Martin Wolf's Exchange

Why the UK should not sell its student loan book

Martin Wolf — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:23 +0000

The UK Treasury is, it is reported, considering the sale of parts of its student loan book. This provokes a big question: when should the UK government sell such an asset – given that it is both immortal and solvent?

The best answer has two parts. First, it must be believed that the asset would be better managed by the private sector. And, second, it must be believed that this superior private management can only be introduced by selling the assets – rather than introducing some type of private management contract.

Why the world faces climate chaos

Martin Wolf — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:16:24 +0000

Last week the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reported to have passed 400 parts per million for the first time in 4.5m years. It is also continuing to rise at a rate of about 2 parts per million every year. On the present course, it could be 800 parts per million by the end of the century. Thus, all the discussions of mitigating the risks of catastrophic climate change have turned out to be empty words.

Collectively, humanity has yawned and decided to let the dangers mount. Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College in London, notes that when the concentrations were last this high, “the world was warmer on average by three or four degrees Celsius than it is today. There was no permanent ice sheet on Greenland, sea levels were much higher, and the world was a very different place, although not all of these differences may be directly related to CO2 levels.”

Debt dynamics in the eurozone

Martin Wolf — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:03:14 +0000

A commenter, A.N., objects to my argument that the big reason for the explosion in government bond yields in Spain was not its debt dynamics, which are remarkably like the UK’s, but because it does not have a lender of last resort, as the UK does.

He responds that the debt dynamics of France and Germany were just like Spain’s. But they were not similarly punished. In any case, the facts are clearly otherwise. These are the relevant data for the three mentioned countries. It is quite clear that Spanish debt dynamics are far worse than those of France and Germany.

A response to Roger Altman

Martin Wolf — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:24:57 +0000

Roger Altman of Evercore partners is a friend of mine, a distinguished public servant and a respected financial expert. But his column “Blame bond markets, not politicians, for austerity” is, in my view, gravely mistaken.

Europe’s beggar-my-neighbour policy

Martin Wolf — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:01:16 +0000

I recently looked at what happened to private financial balances inside the eurozone. Today’s post looks at what happened to the current account deficits. It fills out the broad story of the eurozone’s across-the-board shift into becoming a very large capital exporter. It is complementary to an excellent post by Gavyn Davies, who addresses the sources of the ongoing adjustment.

As it happens Michael Pettis, professor at Peking University, and author of the excellent book, The Great Rebalancing (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013) has a complementary post.

In this, he argues that Spain had no choice over what happened to it during the 2000-07 period, given the deliberate policies of Germany, which were aimed at generating a large current account surplus (“improving competitiveness” being the normal way of talking about this form of structural mercantilism). If one’s principal trading partner is seeking to generate a huge current account surplus and so exporting capital, he argues, then a country is effectively forced into running the counterpart deficits, whatever the consequences.

I agree with this analysis of what happened. Indeed, I have argued along these lines for several years, in trying to explain the roots of the eurozone crisis, which is a balance-of-payments cum financial crisis, of which fiscal deficits are a symptom, not, except in the case of Greece, a cause.

An outbreak of frugality across the eurozone

Martin Wolf — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:07:48 +0000

My column this week was on Germany’s attempt to export the German model throughout the eurozone. Here is some additional information on what has been happening. The story is quite remarkable for the scale of the shift towards private sector frugality across the crisis-hit countries.

The chart below is derived from the data on the fiscal and current account balances in the latest database of the Intenational Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. By definition, the private sector financial balance (the difference between income and spending) must equal the general government balance (difference between receipts and spending) and the foreign balance (the net capital flow). The net capital flow is the inverse of the current account. So a country with a current account deficit has a capital account surplus, by definition – it is receiving more capital from abroad than it exports.

Radical paths to rebalance the UK economy

Martin Wolf — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:54:55 +0000

What is to be done? This question has to be asked of UK economic policy. Only the complacent can be satisfied with what is happening. Yes, the 1 per cent increase in third-quarter gross domestic product is welcome. But GDP stagnated over four quarters and was 3.1 per cent lower than in the first quarter of 2008.

I remain convinced that the decision to move towards fiscal austerity so sharply in 2010 was a huge error. A salient aspect of the mistake was that the UK reinforced the move towards austerity in the EU. In an article entitled “Self-defeating austerity?” published in the October National Institute Economic Review, Dawn Holland and Jonathan Portes argue that UK GDP could well be 4.3 per cent lower this year and 5 per cent lower in 2013 than it would have been without these consolidation programmes, including the UK’s. Moreover, in 2013 the UK’s ratio of public sector debt to GDP might be 5 percentage points higher than it would have been without the co-ordinated contraction. This is a step forward and maybe two steps back.

You can’t measure an economy’s performance on recovery alone

Martin Wolf — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 11:39:29 +0000

I entered into a heated US debate last week on whether the recovery has been surprisingly slow and, if so, whether the policies of Barack Obama’s administration bear responsibility for that outcome. In particular, I was responding to a post by John Taylor of Stanford University, a distinguished macroeconomist and adviser to Mitt Romney, who had argued that the recovery was exceptionally weak.

Prof Taylor has responded to my reply. In this response, he makes four points.

First, he argues that if we exclude the recoveries in 1973, 1981 and 1990 from the analysis, the gap between the average US recovery and the current recovery becomes even bigger.

Martin Wolf’s Exchange hiatus

Isolin Jorgensen — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:00:27 +0000

Martin is on book leave until October

Ways to accelerate private-sector deleveraging

Martin Wolf — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:43:36 +0000

I have argued in previous posts that the policy of letting the government deficits offset the natural post-crisis austerity of the private sector makes excellent sense, provided the country in question has a solvent government. I have argued, too, in the most recent post, that the objections to this policy are not decisive. What matters is making the best of bad alternatives.

Yet let us also look at alternative ways of accelerating deleveraging. Broadly there are two: capital transactions and default. The latter, in turn, comes in two varieties: plain vanilla default and inflationary default.