Finance ministers and central bank governors of Russia, India and China participate in the BRICs news conference during the annual International Monetary Fund-World Bank meetings in Washington on Sept. 22, 2011.YURI GRIPAS/Reuters
A pretty cutting note from Jim Leaviss, head of retail fixed interest at M&G this morning. He poses the (currently theoretical) question: If this is part two of a great recession, who is to blame? The answer seems to be pretty much everyone.
These are his points below – what he calls the "10 recent policy errors that have sent us back to the brink:
"1. The ECB hiking interest rates twice this year in response to a commodity led inflation overshoot. Whilst I guess this gets reversed next month (or even sooner?) and the ECB cuts, the damage this did to confidence and to European funding costs was significant, not least because it caused the euro to remain relatively strong. There was no evidence of second round inflationary effects and the hikes came at a terrible time in the recovery.
"2. The Tea Party and the idiots on both sides of politics in the U.S. not coming up with even small compromises that would have given S&P an excuse not to downgrade the U.S. from AAA.
"3. The continuing Osborne U.K. austerity program. As economic growth deteriorated, as youth unemployment rocketed and as confidence collapsed, he announced there was no Plan B. 'Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate,' as Mr. Mellon might have said, applauding.
"4. Not banning shorting via sovereign CDS. We like CDS, we use CDS. But if they didn't exist, the ECB could have aggressively bought peripheral European bonds and driven their yields down. Nowadays, whilst they were doing this in the physical bond market, the market was signalling its disbelief via wider CDS spreads. This visible secondary market doesn't allow anyone to suspend disbelief. The price action in sovereign CDS dominates sentiment – just take a look on Twitter.
"5. Over-regulation of the banking sector. I'm not sure about this one, because the banks are evil, right? But the backdrop of Dodd-Frank in the US, the global solvency regulations and Basel 3, the ring fencing of retail/investment banking, etc. doesn't provide an environment in which bank lending will aggressively recover. That's if you think more bank lending/leverage in the system is a solution to this mess.
"6. Not bailing out Greece/not letting Greece go bust quickly. It kind of didn't matter which, but one of them could have saved the euro zone. Greece started to wobble at the end of 2009, so we've had nearly two years of sovereign debt uncertainty now. Incidentally, could you compare the clamour for austerity for the Greeks now, to the French demands for implausible payments from Germany after the First World War?
"7. Doing the wrong kind of quantitative easing. Operation Twist? The Fed needed to inject printed money directly into a broken housing market and underwater mortgages, boosting labour mobility and getting cash to those with a high marginal propensity to consume, rather than giving the printed money to investors in assets who didn't do anything with it. QE needed to look a little more fiscal than monetary.
"8. China's pegging of the RMB to the U.S. dollar, and the consequence of many other countries having a semi peg to the U.S. dollar in order to remain competitive versus China. Currency wars. The RMB is the wrong price – it's artificially too weak and therefore developed countries' currencies are artificially too strong. This led to a race to the bottom to weaken relative to other economies, and that didn't help anyone.
"9. There was a brief moment in the quiet year or so that we had, when U.K. defined benefit pension funds were pretty much fully funded for the first time in years. They could have de-risked and locked in benefits for their members. Now that equity markets are nearly 20 per cent lower, and bond yields have fallen by 1.5 per cent (meaning assets have fallen and liabilities risen), that's no longer the case. Pension funds didn't de-risk in the good times and left millions of workers and pensioners in peril for the future.
"10. Not enough shock and awe. Policy was always too incremental. The world economy needed huge injections of monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus. The policy announcements were never enough and confidence in policy making itself faded away as time went on. Obama would like to extend a tax cut, the Fed will do something to do with the shape of the yield curve, the ECB will buy a few Portuguese bonds, the Bank of England might print £50-billion more. The policy action was too tentative – and there wasn't enough collaboration between policy-makers across the world."
Stern stuff indeed.