Paul Samuelson on the central banks' roles

Balancing market freedoms

Paul Samuelson

(IHT) All through the years of the Great Depression, Wall Street publicists and President Herbert Hoover would repeatedly declare: "Recovery is just around the corner."

They were wrong. And history repeats itself.

Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admits that nobody, including him, is able to guess how near to bankruptcy the biggest banks in New York, London, Frankfort and Tokyo might be as a result of the real estate crisis.

As one of the economists who helped create today's newfangled securities, I must plead guilty: These new mechanisms both mask transparency and tempt to rash over-leveraging.

Why should non-economist readers care about these technicalities?

Because the policy tools that served so well for Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve and for the Bank of England now have to be changed.

It used to be enough for a central bank to "lean against the wind." That means lower interest rates when unemployment is too high and when deflation threatens. And when business growth is too brisk, central banks are supposed to raise their interest rates to dampen growth and to forestall price-level inflation that threatens to exceed 2 percent per year.

Today, central bankers and U.S. Treasury cabinet officers cannot know whether current interest rates are too high or too low. This is surprising, but true. The safest bond interest rates are indeed low. But financial panic engendered by the burst bubble of unsound U.S. and foreign mortgage lending means that even a mammoth corporation like General Electric would find it expensive now to finance a loan needed to build a new and efficient factory.

The situation is not hopeless. New, rational regulations that discourage predatory lending and rash borrowing could help a lot. Also, as we learned during the Great Depression, the government's treasury and its central bank must be both the lenders of last resort and the spenders of last resort. Speculative markets will not stabilize themselves.

The best policy is actually the middle way: not too much freedom for market forces, and definitely not too little freedom.

Global markets have moved into a new epoch. China, India and even Russia and Ireland are currently growing at almost twice the pace of the United States and the core countries of the European Union. Gone are the days when an American president could command ocean tides to come in and go out.

The U.S. population is 5 percent of the global total, yet it enjoys per person about 20 percent of total global output. That's the picture now. Will this last?

When I come to write a newspaper article like this 10 years from now, I believe America may still be leading the pack in per-capita affluence. But in all probability, the China that has already displaced Japan as the economy with the second biggest total gross domestic product will likely have a total GDP equal to America's.

When that happens, a typical Chinese family will still be a lot poorer than a family in the United States or even Ireland. Remember, China's population is several times that of America or any European country. Don't even ask me what the U.S. dollar in 2017 will be worth.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will have long retired on their respective ranches, but their rash 2000-2007 tax-cut-and-spend policies will by then have harvested the follies that they sowed.

Since we live ever in the short run, global leaders must make their best guesses about what to be doing in 2008. Here are my tentative suggestions:

Watch developments closely. If America's Christmas retail sales fail badly - as they could when high energy prices and high mortgage costs pinch consumers' pocket books - then be prepared to accelerate credit infusions by central banks on the three main continents.

Keep in mind threats of excessive inflation. But be aware that the skies will not fall if the price-level indices blip up from 1.9 to 2.6 percent per annum. What worsens the public's expectations about price instability are excessive spikes in the cost of living.

Finally, to reduce the burden of mass foreclosures of over-expensive mortgages, we should explore new quasi-public agencies, as we did with the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corp., that specialize in supplementing for-profit ordinary lenders. This suggests expanding in a controlled way the lending powers of quasi-public agencies such as Fannie May and Freddie Mac. Better that they should lose a bit when they help homeowners of modest means fend off foreclosures on their onerous mortgages.

Maybe such innovations will turn out not to be needed. But keeping in mind worst-case scenarios of the freezing-up of banks and other lending agencies, exploratory planning is worthwhile insurance.

What the world does not need now is tolerance for any persistent weakness in global Main Street growth. It is better when physicians worry too much about a patient's health than when they worry too little.