarily. The statutes of other central banks, such as the Fed, can be changed by action of a single legislature. The ECB would require all 15 member states and their parliaments to change the treaty that defines the structure and institutional mandate of the ECB. This makes the ECB one of the most independent central banks in the world. The treaty did not define "price stability", leaving a vacuum quickly filled by the new and independent ECB by defining price stability as "an inflation rate that does not exceed 2 percent over the medium term", a very tight definition by any standard. Interest-rate policy alone is an inadequate tool because a single instrument cannot hit multiple targets. Furthermore, using interest rates to control asset markets risks inflicting significant collateral damage on the rest of the economy, which was exactly what happened in the past few years. The BIS harbors latent ambitions to turn itself into a de facto World Central Bank (WCB) with the ECB as a model, while the argument for the need for a WCB is floated around in the upper reaches of internationalist monetary circles. Asia is home to 58 percent of the world's 6.25 billion people, with 43 percent of Asians living in East Asia and 37 percent in China alone. According to US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) data, the US economy accounts for 21 percent of gross world product (GWP - $47 trillion in 2001), the EU accounts for 20 percent and Japan accounts for 7.3 percent. The three leading economies together account for $22 trillion - 47.3 percent of GWP. China, the second-largest economy in the world based on purchasing power parity (PPP; 12 percent of GWP), and seventh on a nominal basis ($1.3 trillion in 2001, 2.8 percent of GWP) is an exception to global trends of slow growth, continuing its rapid annual growth, officially announced as 7.3 percent in 2001 and 8 percent in 2002. Yet lest we should get carried away by statistics, the Chinese per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of about $900 in 2001 remains solidly in the less-developed-countries (LDC) category, way below Japan's $32,500. Of the 129 countries covered by the World Development Report, China ranked 76th in per capita GDP on a nominal basis and 68th on a PPP basis, a modest climb. China's economic strength rests purely on its size. China also adopted a Central Bank Law in 1995 and gave the People's Bank of China central-bank status, but the Chinese economy has remained a growth economy mostly because its currency is not freely convertible and its financial market is not open, and its central bank not fully independent. There is increasing evidence that the crisis in the Japanese banking system is not the cause but merely the symptom of that nation's economic malaise. This malaise can largely be traced to the Japanese economy's over-dependence on export for dollars, which in turn has resulted from the disadvantaged structural financial position Japan has allowed itself to fall into in the global financial system. BIS regulations, which force traditional Japanese national banking in support of a strong economy to shift toward central banking in support of a strong national currency, are a big part of that structural disadvantage. This is the reason Japan has been resistant to US demands for bank reform. The NPL problem in Japanese banks traces directly to BIS regulations. This is also true for all of Asia, particularly South Korea, and increasingly China. No doubt Japan needs to reform its banking system, but it is highly debatable that the reform needs to go along the line proposed by US neo-liberals, or that bank reform alone will lift the Japanese economy out of its decade-long doldrums (see The BIS vs national banks, May 14, 2002). All these problems contributed to and in turn were magnified by structural flaws and disorders in the international financial architecture and global trade, notably misaligned currency values and interest rate disparities. This has led to escalating mismatches between productive capacity and effective demand, which has been exacerbated by a "free trade" regime that has degenerated into a mad scramble for dollars that the United States can print at will. The whole world lives on an over-reliance on export to a US consumer market fueled by debt sustained by dollar hegemony. The ABC of the global economy is now expressed as America prints dollars to Buy the world's products on Credit provided by the world's producers. The US is exempt from a day of reckoning, since the US only has to print more dollars, as Fed Board member Ben Bernanke pronounced recently. Foreign creditors will only devalue their massive dollar holdings if they try to collect from the US economy. It is the ultimate demonstration of debtor power, with the debtor holding the power to print currency in which the debt is denominated. Asia, because of its largest population of low-wage workers, is holding the shortest end of the biggest global trade stick. The Asian financial crisis that began in 1997 had its genesis in Mexico, incubated by a decade of globalization of financial markets. The currency crisis that started in Mexico in 1982, in Britain in 1992, again in Mexico in 1994, in Asia in 1997, spreading to Russia and Latin America since and finally hitting both the EU and the US in 2000, and the deeper structural financial challenges facing the entire global economy, have been the inevitable result of the Fed, the ECB and the Bank of Japan applying their unified institutional mandates of domestic price stability through domestic interest-rate policies that have destabilized the post-Bretton Woods international finance architecture. The Mexican financial crisis of 1982 set the pattern for subsequent financial crises around the world. To recycle petrodollars beginning in 1973, US banks had sought out select LDCs, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc, for predatory lending. By 1980, LDCs had accumulated $400 billion in foreign debt, more than their combined GDP. In 1982, impacted by the Fed under Paul Volcker raising dollar interest rates sharply in 1979 to fight inflation in the United States, Mexico was put in a position of not being able to meet its obligations to service $80 billion in dollar-denominated short-term debt obligations to foreign, mostly US, banks out of a GDP of $106 billion. Debt service payments reached 62.8 percent of export value in 1979. Exports accounted for 12 percent of GDP while government expenditures accounted for 11 percent, which included public-education expenditure of 5.2 percent. Mexico was paying more in interest to foreign banks than it did to educate its young. Mexican foreign reserves had fallen to less than $200 million and capital was leaving the country at the rate of $100 million a day. Against this background, neo-liberal economists were claiming that poverty was being eradicated in Mexico by "free" trade, a claim they made the world over. A Mexican default would have threatened the survival of the largest commercial banks in the United States, namely Citibank, Chase, Chemical, Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Manufacturer Hanover, etc. To negotiate new loans for Mexico, all creditors would have to agree and participate, so that the new loans would not just go pay off some holdout creditors at the expense of the others. Many other creditor banks were smaller US regional banks that had only limited exposure to Mexico, and they did not want to "throw good money after bad" merely to bail out the major money center banks. The big banks had to lobby the Fed to step in as crisis manager to keep the smaller banks in line for the good of the system, notwithstanding that the crisis had been caused largely by the Fed's failure to impose prudent limits on the money center banks' frenzied lending to the Third World in the previous decade and Volcker's sudden high-interest-rate shock treatment in 1979, instead of traditional Fed gradualism that would have given the banks time to adjust their loan portfolios. Third World economies were falling likes flies from the weight of debts that suddenly became prohibitive to service, not much different from private businesses in the United States, except that countries could not go bankrupt to wipe out debt the way private business could in the US. Volcker's triumph over domestic inflation was bought with the destabilization of the international financial system, whose banks had acted like loan sharks in the Third World with Fed approval. The International Monetary Fund then came in to take over the impaired bank loans with austerity "conditionalities" forced on the debtor economies, while the foreign banks went home whole with the IMF new money. As a result, Third World economies, including those in Asia, fell into a debt spiral, having to borrow new money from the IMF to service the old debts, being forced by new loan "conditionalities" to forgo any hope of future prosperity. Living standards kept declining while foreign debts kept piling higher, leading to even higher unemployment and more bankruptcies. US banks, while continuing to advocate free markets and financial deregulation, were at the same time falling into total dependence on government bailouts, both domestically and internationally. US taxpayers were footing the bill the Fed incurred in bailing out its constituent banks, through higher government budget deficits, which contributed to higher inflation, which led to higher interest rates, which in turn intensified the Third World debt spiral, in one huge vicious circle. By the late 1980s, Mexico had temporarily resolved its debt crisis, though not its debt spiral, and was able to resume a Ponzi-scheme economic growth, relying to a great extent on rising foreign investment. To attract more foreign capital, the Mexican government, coached by neo-liberal market-fundamentalist economists, undertook major economic reforms in the early 1990s designed to make its economy more open to foreign investment, more "efficient", and more "competitive", neo-liberal code words for disguised neo-imperialism. These reforms included privatizing state-owned enterprises, removing trade barriers that protected domestic producers, eliminating restrictions on foreign investment, and reducing inflation by tolerating higher unemployment and pushing down already low wages and limiting government spending on social programs by marketizing them. Most important, it suspended exchange control within a fixed-foreign-exchange-rate regime. This was in essence a Washington Consensus solution and much copied all over Asia in the early 1990s. In effect, it was a suicidal policy masked by the giddy expansion typical of the early phase of a Ponzi scheme. The new foreign investment was used to provide spectacular returns on earlier foreign investment with the help of central-bank support of overvalued fixed exchange rates, while neo-liberal economists were falling over one another congratulating themselves on their brilliant theoretical insight and giving one another awards at insider dinners, while collecting fat consultant fees from banks and governments. Star academics at Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chicago and Stanford, multiple snake heads of the academic Medusa, as well as those in prestigious policy-analysis institutions with unabashed ideological preferences that served as waiting lounges for policy specialists of the loyal opposition, busily turned out star disciples from the Third World elite who, armed with awe-inspiring foreign certificates and diplomas, would return to their home countries to form influential policy-making establishments, particularly in central banks, to promote this scandalous game of snake-oil economics. Every year, sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank, central bankers gathered in Washington, housed in luxurious hotel suites served by fleets of limousines to reassure one another of their monetary magic, communicating through opaque press releases couched in cryptic jargon. Mexico's devaluation of the peso in December 1994 precipitated another crisis in the country's financial institutions and markets that caused an abrupt collapse of a "booming" economy that had not benefited Mexico as much as foreign capital. Within Mexico, most of the benefit went to the elite comprador class at the expense of the general population, particularly the poor but even the middle class. International and domestic investors, reacting to falling confidence in the peso, sold Mexican equity and debt securities. Foreign-currency reserves at the Bank of Mexico, the nation's central bank, were insufficient to meet the massive demand of disillusioned investors seeking to convert pesos to dollars. In response to the crisis, the United States organized a financial rescue package of up to $50 billion in funds from the US, Canada, the IMF and the BIS. The multilateral rescue package was intended to enable Mexico to avoid defaulting on its debt obligations, and thereby overcome its short-term liquidity crisis, and to prevent the crisis from spreading to other emerging markets through contagion. It was not to help a Mexican economy hemorrhaging from a bankrupt monetary policy, one that allowed international investors to collect their phantom Ponzi peso profits in real dollars. The Mexican rescue package in 1995 created moral hazard on a global scale. In the weekend before Mexico's pending default, the US government took the lead in developing a rescue package. The package put together by the Fed under Alan Greenspan and the Treasury under Robert Rubin, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs and a consummate bond trader, included short-term currency swaps from the Fed and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), a commitment from Mexico to an IMF-imposed economic austerity program for $4 billion in IMF loans, and a moratorium on Mexico's principal payments to foreign commercial banks, mostly US, with Fed regulatory forbearance on bank capital adjustments that affected bank profits. It also included $5 billion in additional commercial bank loans, additional liquidity support from central banks in Europe and Japan, and prepayment by the US to Mexico for $1 billion in oil, and a $1 billion line of credit from the US Department of Agriculture. The ESF was established by Section 20 of the Gold Reserve Act of January 1934, with a $2-billion initial appropriation. Its resources has been subsequently augmented by special drawing rights (SDR) allocations by the IMF and through its income over the years from interest on short-term investments and loans, and net gains on foreign currencies. The ESF engages in monetary transactions in which one asset is exchanged for another, such as foreign currencies for dollars, and can also be used to provide direct loans and guarantees to other countries. ESF operations are under the control of the Secretary of the Treasury, subject to the approval of the president. ESF operations include providing resources for exchange-market intervention. The ESF has also been used to provide short-term swaps and guarantees to foreign countries needing financial assistance for short-term currency stabilization. The short-term nature of these transactions has been emphasized by amendments to the ESF statute requiring the president to notify Congress if a loan or credit guarantee is made to a country for more than six months in any 12-month period. It was Bear Stearns chief economist Wayne Angell, a former Fed governor and advisor to then Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who first came up with the idea of using the ESF to prop up the collapsing Mexican peso. Bear Stearns had significant exposure to peso debts. Senator Robert Bennett, a freshman Republican from Utah, took Angell's proposal to Greenspan and Rubin, who both rejected the idea at first, shocked at the blatant circumvention of constitutional procedures that this strategy represented, which would invite certain reprisal from Congress. Congress had implicitly rejected a rescue package that January when the initial proposal of extending Mexico $40 billion in loan guarantees could not get enough favorable votes. The chairman of the Fed advised Bennett that the idea would only work if Congress's silence could be guaranteed. Bennett went to Dole and convinced him that the whole scam would work if the majority leader would simply block all efforts to bring this use of taxpayers' money to a vote. It would all happen by executive fiat. The next step was to persuade Dole and his counterpart in the House, Speaker Newt Gingrich. They consulted several state governors, notably then Texas governor George W Bush, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a bailout to subsidize the border region in his state. Greenspan, who historically opposed bailouts of the private sector for fear of incurring moral hazard, was clearly in a position to stop this one. Instead, he used his considerable power and influence to help the process along when key players balked. The peso bailout would lead to a series of similar situations in which private investors got themselves into trouble, vindicating the moral-hazard principle that predicts such people will take undue risks in the presence of bailout guarantees. As Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Russia stumbled into crisis, culminating in the collapse of hedge-fund giant Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which played key roles in precipitating the crisis to begin with, Greenspan moved to increase liquidity to support the distressed bond markets. At the helm of LTCM was yet another former member of the Fed board, ex-vice chairman David Mullins. Mullins was there to plead for help from his former colleagues. When New York Fed president William McDonough helped coordinate a bailout of LTCM at his offices, Greenspan defended McDonough before a congressional oversight committee. Reflecting on all the corporate welfare being doled out to prop up bad private-sector investments worldwide, Bill Clinton appointee Alice Rivlin, the able former congressional budget director, observed that "the Fed was in a sense acting as the central banker of the world". During Clinton's first term, Greenspan had handed the president a "pro-incumbent-type economy" and was rewarded with a seat next to the First Lady in Clinton's televised State of the Union address and a third-term appointment as Fed chairman. Crony capitalism was in full swing. Short-term currency swaps are repurchase-type agreements through which currencies are exchanged. Mexico purchased dollars in exchange for pesos and simultaneously agreed to sell dollars against pesos three months hence. The US earned interest on its Mexican pesos at a specified rate. Historically, the US and Mexican economies have always been closely integrated in a semi-colonial relationship. In 1994, the United States supplied 69 percent of Mexico's high-value-added imports and absorbed about 85 percent of its low-cost labor-intensive exports. US investors have provided a substantial share of foreign investment in Mexico and have established numerous manufacturing facilities there to take advantage of low wages and unregulated labor and environmental regimes. Also, the US has served as a large market for illegal Mexican immigrant labor in its underground economy and farm sector, which has grown to be a sizable foreign-currency earner for Mexico. Mexico has long been the third-largest trading partner of the United States, accounting for 10 percent of US exports and about 8 percent of US imports in 1994. The maquiladora assembly industry concentrated on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border was hailed by neo-liberals as a model of successful free trade, instead of the sweatshop zone it actually was. In 1994, under newly installed president Ernesto Zedillo, a Yale-educated economist, Mexico entered the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. NAFTA, conceived as a regional economic counterweight to the EU, further opened Mexico to foreign investment and bolstered investor interest on the hope that with NAFTA, Mexico's long-term prospects for stable economic development were likely to improve, at least for the benefit of foreign investors. NAFTA, as negotiated and signed in December 1992 by the administrations of Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and US president George Bush Sr, and as amended and implemented by the Salinas and Clinton administrations in 1993, did not offer Mexico any significant increase in access to the US market. Rather, Mexico was blackmailed into signing NAFTA to prevent Mexican businesses from being bankrupted wholesale by sudden waves of pending US protectionism. Mexico was also advised by neo-liberals to adopt an exchange-rate system intended to protect foreign investors who could exchange their peso earnings for dollars at the Mexican central bank at an overvalued rate. In 1988, the nominal exchange rate of the peso had been fixed temporarily in relation to the US dollar. However, because the inflation rate in Mexico was greater than that in the United States, a peso nominal depreciation against the dollar was needed to keep the real exchange rate of the peso from increasing. With the nominal exchange rate of the peso fixed, the real exchange rate of the peso appreciated during this period. In 1989, this fixed-exchange-rate system was replaced by a "crawling peg" system, under which the peso-dollar exchange rate was adjusted daily to allow a slow rate of nominal depreciation of the peso to occur over time. In 1991, the crawling peg was replaced with a band within which the peso was allowed to fluctuate. The ceiling of the band was adjusted daily to permit some appreciation of the dollar (depreciation of the peso) to occur. The Mexican government used the exchange-rate system as an anchor for an unsustainable economic policy, ie, as a way to reduce inflation through shrinking the economy, to force a politically destabilizing fiscal policy, and thus to provide a comfortable climate for foreign investors, who managed to carry home the same dollars they brought in via a short circuit, while leaving only their peso holdings behind that the Mexican central banks had promised to guarantee as fully convertible at an over-valued fixed exchange rate despite predictable unsustainability. Before 1994, Mexico's strategy of adopting sound monetary and austere fiscal policies appeared to be having its intended effects of making foreign capital feel secure while the Mexican economy was steadily being hollowed out. Inflation had been steadily reduced by the inflated peso, government social spending was down to reduce the budget deficit, and foreign capital investment was increasing. Moreover, unlike in the years before 1982, most foreign capital was flowing to Mexico's private sector that yielded higher returns rather than as low-interest loans to the Mexican government to finance budget deficits. Although Mexico was experiencing a very large current-account deficit, both in absolute terms and in relation to the size of its economy, neo-liberal policy makers did not consider it an immediate problem. They pointed to Mexico's large foreign-currency reserves, its rising exports, and its seemingly endless ability to attract and retain foreign investment. This attitude ignored the fact that true wealth was leaving Mexico through the turning of peso assets into dollar assets, masked by a Mexican stock-market bubble fueled by an over-valued peso. Reality finally unmasked the faulty neo-liberal theory by late 1994. Mexico's financial crisis was the inevitable outcome of the growing inconsistency between its monetary and fiscal policies, its over-dependence on export for growth, and its exchange-rate system pegged to the dollar. Partly because of an upcoming presidential election, Mexican authorities were reluctant to take actions in the spring and summer of 1994, such as raising interest rates or devaluing the peso, that could have reduced this inconsistency. This structural policy inconsistency was exacerbated by the government's response to several economic and political events that created investor concerns about the likelihood of a currency devaluation. In response to investor concerns, the government issued large amounts of short-term, dollar-indexed notes called tesobonos. By the beginning of December 1994, Mexico had become particularly vulnerable to a financial crisis because its foreign-exchange reserves had fallen to $12.5 billion while it had tesobono obligations of $30 billion maturing in 1995. A country can respond to a current-account deficit in four ways: 1. Attract more foreign capital denominated in dollars. The US does not need to do this because of dollar hegemony, but Mexico, which could not print dollars, thus was forced to attract more foreign capital denominated in dollars with a Ponzi scheme of paying old capital with new capital. 2. Use foreign-exchange reserves to cover the deficit. The US can do this by printing dollars, the reserve currency of choice, but Mexico could not print dollars, only pesos, which put more pressure on the peso-dollar exchange rate. 3. Allow its currency to depreciate, thus making imports more expensive and exports cheaper. But for deeply indebted Mexico, a depreciated peso would make servicing existing foreign loans more expensive in peso terms. 4. Tighten monetary and/or fiscal policy to reduce the demand for all goods, including imports, shrinking the economy. A country such as Mexico can only use (3) and (4), as most Asian countries also found out in 1997. It was obvious that Mexico was experiencing a large current-account deficit financed mostly by short-term portfolio capital that was vulnerable to a sudden reversal of investor confidence. Nevertheless, neo liberal policy makers in both Mexico and Washington, while acknowledging that the peso was overvalued and the existing exchange rate was unsustainable, were undecided about the extent to which the peso was overvalued and if and when financial markets might force Mexico to take action. Estimates of the overvaluation ranged between 5 and 20 percent. Moreover, Fed and Treasury officials under Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin respectively did not foresee the magnitude of the crisis that eventually unfolded. The IMF was oblivious to the seriousness of the situation that was developing in Mexico and, for most of 1994, did not see a compelling case for a change in Mexico's exchange-rate policy. In the period prior to July 1997, when the Asian financial crises broke out first in Thailand, the IMF was praising South Korea and most other Asian economies for its continuing growth and sound exchange-rate policies. Even after financial contagion was in full force, the IMF kept releasing complacent prognoses of the temporary nature of the crisis as a passing liquidity crunch, while denying its structural causes. The objectives of the US and IMF rescue packages for Mexico, after the December 1994 devaluation and the subsequent loss of market confidence in the peso, were (1) to help Mexico overcome its allegedly short-term liquidity crisis and (2) to limit the adverse effects of Mexico's crisis spreading to the economies of other emerging market nations and beyond. No effort was directed at restructuring fundamental neo-liberal policy faults, nor to admit that localized isolation is empty hope in a globalized system. Many observers opposed any US financial rescue to Mexico. They argued that tesobono investors should not be shielded from financial losses on moral-hazard grounds, and that neither the danger posed by the spread of Mexico's crisis to other nations nor the risk to US trade, employment, and immigration was sufficient to justify such bailout. The Bank of Mexico, the central bank, increased the interest rate from 9 percent to 18 percent on short-term, peso-denominated Mexican government notes, called cetes, in an attempt to stem the outflow of capital. However, despite higher interest rates, investor demand for cetes continued to lag. Investors were demanding even higher interest rates on newly issued cetes because of their perception that the peso would be subject to progressively larger devaluation by rising interest rates. It was a classic vicious circle. Options available to the Mexican government at this time included (1) offering even higher interest rates on cetes; (2) reducing government expenditures to reduce domestic demand, decrease imports, and relieve pressure on the peso; or (3) devaluing the peso. All three options would lead to increased downward pressure on the peso and the economy. The only workable option, exchange control in the form of restrictive capital flow, was not considered by the Harvard-Yale-trained Mexican central bankers, nor encouraged by US advisors. It was not until 1998, when Malaysia successfully adopted exchange control, that some born-again market-failure fundamentalists, led by MIT economist Paul Krugman, grudging acknowledged it as a legitimate option. From the perspective of the Mexican authorities, the first two choices were unattractive in a presidential-election year because they could have led to a significant downturn in economic activity and could have further weakened Mexico's banking system. The third choice, devaluation, was also unattractive, since Mexico's success in attracting substantial new foreign investment to feed its Ponzi scheme depended on its commitment to maintain a stable exchange rate. In addition, a stable exchange rate had been an essential ingredient of long-standing policy agreements among government, labor, and business, and these agreements were perceived as ensuring economic and social stability. Also, the stable exchange rate was considered a key to continued reductions in the inflation rate by orthodox neo-classical economics. Ironically, typical of all Ponzi schemes, success was fatal because it accelerated unsustainability. Rather than adopting any of these options, the government chose, in the spring of 1994, to increase its issuance of tesobonos. Because tesobonos were dollar-indexed, holders could avoid losses that would otherwise result if Mexico subsequently chose to devalue its currency. The government promised to repay investors an amount, in pesos, sufficient to protect the dollar value of their investment. Tesobono financing in effect dollarized Mexican sovereign debt and transferred foreign-exchange risk from investors to the Mexican central bank and government and to provide a short-term liquidity solution that would exacerbate long-term structural problems. Tesobonos proved attractive to domestic and foreign investors. However, as sales of tesobonos rose, Mexico became vulnerable to a financial market crisis because many tesobono purchasers were portfolio investors who were very sensitive to changes in interest rates and related risks. Furthermore, tesobonos had short maturities, which meant that their holders might not roll them over if investors perceived (1) an increased risk of a government default or (2) higher returns elsewhere. Market discipline operated like a pool of circling hungry sharks. Nevertheless, Mexican authorities viewed tesobono financing as the best way to stabilize foreign-exchange reserves over the short term and to avoid the immediate costs implicit in the other alternatives. In fact, Mexico's foreign-exchange reserves did stabilize at a level of about $17 billion from the end of April through August 1994, when the presidential elections came to a conclusion. Mexican authorities expected that investor confidence would be restored after the August presidential election and that investment flows would return in sufficient amounts to preclude any need for continued, large-scale tesobono financing. After the election, however, foreign-investment flows did not recover to the extent expected by Mexican authorities, in part because peso interest rates were allowed to decline in August and were maintained at that level until December. During the autumn of 1994, it became increasingly clear that Mexico's mix of monetary, fiscal, and exchange-rate policies needed to be adjusted. The current-account deficit had worsened during the year, partly as a result of the strengthening of the economy related to a moderate pre-election loosening of fiscal policy, including a step up in development lending, which was considered by market fundamentalists as a big no-no. Imports had also surged as the peso became further overvalued. Mexico had become heavily exposed to a run on its foreign-exchange reserves as a result of substantial tesobono financing. Outstanding tesobono obligations increased from $3.1 billion at the end of March to $29.2 billion in December. Also, between January and November 1994, US three-month Treasury bill yields had risen from 3.04 percent to 5.45 percent, substantially increasing the attractiveness of US government securities. In the middle of November 1994, Mexican authorities had to draw down foreign-currency reserves to meet the demand for dollars. On November 15, 1994, in response to US domestic economic conditions, the Fed raised the federal funds rate by three-quarters of a percentage point to 5.5 percent, raising the general level of dollar interest rates and further increasing the attractiveness of US bonds to investors. By late November and early December, poor economic performance spilled over to political incidents that caused apprehension among investors regarding Mexico's political stability. These concerns were compounded on December 9, when the new Mexican administration revealed that it expected an even higher current-account deficit in 1995 but planned no change in its exchange-rate policy. This decision led to a further loss in confidence by investors, increased redemptions of Mexican securities, and a significant drop in foreign-exchange reserves to $10 billion. Meanwhile, Mexico's outstanding tesobono obligations reached $30 billion, all coming due in 1995. However, Mexican government officials continued to assure investors that the peso would not be devalued. On December 20, Mexican authorities sought to relieve pressure on the exchange rate by announcing a widening of the peso-dollar exchange-rate band. The widening of the band in effect devalued the peso by about 15 percent. However, the government did not announce any new fiscal or monetary measures to accompany the devaluation - such as raising interest rates. This inaction was accompanied by more than $4 billion in losses in foreign reserves on December 21 and, on December 22, Mexico was forced to float its currency freely. The discrepancy between the stated exchange-rate policy of the Mexican government throughout most of 1994 and its devaluation of the peso on December 20, along with a failure to announce appropriate accompanying economic-policy measures, contributed to a significant loss of investor confidence in the newly elected government and growing fear that default was imminent. Consequently, downward pressure on the peso continued. By early January 1995, investors realized that tesobono redemptions could soon exhaust Mexico's reserves and, in the absence of external assistance, that Mexico might default on its dollar-indexed and dollar-denominated debt. As 1994 began, signs were visible that Mexico was vulnerable to speculative attacks on the peso and that its large and growing current-account deficit and its exchange-rate policy might not be sustainable. However, neo-liberal economists generally thought that Mexico's economy was characterized by "sound economic fundamentals" and that, with the major economic reforms of the past decade along Washington Consensus lines, Mexico had laid an adequate foundation for economic growth in the long term. In reality, Mexico was exporting real wealth and importing hot money with the help of a flawed central-bank policy that was attracting large capital inflows and held substantial foreign-exchange reserves derived from foreign debt. Concerns about the viability of Mexico's exchange-rate system increased after the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in the latter part of March and the subsequent drawdown of about $10 billion in foreign-exchange reserves by the end of April. Just after the assassination, US Treasury and Fed officials temporarily enlarged long-standing currency-swap facilities with Mexico from $1 billion to $6 billion. These enlarged facilities were made permanent with the establishment of the North American Financial Group in April. The initiative to enlarge the swap facilities permanently preceded the Colosio assassination. Mexican foreign-exchange reserves stabilized at about $17 billion by the end of April 1994. At the end of June 1994, a new run on the peso was under way. Between June 21 and July 22, foreign-exchange reserves were drawn down by nearly $3 billion, to about $14 billion. In early July, Mexico asked the Fed and Treasury to explore with the central banks of certain European countries the establishment of a contingency, short-term swap facility. That facility could be used in conjunction with the US-Mexican swap facility to help Mexico cope with possible exchange-rate volatility in the period leading up to the August election. By July, staff in the Fed had concluded that Mexico's exchange rate probably was overvalued and that some sort of adjustment eventually would be needed. However, US officials thought that Mexican officials might be correct in hoping that foreign capital inflows could resume after the August elections. In August, the US and the BIS established the requested swap facility, but not until US officials had secured an oral understanding with Mexico that it would adjust its exchange-rate system if pressure on the peso continued after the election. The temporary facility incorporated the US-Mexican $6 billion swap arrangement established in April. At the end of July, pressure on the peso abated, and Mexican foreign-exchange reserves increased to more than $16 billion. Significant new pressure on the peso did not develop immediately after the August election, but at the same time, capital inflows did not return to their former levels. The Fed and Treasury did not foresee the serious consequences that an abrupt devaluation would have on investor confidence in Mexico. These included a possible wholesale flight of capital that could bring Mexico to the point of default and, in the judgment of US and IMF officials, require a major financial assistance package. IMF officials thought that Mexico's sizable exports meant there was not a need to adjust the foreign-exchange policy. They did not foresee the exchange-rate crisis and, for most of 1994, did not see a compelling case for a change in Mexico's exchange-rate policy. The IMF completed an annual review of Mexico's foreign-exchange and economic policies in February 1994. The review did not identify problems with Mexico's exchange-rate policy. This pattern of IMF complacency was repeated in Asia and Latin America throughout the rest of the decade. Whereas the 1982 rescue package would turn out to be just the beginning of a protracted process of managing Mexico's excessive indebtedness, including several concerted debt-rescheduling exercises, a debt buy-back, and the 1990 debt-reduction agreement negotiated under the terms of the Brady Plan, the 1995 rescue package worked better. After the 1982 rescue package, Mexico received support from the Fed and the Treasury on three other occasions, but always in the form of interim financing while other workouts were concluded. The difference between the 1982 and 1995 packages is that while the former was followed by a decade of living in "exile" from the international capital markets, the latter was successful in quickly restoring market access. The difference in outcomes must be related to the size of the financial package and its medium-term quality. In 1995 the financial rescue package was designed to be large enough plausibly to solve Mexico's liquidity crisis; in 1982, the package was large enough to avoid a Mexican default but for the next six years the country had to go from one rescheduling exercise to another, with the uncertainty of whether the country would be able to meet its obligations always lurking on the horizon. Success in the 1995 package was not applicable to correcting Mexico's fundamental debt problem. In 1995, after the Federal Reserve started to hike interest rates in 1994 and sharply curtailed its own purchase of Treasury bills, triggering the Mexico peso crisis and a subsequent US slowdown, the Bank of Japan initiated a program to buy $100 billion of US treasuries. China bought $80 billion. Hong Kong and Singapore bought $22 billion each. South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines bought $30 billion. The Asian purchase totaled $260 billion from 1994-97, the entire increase in foreign-held US dollar reserves. These recycled dollars pushed up stock prices in the United States. Like the rest of the world, Asia is heavily dependent on export to the United States. Japan, by far the largest Asian economy, is paralyzed by an export addiction for dollars that are useless in Japan. This paralysis is made worse by an institutionally based policy dispute between the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan, its newly installed central bank, in dealing with its economic woes. The dispute centers on the nature of the Japanese banking system and its traditional national banking role in supporting the export-based national economic policy. Central banking, as espoused by BIS regulations, challenges the very root of Japanese political-economy culture, which has never viewed reform as a license to weaken Japanese nationalism that saved Japan from Western imperialism in the 19th century. The Japanese model, until it became captured by Japanese militarism, provided inspiration for nationalist movements all over Asia against Western imperialism. After 1979, central banking has been viewed increasingly as the monetary institution of financial neo-liberalism, which has become synonymous with economic neo-imperialism. In the US and EU, fiscal policy was significantly diminished as a macroeconomic policy tool in the 1990s, releasing the Fed and the ECB to assume the role of meta-political economic manager for their societies. Money, instead of an engine of commerce for the benefit of people, has become an economic icon whose sanctity must be defended with human casualties for the good of the increasingly internationalized financial system. Unregulated global financial markets operating within the context of international monetary anarchy allows these two key central banks to impact economic growth adversely, first in the rest of the world, now even in their home countries. When the Fed moved to tighten monetary policy in 1999-2000, after a panic ease in 1997-99, it in effect suppressed global economic growth by forcing the ECB and other central banks into a series of parallel rate hikes designed to support the value of their currencies against the dominant dollar. With joblessness rising and growth restrained around the world, pressure mounted on the United States to expand its already unsustainable current-account deficit, to the inevitable detriment of many US households and businesses, particular in the manufacturing sector but increasingly in the information and data-processing sectors as well. The so-called New Economy died. The Fed, the ECB and most other central banks have remained uniquely opaque entities. In fact, the Fed takes pride in playing cat-and-mouse games with the market over the prospect of its interest-rate policy and allows the financial market to operate like a lottery, with the winner being the lucky one who correctly guessed its interest-rate decisions. Most Asian central banks follow reactively Fed policy and action. Bill Gross, manager director of Pimco, the largest bond-investment fund in the United States, may not have a monopoly on truth, but he controls vast investment power over the credit market and makes decisions based on his views. He wrote recently that 13 percent of the US stock market, 35 percent of the US Treasury market, 23 percent of the US corporate bond market, and 14 percent direct ownership in US companies are now in the hands of non-US investors. And with the trade deficit at 6 percent of GDP and the US need to attract nearly 80 percent of all the world's ongoing savings just to keep the dollar at current levels, "an end to the party is clearly in sight". Gross said that former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin's policy of a strong dollar succeeded so famously that US bonds and stocks now have lower yields and much higher price-to-earnings ratios (P/Es) than most alternative markets. This strong-dollar policy, implemented through the Fed under Alan Greenspan, has painted the US into a corner from which either a falling dollar, depreciating financial markets, or both are "nearly inevitable". The net foreign debt in the US economy is now 22 percent of GDP. Assuming an economic recovery, the US economy is on a trajectory toward a debt burden of 40 percent of GDP within five years, roughly the debt-to-GDP ratio of Argentina in 2000. What keeps the US afloat is dollar hegemony. The US cannot forever borrow in order to buy more from the rest of the world than it sells. The interest burden will eventually be so heavy that foreign investors will be unwilling or unable to keep financing this rising debt. When that happens, the dollar will drop and dollar interest rates will spike upward. The United States will then be forced to run a trade surplus with a drastic devaluation of the dollar and/or a draconian deflation in real incomes in order to reduce demand for imports and make US goods cheap enough to run a surplus in world markets. Yet this will directly shrink world trade, making it difficult for the US to reduce its cumulated debt. The costs of balancing trade through deflation would be near fatal. According to one calculation (Godley 1995), bringing a current-account deficit of 2 percent GDP into balance would require a 10 percent drop in GDP and a jump of 5 percent in the unemployment rate. With today's trade deficit of 4 percent and rising, the required contraction in GDP would be 20 percent or greater and an unemployment rate of an additional 10 percent to the current 7 percent. Attempting to regain balance through currency devaluation could be catastrophic. Goldman-Sachs recently estimated that it would take a more than 40 percent drop in the dollar just to halve the US current-account deficit. Getting to a trade balance will be even more difficult because US manufacturing capacity may well have shrunk below the level needed to eliminate the trade deficit through expanding exports. Given relentless import competition, investors are reluctant to make long-term capital available to small and medium manufacturing firms, and some large ones as well. The grim outlook for manufacturing also reduces the incentive for young people to invest in becoming skilled manufacturing workers. The low savings rate in the United States also contributes to the current-account problem but it is now a function of a deficiency in private rather than public savings. This is a much harder problem to solve. In fact, the US does not seem to know how to raise its private savings rate without putting a damper on its relentless push on expanding consumer finance. Under current conditions, increasing the savings rate would reduce consumer demand, upon which the US economy and the world depend. Japan's economic problem is rooted in the geopolitical shift resulting from the end of the Cold War. The Japanese economy has outgrown its postwar role as an export engine. With the end of the Cold War, Japan no longer enjoys geopolitically induced special trade concessions from the United States. The continuing trade surplus with the US is now contingent on its being recycled into dollar assets. Not only will the continued expansion of export to the US not be sustainable at a rate that will help the doomed Japanese domestic economy, but even effective stimulation of domestic consumption cannot solve the Japanese dilemma because the domestic economy is too small to sustain the enormous and growing overcapacity of its export engine. The Japanese economy cannot be revived by domestic restructuring unless it is prepared to shrink drastically to the size of the United Kingdom. No monetary or fiscal measures can overcome this structural problem, which is the legacy of policies of General Douglas MacArthur's occupation after World War II. The Japanese problem is not a purely economic problem. It is a political-economy problem. What Japan needs is to restructure its international economic relationships away from its unnatural partner, the United States, toward its natural partner, China, and to shift from an export economy to a regional-developmental economy. The anchor of US policy in Asia is the United States' "special relationship" to Japan. The intensity and bitterness of the historical conflict between Japan and the US for their separate interests in Asia have not been eliminated by the post-World War II facade of "special relationship" or by the Mutual Defense Treaty. Before World War II, Japan, not China, was seen by most US leaders as America's chief rival in Asia. They squeezed Japan's access to vital raw materials, particularly oil, and so obstructed Japan's plan of becoming a great regional power through its conquest of a fragmented China weakened by a century of Western imperialism. While the targets of Japanese expansion in World War II were primarily the colonies of the British and French empires, the sole exception being the Philippines, the objective made it necessary for Japan to disable the US Pacific Fleet. The Pacific theater against Japan in World War II was won mainly by US efforts, unlike the European theater, where Britain and the Soviet Union also played major roles. It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that forced Adolf Hitler to declare war on a formally neutral United States, thus saving Britain from imminent defeat. It was one of the two strategic errors Germany made, the other being the invasion of the Soviet Union. Without a two-front war that eventually destroyed the German 6th Army on Russian soil in February 1943 and the relentless Soviet counteroffensive afterward that tied up half of German military assets, it would be doubtful whether the US landing in Normandy in 1944 would have been as successful as it was. Britain, in winning a Pyrrhic victory against Germany with US and Soviet help, lost both empire and greatness. Together with Britain, supposedly the winner, Japan and Germany, the vanquished, were thrown by World War II into the arms of the United States as suppliants, in a subordination masked by the euphemism of "special relationships". Postwar Germany, divided into socialist East and capitalist West, benefited economically from the Cold War by the need of the US to subsidize West Germany to keep it safely in the Western camp. Outside of imposed anti-Sovietism and anti-communism, West Germany enjoyed enviable autonomy from US policy domination. Japan enjoyed much less autonomy than West Germany, a fact many Japanese resented as US racism. Further, Germany had a real historical phobia against a powerful Russia pushing westward, while Japan had less real reason to fear China, or an Soviet Union that was fundamentally Europe-oriented. Japan had already defeated Russia once. After the Japanese surrender, MacArthur at first aimed at restructuring Japanese politics and economics to prevent a return to militarism. For that purpose, MacArthur's occupation regime purged from Japanese politics all wartime leaders, instituted land reform, and began breaking down large corporate conglomerates (zaibatsu or keiretsu), in favor of populist if not socialist forces. This strategy would begin to change in the early months of 1948 with what would be labeled in diplomatic history as "The Reverse Course". As fears of Soviet expansion grew in Washington, concerns also grew that MacArthur's reform program was making Japan geopolitically unreliable, ideologically unstable, economically weak, and geopolitically vulnerable to subversive infiltration or, in the longer run, perhaps even military invasion with Fifth Column help. As China liberated itself by establishing a socialist state in 1949, MacArthur was ordered to turn US occupation policy abruptly into a strategy of keeping Japan from turning toward socialist paths. Since Japan was viewed as a "strong point" by key US grand strategists George Kennan, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson, a more politically regressive and economically conservative program was put into place. It was a program designed to stabilize the Japanese political economy and to set the stage for revived limited Japanese military strength in the future that would assist US efforts in countering international communism in Japan and the rest of East Asia. To support this controlled military power, a US trade subsidy/preference regime for Japan was instituted. MacArthur, who had all but set himself up as the new emperor of Japan and who had built a postwar popularity within US domestic politics, criticizing the State Department for shortcomings ranging from Eurocentrism to excessive meddling in the Pacific to lack of political will to use nuclear weapons on China, would argue not only against reversing the anti-zaibatsu program, but also against strengthening the Japanese military from whom he had suffered well-publicized defeat with deep personal embarrassment. Ironically, it was left to the Supreme Military Commander/Occupier to argue that economic growth and a stable political order were the most important weapons in the struggle for containment of the communist threat for Japan, not the creation of military might. Nobody doubted the general's argument about the importance of economic strength and political stability, but many at the US Defense Department and some even at the State Department subsequently insisted that they wanted a major portion of the fruits of US supplied economic revival to be channeled into Japanese military strengthening. In their minds, Japan should accept a significant share of the burden of defending itself and containing communism in the region. This position would win the debate in Washington and would be presented to Japanese authorities in 1950-51 by president Harry Truman's special envoy, John Foster Dulles. In the 1950s, the administrations of Truman and Dwight D Eisenhower both believed that open tolerance of Japanese resistance to US imports, systematic undervaluation of the yen, and total reliance on US military protection were necessary to strengthen Japan domestically and legitimize it internationally as a solid anti-communist ally. After persistent persuasion by premier Yoshida Shigeru, US leaders also decided that pushing the Japanese government too soon and too hard to build up its military significantly merely to reduce the US defense burden could lead to a popular backlash in Japan that might threaten the budding alliance and, by association, the maintenance of US military bases in Japan. Japan, a recent and very bitter enemy, was clearly not sharing much of the cost burden of the anti-communist alliance early in the Cold War. In fact, it worked to benefit economically from it. The kernel of this dilemma is still alive in the developing relationship of new US-Japan relationship under the current administration of President George W Bush. While the Bush Team claims a continuation of the strong-dollar policy, there is much open talk of coordinated government intervention against a yen devaluation beyond 120 to the dollar. Concerned about the acceptance of the US-Japan alliance in domestic US politics, US leaders decided they must maintain US dominance of the political alliance in exchange for generous US aid, trade, and military protection policies Washington had already granted to Tokyo. As the sole economic power that had directly profited from World War II, the United States had the resources and the confidence to buy Japanese support with economic carrots. In particular, Yoshida would be pushed to accept Washington's pro-Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist) and tough anti-communist China policies. US elites worried that if Yoshida diverged too strongly from the anti-communist strategies being advocated by the United States, Congress and the public would demand a fundamental reconsideration of the already controversial one-way economic relationship. The same argument was presented to other national leaders around the world as a reason for them to shun independent national-policy lines toward the communist world. The geopolitical foundation of the Marshall Plan was obvious, but the US domestic-politics argument was the classic mantra. Yet the cost for Japan of compliance with US geopolitical leadership demands was very high because the United States had adopted such a tough policy toward China, with which Japan would have preferred to have closer economic and diplomatic ties than intransigent US policy would allow. This problem exists even today, albeit under different geopolitical conditions. The Truman administration's need to guarantee domestic consensus for its domestically controversial early-Cold War grand strategy often compelled it to abandon its privately preferred economic and diplomatic strategies toward China. In 1949-50, the US refused to abandon KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek and recognize the new People's Republic of China (PRC), despite Truman's personal disdain for Chiang and KMT corruption and Madam Chiang's deft manipulation of the Republican right wing and the anti-communist Christian fundamentalists in US domestic politics. At the outbreak of the Korean War, the Truman administration reversed earlier statements of neutrality regarding the Chinese Civil War and sent the 7th Fleet to protect KMT-controlled Taiwan from potential forceful unification with the communist mainland. This locked the United States into an exclusive diplomatic relationship with Chiang's regime until 1973, and the 7th Fleet continues to be active in the Taiwan Strait today. The Taiwan issue remains the main obstacle to normal US-China relations. After the late-1950 escalation of the Korean War, a desperate Truman administration applied a total embargo on China, and policies more hostile than those applied to the Soviet Union (this imbalance in the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls - CoCom - regime would come to be known as the "China Differential"). Many of the US diplomatic and trade policies around the world, particularly in Asia, were often viewed by top presidential advisors as ineffective or even counterproductive on geopolitical grounds, but politically unavoidable on domestic grounds, particularly after the outbreak and escalation of the Korean War from June-November 1950. To understand the sacrifice Tokyo had to make in order to grant the United States a firm leadership role on the budding US-Japan alliance's China policy, it is critical to note just how important the Chinese economy had been to Japan in modern history. It was the search for a preferred integrated economic relationship with China that fueled Japanese aggression on the mainland in the 1930s. Japanese leadership was actually obsessed first and foremost with the threat from the Soviet Union and the lessons of World War I about the need for an autarkic economy to provide staying power in war. The quest for Japanese autarky on the Asian mainland helped drive Japan deeper and deeper into a quagmire in China and, eventually, into war with the United States over oil supply. In the 1920s and for most of the 1930s, China (including Manchuria) was by far Japan's biggest export market and import provider in the region. Japanese exploitation of Chinese resources financed the Japanese military machine for World War II. In 1949, Yoshida and other members of the Japanese elite saw real economic and political benefits in establishing relations with the new communist regime in Beijing. Postwar Japan wanted to appear sympathetic to the new Asian post-colonial nationalist movements, a theme of the wartime Co-prosperity Ring. The problem was not that PRC-Japan trade was viewed as against US or Japanese national interests, but that it was unacceptable to US domestic politics. In February and March 1949, six months before the founding of the People's Republic, the US National Security Council produced NSC 41, a report on China trade policy. The document reflected a cautious faith in the possibility of Chinese Titoism and the usefulness of US trade with areas held by the Chinese Communist Party as a way to reduce the CCP's dependence on Moscow. The sections on Sino-Japan trade were, in a sense, more practical, emphasizing the goal of reducing the US burden of rebuilding Japan as well as gaining some degree of political leverage over China through trade dependence with Japan. The State Department was hardly indifferent to the concerns raised by opponents to Sino-Japanese trade, so NSC 41 and other directives advised MacArthur to encourage trade on a quid pro quo basis and to try to find alternative markets and raw-material sources elsewhere in Asia to reduce Japanese dependence on China for critical materials. The need for such alternative markets for Japan was one of the arguments Washington used on Japan to secure its support for keeping Southeast Asia out of communist hands early in the Cold War. This constituted another "Reverse Course", in which the United States went from a critic to a supporter of European imperialism in British Malaya and Indochina. Despite US restrictions, Japanese trade with mainland China grew tenfold from 1947-50. The Korean War and the US-led embargoes against China halted this trend. Another problem facing the United States in its calculation about US-China and US-Japan trade was that, for economic and political reasons, Britain was unwilling to apply the strict export-control measures toward China that Washington demanded, fearing the damage such measures would do to British Hong Kong. In November 1949, top US officials recognized that if Western Europe traded relatively normally with China while the United States and Japan embargoed it, this would only serve to increase the expense of the US relationship with Japan without any real costs being raised to the Chinese economy. Although the Truman administration would continue to try to prevent China from getting strategically important materials (1A and 1B items on the CoCom list), it seemed resigned to allow PRC trade with the US and Japan on a "cash basis". The logical standard was that the same criteria should be applied to China that were being applied to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the first half of 1950, the picture became more mixed as relations with Beijing worsened after the January seizure of US consular property and the February signing of the Sino-Soviet defense treaty. The United States wanted to find a balance between, on the one hand, reducing the burden on the Japanese economy (and, indirectly, on the United States) by allowing trade between Japan and the PRC, and, on the other, reducing Japanese dependence on China, which could provide China with political leverage over Tokyo and threaten US dominance. The Truman administration pushed this argument particularly hard on other non-communist partners in East Asia, which had been reluctant to open up their economies to their former Japanese occupiers. The administration argued that increasing their trade with Japan was a necessary role for these allies since Japan's natural market in China had fallen to the communists. The Korean War would radically alter this picture, with the US leveling the "China Differential" in CoCom. It was clear that domestic politics, rather than the "high politics" of strategy, was driving US trade policy toward China, as was true with the US attitude toward Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization five decades later. This all but destroyed Sino-Japanese trade, as some 400 items were put on the list of prohibited products. Over the next several years, important elites, including president Eisenhower himself, recognized the illogic of the China Differential and a strict Japanese embargo on China. But significant relaxation of China-Japan trade restrictions would remain in place until well after the end of the Korean War. Throughout 1951, John Foster Dulles, Truman's envoy to Japan for negotiations on the Japanese Peace Treaty, would apply the same logic with Yoshida Shigeru. Dulles made various arguments why Japan should reject Beijing as a diplomatic partner, continue recognizing Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of all of China, and sign a peace treaty with Chiang's Republic of China rather than the PRC. Dulles also sought Yoshida's general compliance with US limits on trade contacts with the PRC. Like most Japanese elites since MacArthur, Yoshida was anti-communist. But as a practical matter, Japan wanted diplomatic ties with Beijing and much more extensive trade relations than Dulles's preferred scenario would allow. Yoshida bluntly put it: "I don't care whether China is red or green. China is a natural market, and it has become necessary for Japan to think about markets." In his effort to persuade Japanese leaders, Dulles' trump card was not a geostrategic argument but a domestic political one. He emphasized that if Japan did not comply with US general Cold War strategy, the military protection of Japan by US forces would become more controversial domestically, as would economic aid and Japan's preferential trade and financial arrangements. It was this domestic political argument, above all others, that convinced the reluctant Japanese that questioning the US leadership role in the Cold War in Asia could carry devastating results for the maverick nation's security and economic interests. Dulles would return to this tried-and-true bargaining tactic again as president Eisenhower's Secretary of State in order to prevent Japan from establishing politically significant trade offices in China. The result of Japan's acquiescence to US demands, the December 1951 Yoshida Letter and subsequent bilateral Peace Treaty negotiations with Taipei in 1952, locked Japan into a pro-Taiwan, anti-Beijing diplomatic posture for the next 21 years. With Japanese acquiescence to America's harsh economic sanctions regime against China, the small-scale but promising trade between Japan and the PRC allowed by the US in 1949-50 practically disappeared. Politicians are probably held in as low esteem in Japan today as in the United States. For an Asian culture, that is a serious development. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy, which basically sets policy for Japan, is also not trusted because of the present anemic state of the economy and US media scapegoating. After a whole decade of slow growth, the streets of Tokyo still do not look like those of a poor economy, because the Japanese government has been effectively insulating the Japanese public from the real pain. The US had a cozy relationship with the Liberal Democratic Party but had a contentious relationship over trade. Today, young people in Japan are more openly nationalistic than the subdued older generation. It will be increasingly more difficult for the United States to work with Japan as time passes. For many years, Japan has counted on its economic strength to provide its regional and global influence. There was one magic moment when the yen was 79 to a US dollar and the Japanese economy on a currency basis was larger than the US economy and Herman Khan was predicting the Japanese Century. The psychological shock in shifting from a position of a rising economic powerhouse to a situation where the world is criticizing Japan's economy has sapped Japan's self-confidence. Market capitalization of Japanese equity fell from 50 percent of global value to just 10 percent, even as the US lost 60 percent of its peak market capitalization. The economic difficulties Japan is experiencing are not a banking problem, as US neo-liberal economists keep saying. The central bank, though newly created, has become part of the problem. But the central problem involves a much broader system of a dual economy of successful transnational companies built on subsidiaries and networks of other small companies that are operating along unique Japanese relationships. The Finance Ministry, trying to help consumers by dropping the discount rate to 0 percent, failed to help consumers but decimated the insurance industry because it offered a guaranteed rate of return on its pension plans that are now much higher than current returns on investment. The industry could not find any place to put the money to provide the return it had guaranteed. Large insurance companies went broke and the people counting on them for their pensions no longer had pensions. As a result, people started not renewing their policies. Japan is becoming an older society faster than any society in the world. But it has a large savings base, about $10 trillion, which amounts to about a per capita amount of $80,000, enough to cover per capita debt in the United States at its height. But 60 percent of that money is held by people over 65 who are not robust consumers. How does one motivate such an economy? The world has never seen a country with a population this old. The world consensus is pushing Japan into a quick solution so as to avoid an even more traumatic Asian financial crisis. The concern in Tokyo is that, if Japan did "fix" the economy in a hurry, it might cause more trouble than would a gradual approach. The US has told Japan to lead. The first solution Japan came up with when the Asian economy started to collapse was a $100 billion security fund to help Asian economies, which the US rejected. Economic growth has been flat since the real-estate and stock bubble burst in 1990, except for 1996, when real GDP growth was 3.6 percent due to a large fiscal stimulus and low interest rates. Japan remains a massive net exporter of goods to the rest of the world as its economy sinks. It has emerged as a model for other Asian economies to avoid, rather than copy. Japan, as an Asian culture, places importance on the national economy and operates as if individuals and companies can only prosper if the national economy prospers. The US economy operates as a "natural" calculus of individual survival. To Americans and American corporations, a national economic boom has no meaning unless the individual unit first benefits. As markets globalize, this creates problems for management in both cultural regimes. For Japan, bailouts are normal, while in the US bailouts, though they occur, are exercised with apologies. When in trouble, the US economy historically sacrifices quickly the weak and the small, while the Japanese economy punishes the strong and big gradually. When the long-overdue US recession hits, Americans will see their faith in market free enterprise shaken as the Japanese have been losing their faith in their command economy, despite the fact that the government has been reasonably effective in insulating the Japanese public from economic pain. The Campaign 2000 rhetoric in the United States was already slightly populist and the recession has yet to begin. The recent Bush tax plan was couched in heavy populist rhetoric. The problem is that around the world there are visible signs of exhaustion. Asia and Latin America are completely worn out after six years of tumult. The US boom was fed mostly by global deflation, and there have not been free lunches even in the US. Even those who are still doing well have to work 14-hour days and most families need to be two-income households to make do. The press has stop running stories about people with $60,000 annual incomes living in their cars in Silicon Valley because it is no longer news. At this rate, unemployment may even come as a relief and a guiltless way to get off the treadmill. There was a moment in the late 1960s, before the Vietnam War blew away all of America's surpluses, that people with good incomes were beginning to take three-day weekends on a regular year-around basis and eight-week vacations. From Los Angeles to Dallas to Scarsdale, fathers were home by 5:30pm barbecuing for the whole family and mothers had time for their children, and the GDP was a mere $200 billion. Economists thought then that if the GDP reached $1 trillion, all economic problems would be solved. Instead, the GDP is now more than $10 trillion, and there is financial crisis everywhere - from health care to social security to education, even defense. There appears to be a problem with what growth really is. Next: The Asian Experience