15/08 Geithner, Bernanke have little in arsenal to fight new crisis


By  and Monday, August 15, 9:47 AM

Barely two years after the financial crisis ended, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke were back at it about a week ago. They were working the weekend phones with their counterparts in Europe, urging them to use overwhelming force to contain the continent’s spreading debt crisis, which was unnerving markets on both sides of the Atlantic.
Geithner and Bernanke could speak with authority. As two of the architects of the United States’ own financial rescue starting in 2008, they had eschewed half-measures, instead marshaling hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks and successfully head off a new Great Depression.
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But as the pair again donned the cloak of crisis fighters, their efforts underscored what’s changed in the last three years. The men, battle-hardened and more experienced, now have little more than the power of persuasion. No longer can they muster the same range of policy tools and supporters they had in 2008 should the European crisis become an even greater menace to the U.S. economy.
As Europe’s financial worries spread to new countries and financial firms last week, U.S. and other global markets experienced one of the most tumultuous weeks of trading in their histories. Markets open again Monday with persisting concern about Europe, anxiety about the prospect of a double-dip recession and continuing fallout from thehistoric downgrade of the U.S. credit ratingby Standard and Poor’s earlier this month.
When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Bernanke was a relatively new Fed chairman, and Geithner was his chief emissary on Wall Street as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Along with then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., whom President George W. Bush tapped to lead the rescue, they organized the massive and unpopular bailout that helped stem a rapid financial decline.
Today, Geithner’s options are constrained by gridlock in Congress. Any fresh proposals to invigorate the economy would face Republican skepticism. And instead of devoting his full attention to the country’s flagging economic recovery and mounting threats from Europe, Geithner spent much of the last few months planning for the possibility Congress would not raise the federal debt limit, confronting the government with default. He also was focused on negotiations among Democrats and Republicans over a deal to tame the debt.
Geithner, 49, has wanted time off after a nonstop schedule, starting in 2007, that involved rescuing the banking and automobile industries, the design and passage of legislation to overhaul financial regulation, and several tax and budget fights. But he recently agreed to stay at the Treasury Department after a plea from President Obama. Geithner’s family is moving back to New York, and he will commute to Washington.
Bernanke, 57, meanwhile, has been pushing the Fed to take a series of steps over the past three years to spur economic growth. But he has exhausted the Fed’s usual tools — for instance, lowering interest rates, which are now near zero — and is facing new opposition from members of the Fed’s policymaking committee who are worried about the risk of inflation or new financial bubbles.
Although Bernanke tries to remain isolated from politics, he too has had to face mounting pressures as the central bank’s performance and independence have been called into question by segments of the public and some members of Congress as few times before. At the strong urging of Geithner, Obama reappointed Bernanke for another four-year term in 2009.
Lawrence Summers, who resigned late last this year as the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, said the government’s “tool chest is emptier than it was a few years ago.” But he added that “government can still very much be a potent force.”
Although both Geithner and Bernanke remain in their posts, the ranks of their advisers have slimmed as the economic recovery has slowed and the European crisis has intensified.
Geithner has lost key lieutenants, including Lee Sachs, a banker who helped craft the financial rescue, and is about to lose another, Jake Siewert, a former White House press secretary who has helped frame the Treasury’s efforts for the public.
Bernanke also has lost several of his top advisers, including vice chairman Don Kohn, a Fed veteran, and governor Kevin Warsh, who served as another liaison to Wall Street for a chairman more familiar with the academia.
“The Federal Reserve has learned a lot going through these things over the last few years,” said Kohn, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Everyone learned what to look for, where the weak points in the financial system might be, how to gauge if there was a liquidity issue. But each episode is different, so they can’t just rely on experience.”
Trying to anticipate trouble
As markets gyrated last week, Geithner and Bernanke led an emergency conference call of U.S. regulators to discuss potential risks to the U.S. financial system. Officials were especially focused on any evidence of threats to the largest U.S. banks and money-market funds as well as to esoteric but crucial lending markets.
Some officials have been concerned that they would have less latitude than in 2008 to bail out troubled companies because of constraints imposed by Congress, people familiar with the matter said. Others have worried that the turmoil had come before regulators had finished beefing up financial oversight of the markets, as mandated by the financial regulation law enacted last year.
“Until we complete the task and the rules are actually implemented, and we have the funding to cover the expanded mission, the American public is not yet protected,” said Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
For its part, the White House has been advocating measures to bolster the economy, such as extending a 2 percentage point payroll tax cut that is due to expire at the end of the year. But Obama’s options are limited by politics.
“Back in ’08, we were able to do things on the fiscal side which were interventionist and aggressive, and now the country’s pushed back on that. Policymakers’ hands are tied,” said Neel Kashkari, a top executive with the bond giant Pimco who served as a top adviser to both Paulson and Geithner. “One of the big advantages we had was that President Bush wasn’t running for reelection, so we could do things that were deeply unpopular but we knew were the right thing.”
Reluctance in Europe
Since early last year, when Greece’s debt problems started roiling the markets, Geithner has been increasingly concerned about Europe, concluding that it posed a serious risk to the U.S. economic recovery, officials said. He and Lael Brainard, Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, have been pushing European governments to take strong steps to deal with the crisis, officials said.
For Greece, Ireland, Italy and other debt-burdened countries, this would mean tough austerity programs to cut their budget deficits. For the continent’s stalwarts, Germany and France, it would mean bailing out their neighbors.
But many European leaders have been resistant to the entreaties.
“The Americans would like Europeans to be more forceful and come out with a bigger bailout pool than you have now,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There’s a limit to how much the United States can really overtly push the Europeans in the direction they would like without creating a backlash.”
After Obama called German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in late June to discuss the debt crisis, Geithner dispatched Brainard on an unannounced mission to urge senior European officials in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin to take new action.
But the crisis has continued to escalate. Going into the weekend of Aug. 5, it wasn’t clear to top Washington policymakers if German and French leaders would be willing to take stronger steps.
On the phone with their counterparts over that weekend, Geithner and Bernanke again made the case that taking big, risky and expensive action to stem the crisis would ultimately be less costly than managing it piecemeal, officials said. The U.S. argument prevailed when France and Germany, the European Central Bank, and the Group of Seven developed economies all announced major new measures last weekend to stabilize Europe’s financial system.

14/08 Three steps to resolving the eurozone crisis


August 14, 2011 7:40 pm
By George Soros

A comprehensive solution to the euro crisis must have three major components: reform and recapitalisation of the banking system; a eurobond regime; and an exit mechanism.
First, the banking system. The European Union’s Maastricht treaty was designed to deal only with imbalances in the public sector; but excesses in the banking sector have been far worse. The euro’s introduction led to housing booms in countries such as Spain and Ireland. Eurozone banksbecame among the world’s most over-leveraged, and they remain in need of protection from counterparty risks.

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The first step was taken by authorising the European financial stability facility to rescue banks. Now banks’ equity capital levels need to be greatly increased. If an agency is to guarantee banks’ solvency, it must oversee them too. A powerful European banking agency could end the incestuous relationship between banks and regulators, while interfering much less with nations’ sovereignty than dictating their fiscal policies.
Second, Europe needs eurobonds. The introduction of the euro was supposed to reinforce convergence; in fact it created divergences, with widely differing levels of indebtedness and competitiveness. If heavily indebted countries have to pay heavy risk premiums, their debt becomes unsustainable. That is now happening. The solution is obvious: deficit countries must be allowed to refinance their debt on the same terms as surplus countries.
This is best accomplished through eurobonds, which would be jointly guaranteed by all the member states. While the principle is clear, the details will require a lot of work. Which agency would be in charge of issuing, and what rules would it follow? Presumably the eurobonds would be under eurozone finance ministers’ control. The board would constitute the fiscal counterpart of the European Central Bank; it would also be the European counterpart of the International Monetary Fund.
Debate will therefore revolve around voting rights. The ECB operates on the principle of one vote per country; the IMF assigns rights according to capital contributions. Which should prevail? The former could give carte blanche to debtors to run up deficits; the latter might perpetuate a two-speed Europe. Compromise will be necessary.
Because the fate of Europe depends on Germany, and because eurobonds will put Germany’s credit standing at risk, any compromise must put Germany in the driver’s seat. Sadly, Germany has unsound ideas about macroeconomic policy, and it wants Europe to follow its example. But what works for Germany cannot work for the rest of Europe: no country can run a chronic trade surplus without others running deficits. Germany must agree to rules by which others can also abide.
These rules must provide for a gradual reduction in indebtedness. They must also allow countries with high unemployment, such as Spain, to run budget deficits. Rules involving targets for cyclically adjusted deficits can accomplish both goals. Importantly, they must remain open to review and improvement.
Bruegel, the Brussels-based think-tank, has proposed that eurobonds constitute 60 per cent of eurozone members’ outstanding external debt. But given the high risk premiums prevailing in Europe, this percentage is too low for a level playing field. In my view, new issues should be entirely in eurobonds, up to a limit set by the board. The higher the volume of eurobonds a country seeks to issue, the more severe the conditions the board would impose. The board should be able to impose its will, because denying the right to issue additional eurobonds ought to be a powerful deterrent.
This leads directly to the third unsolved problem: what happens if a country is unwilling or unable to keep within agreed conditions? Inability to issue eurobonds could then result in a disorderly default or devaluation. In the absence of an exit mechanism, this could be catastrophic. A deterrent that is too dangerous to invoke lacks credibility.
Greece constitutes a cautionary example, and much depends on how its crisis plays out. It might be possible to devise an orderly exit for a small country like Greece that would not be applicable to a large one like Italy. In the absence of an orderly exit, the regime would have to carry sanctions from which there is no escape – something like a European finance ministry that has political as well as financial legitimacy. That could emerge only from a profound rethinking of the euro that is so badly needed (particularly in Germany).
Financial markets might not offer the respite necessary to put the new arrangements in place. Under continued market pressure, the European Council might have to find a stopgap arrangement to avoid a calamity. It could authorise the ECB to lend to governments that cannot borrow until a eurobond regime is introduced. But only one thing is certain: these three problems must be resolved if the euro is to be a viable currency.
The writer is chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute
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14/08 The dangers of youth’s labour lost



August 14, 2011 6:53 pm


If proof were needed of the incendiary consequences of persistently high youth unemployment, it has been in ample supply recently – most dramatically in the Arab uprisings. There were, of course, many factors behind that region-wide explosion of popular discontent. But among the most potent was the seething frustration with a system in which upwards of 40 per cent of youths could not find work.
High youth unemployment is not just a North African problem. The looting that ravaged English cities last week happened in a country where one in five young people is jobless. The picture in the US is no better. In continental Europe it is worse. More than 45 per cent of young Spaniards and 38 per cent of young Greeks are out of work. With developed economies facing years of austerity and sluggish growth, the picture is unlikely to improve in the near future.

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It is not surprising that young people have a harder time than their elders in finding a job. They are, on the whole, less skilled and less experienced. They are also often more able to wait around for the right job than older workers with families to feed and mortgages to pay.
This does not mean that governments can afford to ignore the problem, however. High youth unemployment is associated with ills such as higher crime rates and lower health levels. A year of unemployment early in a career can permanently reduce a worker’s earning power. A cohort of such individuals working their way through their careers can dampen their country’s economic potential. Bringing down youth unemployment is just as crucial a post-crisis challenge for global leaders as repairing the public finances.
So what can be done? For starters, politicians should avoid the populist trap of blaming immigrants for the woes of indigenous youngsters. Not only is it a fallacy to assume that the number of jobs in an economy is fixed; there is no evidence linking immigration and high youth unemployment. Recent FT research found that, in Britain, youth unemployment was highest where the non-UK population had a lower share.
Better would be to give employers incentives to take on and train apprentices, as a recent report recommended in the UK. Even if firms do not keep youngsters once they cease to receive support, they will have gained valuable labour market experience. The catch is that with public purses around the world overstretched, subsidies may not be widely feasible.
Structural reform, by contrast, should be – although its nature should vary by country. In North Africa, it means cutting through the thicket of monopolies and regulations that artificially restrict productive activity. On the north shore of the Mediterranean, it means ending two-tier labour markets where excessive protections enjoyed by permanent employees create a class of overwhelmingly young economic outsiders with little hope of finding work. In countries such as the UK, it means ensuring that the youth minimum wage is not set too high: youngsters’ chances in the job market are especially sensitive to pay.
Everywhere, however, it means boosting the skills of young workers. Such reforms are time-consuming and unglamorous – Tony Blair once quipped that he could hide a declaration of war in a skills speech without it being spotted – but crucial. Governments should pay special attention to the lowest third of achievers, since these are most likely to struggle to find jobs.
As populations age, their political priorities shift away from the young. But today’s youth will work longer than past generations, enjoy less generous pensions, and pay more for education and to support ageing parents. The least yesterday’s youngsters can do for those of today is to allow them the economic opportunities they will need to foot these bills.
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