Crisis worse than Japan?

Source: The Economist

HERE is one consolation for the depressing instability of finance. History offers a rich array of banking crises from which policymakers can draw lessons—and against which today’s rescue plans can be judged. According to an IMF database, there have been 124 “systemic” banking crises since 1970—episodes in which bad debts soared across the economy and much of the banking sector was insolvent.

Most of those were in the developing world. But the list also includes half a dozen rich-country crashes, from Japan’s slump after its property bubble burst in the late 1980s, to the Nordic bank crises in the early 1990s. All involved deep recessions, required massive government intervention to clean up bust banks, and led to big increases in public debt as economies shrank while government spending soared. But the speed of recovery differed dramatically; Japan endured a decade of economic stagnation, whereas South Korea returned to growth within two years of its 1997 banking disaster.

Received wisdom holds that policy choices determined the pace of recovery. Sweden rebounded quickly because it acted fast: removing dud assets from banks’ balance-sheets, recapitalising weak banks and nationalising where necessary. Japan stalled for a decade because it took years to recognise the scale of its mess. In his first presidential news conference on February 9th, Barack Obama pointed to Japan as an example of what not to do. Its “lost decade”, he argued, was the consequence of “not act[ing] boldly or swiftly enough”.

There is truth to that analysis. Japan’s central bank took too long to fight deflation; its fiscal stimulus was cut off too quickly with an ill-judged tax increase in 1997; and it did not begin to clean up and recapitalise its banks until 1998, almost a decade after the bubble had burst. But the history of bank failures suggests that Japan’s slump was not only the result of policy errors. Its problems were deeper-rooted than those in countries that recovered more quickly. Today’s mess in America is as big as Japan’s—and in some ways harder to fix.

Double bubble

This crisis, like most others in rich countries, emerged from a property bubble and a credit boom. The scale of the bubble—a doubling of house prices in five years—was about as big in America’s ten largest cities as it was in Japan’s metropolises. But nationwide, house prices rose further in America and Britain than they did in Japan (see first chart). So did commercial-property prices. In absolute terms, the credit boom on top of the housing bubble was unparalleled. In America private-sector debt soared from $22 trillion in 2000 (or the equivalent of 222% of GDP) to $41 trillion (294% of GDP) in 2007 (see second chart).

Judged by standard measures of banking distress, such as the amount of non-performing loans, America’s troubles are probably worse than those in any developed-country crash bar Japan’s. According to the IMF, non-performing loans in Sweden reached 13% of GDP at the peak of the crisis. In Japan they hit 35% of GDP. A recent estimate by Goldman Sachs suggests that American banks held some $5.7 trillion-worth of loans in “troubled” categories, such as subprime mortgages and commercial property. That is equivalent to almost 40% of GDP.