Learning From Iceland’s Recovery

Banking isn’t some kind of black box, or set of sacred mysteries. Boom and bust speculative cycles and financial crises happen again and again, and the lessons of how to deal with them are well known – to smart and honest people who’ve successfully managed them, anyway.

Here’s one of the sober, smart, honest nordic bankers on the lessons that the nordic countries learned in cleaning up their own colossal banking mess in the early 1990s:

http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2002/091102.htm

Irony of ironies, this speech was given in 2002, in the wake of the Asian Contagion meltdown, but much of what he says seems to have been forgotten by our own bank-coddling political class. Several of the factors that made the Asian crisis even worse than the nordic ones are, oddly enough, to be found in our own US system today. See #3 especially:

“3. Ability of political systems to make decisions in the public interest

“A very basic issue for the success of any systemic bank restructuring is the ability to get political decision makers to recognize that there is a problem, that the problem is severe, that it requires quick and resolute actions, and that the problems largely are technical rather than political in nature.

“How lucky we were in the Nordic countries to have governments able to make tough decisions and leaving most of the implementation to a group of civil servants (statstjansteman) and technical experts.

“In other countries, vested bank owner and borrower interests sabotage such actions through political interference, corruption and intimidation of courts and officials, etc.

“Necessary political decisions such as loss sharing and the allocation of public support funds are hard to come by, even in cases where the governments have the financial capacity to provide the resources.

“It is much easier to do nothing and wish the problems away. Needless to say, burden sharing decisions become exponentially more difficult when public financial resources are severely limited or nonexistent….”

Too bad the US didn’t apply its own IMF-style medicine to its own corrupt and cratering banking sector:

“… let me mention some of the important lessons from the Nordic countries that became part of the policies for dealing with banking crises that were adopted by the IMF. In the mid-1990s, many of them were substantially at odds with the common view of a dominant group of US RTC-inspired financial economists.

“The principal one is that you cannot rely on the private sector or markets alone to solve systemic banking problems.

“Similar to the need for a lender of last resort to deal with systemic liquidity shortfalls, there is need for an investor or owner of last resort when all other sources of capital have dried up—and closing down an entire banking system is not a feasible option.”

@thibaud-

The problem is, after the GM bailout (and the rest of the heavily Politically Correct Obama stimulus) people don’t trust the Democrats to do the right thing when it comes to restructuring. The other side of the problem is that even stringent-measures Republicans like Paul Ryan, whose early works show that he at least understands th depth of our Debt/Entitlement crisis, is being forced too far to the Left by an electorate still in denial about the magnitude of the cuts we’re going to have to make.

No one can solve this problem until the electorate comes around. The Left’s unrelenting war on the Tea Party, along with members of that group still in denial about the cuts that must be made, have blunted that most promising advance. The fact that there were not riots in the streets over Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits have allowed the problem to get enormously worse.

America is trying to muddle through a hole that gets deeper by the hour. Maybe God will smile on us again and lift us out; but with idiots like Reich and Krugman still influential over the direction of the nation’s finances, hope continues to dim.

@Jim. – it’s not a partisan issue. Neither party has acted or wanted to act.

Ken Rogoff’s prescriptions for forced haircuts and financial workouts were made in Sept 2008, while the Bush admin was in office. Bush’s own former adviser, Columbia B-School head Glenn Hubbard, made similar recommendations.

The TBTF lenders and their sick portfolios are the dead hand (no pun intended) on the mortgage market, which is the dead weight on the housing market, which is the dead weight on our lopsided, consumer-dependent economy that requires a widespread “wealth effect” mentality in order for US households to spend spend spend.

So long as the housing market is in the tank, the recovery will be lame. Neither party has shown any real interest in or commitment to fixing the problem.

I like what thibaud has to say.

I also liked this: “Capital controls, progressive taxes and a careful phasing-in of austerity measures were also key to getting the country back on track …”

@thibaud #1:

Yes the issue is essentially moral; and the deeper issue is cultural. A brief story:

In the depths of the Depression, my grandparents, dry-land farmers in eastern New Mexico (really dry!) received loans from some New Deal agency or other to buy seed and otherwise see them through the crisis. Some years later a bureau-dandy showed up at their doorstep to to smugly inform them that they would not be required to repay the loan. They refused. “You will get all your money back from us,” they told him. His response is not known.

How does this relate to TBTF banks? The money-for-nothing mindset, which in my grandparents day would have been viewed little better than pedophilia, now pervades our society top-to-bottom. Does America have the the collective cojones to repudiate this delusion? The future of our economy and our very way of life depends upon it.