LOSING CONTROL
Authors: Stephen D. King
LOSING CONTROL
LOSING
CONTROL
THE EMERGING THREATS TO
WESTERN PROSPERITY
STEPHEN D.
KING
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Copyright © 2010 Stephen D.
King
The right of Stephen D.
King to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Stephen D., 1963–
Losing control : the emerging threats to western prosperity / Stephen D.
King.
p.
cm.
ISBN 978-0-300-15432-0 (cl : alk.
paper) 1.
Western countries—Economic conditions—21st century.
2.
Western countries—Economic policy.
3.
Developing countries—Economic policy.
I.
Title.
HC59.3.K56 2010
330.9—dc22 2009052119
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2014 2013 2012 2011 2010
Chapter 1 Wimbledon, the Olympics and Scarcity
Chapter 2 The Secrets of Western Success
PART TWO BROKEN ECONOMIC BAROMETERS
Chapter 3 The Pleasures and Perils of Trade
Chapter 4 International Roulette: Anarchy in Capital Markets
Chapter 5 Price Stability Brings Economic Instability
PART THREE THE RETURN OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Chapter 7 Who Controls What?
The Rise of State Capitalism
Chapter 8 Running out of Workers
Chapter 9 Indulging the US No More
To Yvonne, Helena, Olivia and Sophie
I may have spent many days (and nights) umbilically attached to my keyboard in a quest to complete this book but I can hardly claim to have done so without the support of others who have, throughout the project, offered encouragement, advice and numerous helpful suggestions.
I would like to thank those friends and colleagues who have provided comments on the manuscript, whether in its early stages or as it approached completion.
Of particular help were Richard Cookson, Ian Morris, David Bloom (all, at the time, at HSBC) and Peter Oppenheimer (at Goldman Sachs).
I am also very grateful to the two anonymous academic referees who provided sage advice to a book-writing novice.
When I delivered speeches on the global economy at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick, both teachers and students encouraged me to think about some of the ideas that now find their way into the book, notably those associated with the history of globalization.
Professor Tim Besley from the London School of Economics offered useful advice on Part 1.
The chapter on state capitalism benefited from a lengthy conversation with Professor Dieter Helm from New College, Oxford.
The sections on monetary policy were helped by discussions over the years with policymakers, notably from the Bank of England, HM Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.
My economic horizons have been expanded as a result of regular attendance at events where I have had the chance to converse with fellow economists.
Of particular value have been regular meetings at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (OeKB) in Vienna and the Accumulation Society in London.
I have also benefited from my occasional involvement with the Business Council for Britain.
Those who offered encouragement when the book was merely a vague concept include Diane Coyle, Hamish McRae and Martin Wolf.
All three know a lot more than I do about writing books and all were kind enough to steer me in the right direction.
I am enormously grateful to the people at Yale University Press.
Special thanks go to Phoebe Clapham, my editor, who was dogged in her determination to turn my scribblings into a coherent final manuscript.
I also offer my gratitude to Sarah Harrison and Liz Pelton, who have provided so much support on publicity.
Heather Nathan has been a source of tremendous encouragement throughout with her infectious enthusiasm, which was instrumental in persuading me to pursue the project from day one.
Many people at HSBC have gone the extra mile to help me in my bid to complete the book.
I am grateful to Stuart Gulliver, David Burnett and Bronwyn Curtis for encouraging me to take time off to write the bulk of the material.
My colleagues in the HSBC economics team have been enormously helpful.
Janet Henry, Stuart Green and Karen Ward picked up the pieces while I was away.
Others travelled
from far and wide to provide support in my absence, notably Qu Hongbin, Fred Neumann, Robert Prior-Wandesforde and Simon Williams.
I also acknowledge the help of Pierre Goad, Jezz Farr and Fiona McClymont, who have worked closely with Yale to bring the project to fruition.
I offer particular thanks to Nic Bastion, my PA, and to the University of Bath students who have provided me with statistical support.
Finally, and most importantly, I have to thank my wife, Yvonne, and my three daughters, Helena, Olivia and Sophie.
Without their love, and their ongoing support, I would have made little headway.
Their patience in the light of the ongoing disruption within the King household – piles of paper, towers of books, the occasional tantrum – knows no bounds.
I dedicate the book to them.
As a teenager in the 1970s, I made a trip with a dance band to Bulgaria, a country very much in the true Soviet mould.
Even to a rather naive fourteen-year-old saxophonist, the denial of economic freedoms in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, was fairly obvious.
Western goods could be purchased only in so-called ‘tourist shops’, using foreign currency.
Not surprisingly, the black-market exchange rate was far more favourable from a British point of view than the official rate.
Bulgarians regarded East German Praktica cameras as the best in the world, seemingly unaware of the growing international dominance of Japanese brands like Canon, Nikon and Pentax.
And one youth was particularly keen to purchase my Levis, even though I was wearing them at the time, making me a financial offer I was almost unable to refuse.
In hindsight it was obvious that the collapse of Soviet Communism would lead to a very different kind of global economy.
In 2007, I was in Shanghai for a conference.
I was lucky enough to be staying at the Grand Hyatt hotel.
It’s located on the 53rd through
to the 87th floors of the Jin Mao Tower, which at the time was the tallest building in China and, indeed, one of the tallest buildings in the world.
I had been to the hotel on a number of previous occasions and each time had been mightily impressed by the views from the panoramic windows in my guest room, at least when the building wasn’t enveloped in low cloud.
Because the building was so high, there was no need to draw the curtains.
Privacy was assured.
Stepping out of the bathroom wearing nothing other than my glasses, I was therefore surprised to see a group of Chinese construction workers staring at me through the window.
They were building Shanghai’s new World Financial Center, a tower that had sprung up with remarkable speed and was shortly set to rise above the Jin Mao tower.
I hope none of them fell off on seeing me.
Pudong, the area of Shanghai where these and other spectacular buildings are located, used to be not much more than poor farmland on the less prosperous side of the Huangpu River.
The farmers have been shifted elsewhere, sometimes forcibly.
The workers and residents of Pudong, in their smart new offices and apartments, can look down upon Shanghai’s past.
Across the river, the Bund still sparkles at night, providing a reminder of Shanghai’s colonial history.
Many of its buildings were constructed by the British, the French, the Germans, the Americans and the Russians.
Foreign powers erected consulates, banks and sleazy nightclubs.
Those working, living or partying in the Bund, meanwhile, are now able to stare across the river and look up to Shanghai’s future.
Other than the need to close curtains in tall buildings, the obvious lesson from my experiences in Sofia and Shanghai is that the world economy has fundamentally changed and, for the most part, changed for the better.
The tired and arthritic communist systems of the 1970s have mostly gone, either because regimes have fallen or because they have reinvented themselves to accommodate a world of openness.
The opportunities created have been truly astounding.
We are living through a new and radical form of globalization where economic prospects are changing, not just in the emerging nations but also in the Western world.
However, I am not convinced we have understood the full implications.
In my twenty-five years as a professional economist, initially as a civil servant in Whitehall but, for the most part, as an employee of a major international bank, I’ve spent a good deal of time looking into the future.
As the emerging nations first appeared on the economic radar screen, I began to realize I could talk about the future only by delving much further into the past.
I wasn’t interested merely in the history incorporated into statistical models of the economy, a history which typically includes just a handful of years and therefore ignores almost all the interesting economic developments that have taken place over the last millennium.
Instead, the history that mattered to me had to capture the long sweep of economic and political progress and all too frequent reversal.
In recent years, as the emerging nations have taken their seats at the international table of powers and superpowers, economic and political history has become increasingly important.
How else can we hope to understand the re-emergence of China and India, the growing influence of Russia and the closer integration into the world economy of nations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe?
Through much of the twentieth century, political systems prevented economies from becoming more integrated: indeed, they pushed economies further apart.
The collapse of the British Empire, the destruction associated with the First World War, the rise of nationalism, fascism and communism, the horrors of the Second World War and the stalemate of the Cold War all contributed to the destruction of economic relationships.
These relationships are now
rapidly being rebuilt.
Changing patterns of trade and investment opportunities around the world provide compelling evidence of this shift.
Yet many people are in denial.
They still tend to think in the old domestic mindsets.
They are slaves to national economic data that, for the most part, include only the most recent domestic economic developments.
They are slaves to a world that, in effect, crumbled as Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the global economy at the beginning of the 1980s and as the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989.
During the 1980s, as cumbersome mainframe computers were replaced by PCs, economists began to calibrate statistically the ways in which economies operated.
With reams of annual, quarterly, monthly, daily and even intra-day data at their disposal and with significant advances in computing power, they were able to build economic models linked to past reality (and, as the models became more complex, to ‘expected’ future reality).
The mathematics employed in the construction of these models was often mind-bogglingly complex, but, at the end of the day, all the models rested on a few simple assumptions: (i) the recent past could be represented with some degree of accuracy; (ii) the future was similar to the recent past; (iii) the public understood the aims of policymakers who, in turn, delivered credible and socially desirable policies, thereby confirming the public’s understanding; and (iv) economic relationships with other countries could be captured through some simple trade equations, a global interest rate and an assumed level for oil prices and the exchange rate.
These models, essentially national in nature and limited to economic experience over only a few years, performed like clockwork.
The rest of the world mattered, but only in a minor way.
Capital flows hardly mattered at all, in part because in the 1980s there was still a significant home bias in savings and investment flows.
The models gave the impression that domestic policymakers were, for the most part, in control of their nation’s economic destiny.
Those employed to run the models were happy to support this view.
In the mid-1980s, when I worked at HM Treasury, many dozens of economists were employed to analyse the UK economy.
There were only four monitoring developments in the rest of the world.
Today, the numbers covering the rest of the world have gone up but the language remains the same: politicians in particular routinely claim their countries are subject to global ‘shocks’ as if the rest of the world is on another planet rather than just over the sea or across the border.
Admittedly, policymakers recognized long ago that ‘when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold’, but there was little understanding of how the global economy as a whole operated.
Nation states were, apparently, economically sovereign.
Over the years, I have become more and more frustrated with this approach, in particular because of the huge expansion of global capital markets linking economies together in ways which, in the 1980s, seemed unimaginable.
Savers in one part of the world can now easily invest elsewhere.
In theory, their behaviour implies that capital is more efficiently allocated globally, delivering a higher level of economic well-being as a result.
In practice, however, these cross-border capital flows are sometimes a source of inefficiency given that many of the biggest players are nation states that choose not to pursue commercial objectives but, instead, focus on meeting the interests of their various internal constituents: the US government is the world’s biggest borrower while the Chinese, Saudis and Russians are among the world’s biggest savers.
It may be that the data simply do not exist to measure, calibrate and analyse these growing interactions between the developed and emerging worlds, but that does not mean to say they can be ignored.
Regrettably, as with the 2007/8 credit crunch, they too often are.
Even when they are taken into account, it’s often just one-way traffic.
Plenty of economists spend their time trying to work out how developments in the United States affect the rest of the world.
Few
spend their time asking how the rest of the world and, in particular, the emerging nations affect the US.
Yet, as I argue in this book, this second question needs to be asked more and more if we are to understand anything about developments in the world economy and in our own economies in the twenty-first century.
Openness matters.
Never before has the world economy been quite so ‘open’ as it is today.
I strongly believe this is a good thing.
The number of people lifted out of poverty since the 1980s has swamped anything achieved at any time in the past, even during the heady days of the Industrial Revolution.
Their improving lifestyles reflect much that is good about globalization.
To pretend, however, that globalization is automatically leading us to an economic land of milk and honey through the miracle of market forces, as is so often claimed, is foolish.
Parallels are often drawn with the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when globalization last reached a peak (and, with the advent of the First World War, came to a sticky end).
Yet we live in a very different, and rather paradoxical, world.
We have more globalization today, in the form of much higher international trade and cross-border capital flows.
A company headquartered in the US might make its profits through a subsidiary in China which, in turn, imports raw materials from Brazil.
Its sales, meanwhile, may be primarily in the Middle East, while its profits will be distributed to its large numbers of European shareholders.
We also, however, have much less globalization.
There has been a proliferation of nation states and, hence, legal and regulatory systems as the empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given way to self-determination, nationalism and religious sectarianism.
We have a much-reduced volume of cross-border migration, at least in relation to the size of now much bigger indigenous populations.
1
Hoards of people crossed borders, seas and oceans in the nineteenth century, through both the coercion of slavery and the search for a better life.
Indeed, the US would not be the nation it is today had it not been for earlier large-scale waves of migration.
The border controls we now take for granted were an invention of the twentieth century: they limit the ability of entrepreneurial workers to go in search of economic opportunities in other parts of the world.
Even if the global economic cake is bigger as a result of this latest wave of globalization, there are both winners and losers.
The heightened gravitational pull of the emerging world may be reducing income inequality between nations, but it is also increasing income inequality within nations.
Over the last forty years, for example, income inequality in the US has risen dramatically.
2
The rise of the emerging nations thus creates a whole new set of challenges which, all too often, are either swept under the carpet by the supporters of globalization or, instead, distorted to suit the varying interests of xenophobes, nationalists and the anti-big business lobby.
3
Globalization has undoubtedly led to higher global incomes but, at the same time, individual nations are struggling to cope with some of its other effects: greater economic instability, heightened income inequality and financial market turmoil.
It is, of course, a comforting thought that the rest of the world is embracing the spirit of industrial innovation established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a newly enlightened Europe and a newly independent United States.
Technologies now spread more quickly to other parts of the world, a reflection of lower transportation costs and, more recently, much lower information costs.
Trade between Western and emerging nations has flourished.
There are more democracies now than there used to be.
Yet, as I shall argue, economic progress in the developed world did not just depend on improvements in technology or the adoption of democracy.
It also depended on access to ‘enabling resources’ – land,
raw materials, migration (and, in the past, slavery) – and the ability to rig markets.
The arrival on the world economic stage of the emerging nations has the potential to undermine these sources of Western prosperity, both through the emerging nations’ own demands over resources that are ultimately limited and through the heightened level of cross-border competition in a wide range of markets.
The West had been economically comfortable for many years: life is now becoming distinctly uncomfortable.