The Real Culture War II: Utopia, Austerity and the F***** C****

Yesterday we argued for carrying the culture war into the heart of the American political economy. We made the very broad claim that a defining feature of our economic culture is the acceptance of limits. This might seem like a strange thing to say. Surely the last decade was marked not by limits but by a failure to acknowledge them. Individuals, businesses and eventually governments borrowed well beyond their means. That, so the story goes, was what created the credit crunch and the stagnant new normal. It is certainly the narrative behind the growing deal, in which Republicans appear to be ‘conceding’ on some tax hikes while Democrats accept 5-10% cuts to Social Security.

But that narrative exactly misreads the role of credit and consumption. The expansion of credit was largely an attempt to overcome the limits of capitalism within capitalism. As is now common knowledge, the expansion of consumer credit presupposed stagnant wages:

And, as the graph shows, it began with sagging profit rates of the late 1970s – perhaps most famously marked by Volcker’s revanchist announcement that “the standard of living of the average American must decline.”

(graph from Robert Brenner, see also Henwood.) What the expansion of consumer credit permitted, in other words, was the appearance that capitalism could accommodate the expansion of desires, the demand for ‘more,’ even while suppressing labor costs and increasing the expropriation of the expropriated.

The expansion of credit over the past thirty years was in a sense a massive bridge loan to cover the transition to a leaner set of arrangements, in which more jobs would be low-paying, part-time and insecure, labor would be less able to defend attacks on the standard of living, ‘job-creating’ capital would take home a larger share of the pie and then basically sit on it, and politicians could pretend serious economic issues could simply be managed by technocrats.

The major problem with the credit crunch was not the attempt to surpass existing limits to consumption, but with the implicit practical belief that credit could in any way rise above and compensate for the class defeats of the past twenty years. Just as Obama has frequently tried to rise above politics in the name of some abstract non-partisan unity, so too did the borrowing public hope it could rise above the real disparities in society, without having to face them directly.

To put it another way, the ‘fiscal cliff’ is not just a false emergency engineered by Republicans and Democrats, it is the culmination of decades of attempting to paper over the limits, not merely injustices, of the American economy. It is not just that both parties have joined the austerity bandwagon, they in the process are attempting to neutralize the only utopian moment of the past few decades: the satisfaction of desires that the current society cannot satisfy. The expansion of debt would have been unlikely to succeed had that desire not been there to sublimate.

Of course, critics may say that many of these desires took a form not at all challenging to a consumer society. That criticism has some teeth, and we will take it up in tomorrow’s post. However, moving too quickly towards anti-consumerism not only misses the utopian moment, but also blurs quickly into the bland and conservative narrative of arguing we should do more with less. The starting point for an economic culture war must be to reject the austerity party and its culture of low expectations. Any reconstruction of meaningful alternatives must begin by rejecting that piece of our economic culture. After all, the so-called ‘solution’ of a grand bargain is really just a an attempt to throw back on society the political class’s own lack of imagination and inability to deal with the problems it has inherited.

(to be continued)

On politics and finance

Buried under the frenzy around the Leveson report was the British government’s coup of attracting Mark Carney, governor of the Canadian Central Bank, to London. Apparently ruled out of the running, much to the chagrin of those who felt he was the best man for the job, Carney has now been appointed as governor of the Bank of England and will take up the job next summer. For those who view these appointments as purely about expertise and experience, this is a great victory. Gone it would seem are the mercantilist days where nationality, wealth and government policy were so closely aligned. The cosmopolitan financial press, from the Financial Times to The Economist, are satisfied. Britain, it seems, is a pioneer in these international recruitments for national institutions: think of the English football team. That Carey was a Canadian certainly helped make him acceptable to the British establishment. He’s sort of one of us, after all, runs the sentiment. But the principle still stands that positions such as these are all about competence and expertise. There is no politics or partisanship here and the appointment of Carney, we are told, is proof of that.

It is also proof of a number of other things. One is that there is emerging a cadre of elite central bankers who move relatively seamlessly from one appointment to another. National boundaries seem less restrictive than in the past. This holds true to some degree at the global level, where competition for posts such as head of the IMF or the World Bank has become more intense. The old Bretton Woods division of the spoils between Europe and the United States is coming under serious pressure and may not survive the next round of appointments. And nationally, central banks are opening up with Britain leading the way. Curiously, the European Central Bank in this regard is behind the times: its appointments are rigidly based upon the principle of achieving balance between nationalities. The unfortunate Lorenzo Bini Smaghi was edged out of the ECB executive board because it wouldn’t do to have two Italians in there and no Frenchman. Draghi became director, Smaghi was out, and Benoit Coeuré was in. This seems rather old hat and overly political compared to the forward looking Bank of England. Whether other central banks follow Threadneedle Street’s example is unclear but the principle has been established and there is no short supply of expert central bankers.

It is also proof that the way we understand banking, finance and monetary policy today is entirely free of political principle. The struggle between banking and financial interests and those of elected representatives is a long-standing and epic struggle. There is nothing new there. But central banks have often been seen as exceptions. They are, after all, lenders of last resort and in that respect are eminently political institutions. Those critical of the ECB in the current crisis have often suggested that it’s role should become more, not less, political in so far as it needs to act in order to save the Eurozone from collapse. Yet the implication of Carney’s arrival is that the tie between central banks and national politics should be cut. This is a mistake. Carney may be Canadian but the Bank of England remains firmly part of the functioning and survival of the British economy. And the Bank of England should still be understood as an agent of national capital, in spite of who is running it.

Carney’s appointment also chimes with a more general feeling that politics is seeping out of macro-economic policy as a whole. Illustrative in this regard is the debate underway at the moment around who might replace Tim Geithner as US Treasury Secretary. One name that has been floated around, and who the FT considers a realistic outside contender, is Larry Fink. As head of the biggest asset management group in the world (BlackRock manages around 3.7 trillion US dollars of assets), Fink is a heavy-weight figure, as important as those running the big Wall Street banks. However, his entire background is in finance. He certainly has views about how the US economy should be run but to appoint Fink would be to give the job to an expert. And this is not a job as central banker but as Treasury Secretary, an ostensibly political appointment. Of course, experts have long been appointment to this position. There is even talk of Geithner stepping down and joining BlackRock and Fink moving in to take his place. Were this to happen, it would illustrate how firmly financiers dominate economic policymaking and how expertise in finance has become the baseline for political appointments within the US Treasury.

As we’ve argued before on this blog, expertise does matter in politics. But the overwhelming tendency today is to view macro-economic policy as a purely technical realm, rather than as one where technical questions co-exist alongside fundamental differences of political principle and alongside important moral questions. Such a tendency has the effect of shielding economic policy from public criticism and gives to public financial institutions like central banks a veneer of political and social neutrality. In fact, no amount of expert knowledge can obviate the need to make political choices. The most honest experts will say that various scenarios are possible and that the choices depend upon what outcomes we want. It is these outcomes that we should be debating, not which expert can magically solve our ethical and political dilemmas about what sort of society we want to live in.

Varieties of finance?

In a previous post, we looked at the structure of the European banking system. We asked whether there was a particular European story that can help explain the sorry state of the current European economy. It was noted that the size of the European banking sector, so much larger than in the United States, reflected the central role banks in Europe play in financing the private sector. In the US, there is more reliance on capital markets than on banks and so the assets to GDP ratio of US banks is much lower than in Europe.

Can we transform those differences into something more systematic? Do differences in financial markets point to deeper and broader differences between different types of societies? The question here is whether there exists the same kind of variety in financial sectors as there does in capitalist economies more generally. A popular way of classifying capitalist systems is according to type: liberal market economies, coordinated market economies and mixed market economies. This is the famous “varieties of capitalism” approach. Can we say that the financial sectors in Europe are shaped by these national institutional factors? One basic distinction, for instance, is between market-based and relationship-based borrowing and lending. In more liberal market economies like the UK, companies are expected to rely more on the open market as a source of finance. In a coordinated market economy, corporate financing is fed through bank-to-business relationships.

Finding out whether any of these patterns exist in the date on financial markets is not easy. Interest has tended to be in the ties between business and politics, not in the correspondence between differences in financial markets and broader varieties of capitalist production. But there is some data out there. In the Liikanen report on the European banking industry, we see little evidence for these kinds of patterns. In terms of the balance between stock market capitalization, total debt securities and bank assets, we do see differences between Europe and the US. But within Europe, a supposedly liberal market economy like the UK has bank assets that massively outstrip any other European country and offsets its larger stock market capitalisation (p119 of the Liikanen report). The data on financial institutions and markets collected by Thomas Beck, Ash Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Devine (available here) is extensive but suggests that the biggest difference is between income levels, not between varieties of capitalism. Another way of thinking about the varieties of financial markets is whether it can help explain different national government responses to the current economic and financial crisis. One study of this by Beat Weber and Stefan Schmitz (available here) found that institutional factors did not in fact influence very much the rescue packages put together by European governments. They point instead to other factors. The degree of inequality in society, which they take as an indication of the fact that policymakers in those countries use access to credit as a substitute for higher wages (what Colin Crouch calls “privatized Keynesianism” – see here), is for them one element that explains the form the government bail-outs took. On the varieties of capitalism, they note that as an approach it is focused more on production and not on financial systems. It has therefore little to say about financialization as such.

National differences remain important and a feature of the current crisis is the difference in the national responses. Behind efforts to build a common European response are national bail-out packages that differ greatly in terms of size and in the strictness of their conditions. But financialization as such, and the boom of the late 2000s, was common to many high-income countries. By way of explaining the current crisis, Beck and his colleagues write that “the lower margins for traditional lines of business and the search for higher returns were possible only through high-risk taking” (p78 of this paper). The implication here is that the lack of profitability in the real economy drove the expansion of financial activity in the 2000s. This explanation isn’t perfect but it certainly helps us understand why it has been so difficult for governments to return to positive growth. If financialisation was itself more symptom than cause, then we are still left with the causes of the crisis today.

The state of European banking

 

In his assessment of a new report published on banking reform within the EU, Martin Wolf starts off with an arresting statistic. In 2010, he writes, US banks had assets worth 8.6 trillion Euros. Banks in the EU had assets worth 42.9 trillion Euros. For the US, those assets represented 80% of GDP; in the EU, they represented 350% of GDP. The EU’s banking sector, claims Wolf, is too big to fail and “too big to save”.

Wolf’s fact raises interesting questions. Can we say that in Europe the expansion of the financial sector has been so significant that it dwarfs developments in the US and gives us an explanation for Europe’s current sovereign debt crisis? Explanations of the Eurozone crisis have in recent months increasingly focused on governance issues tied to the Eurozone itself and to poor economic performance of many Eurozone economies. Is the implication that the crisis is a European affair?

A useful place to look in order to answer these questions is the report that Wolf cites, put together by a group of experts and led by Errki Liikanen, governor of Finland’s central bank. Most of the coverage of the report has been about its recommendations: ones that are not so different from those of the Vickers report in the UK (see here for a comment on Vickers). However, the report itself gives a detailed account of the crisis and of the transformations in the European banking sector.

In general, it implies that whilst there is variation, there is no “European exception”. The origins of the crisis lie in the collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States, which put a number of lending institutions into serious difficulty. This localized crisis quickly fed through an internationalized financial system to affect non-US institutions. Many European banks were left with very bad loans on their books: the German bank, Deutsche Industriebank IKB, was one of the first to be bailed out by the Bundesbank. As early as August 2007, the interbank lending market in Europe dried up altogether: the ECB had to step in with an injection of 95 billion Euros. In December of the same year, it injected a further 300 billion. At issue here is the generalized dependence of US and European financial institutions on what turned out to be very bad loans.

On the size of the assets of European banks, compared to other parts of the world, the report also has a lot of good information. The report notes that the EU banking sector is very large when compared with other countries and regions, as the figures above make clear. However, it notes that this reflects the fact that bank intermediation plays a bigger role in Europe than elsewhere. What this means is that banks are the principal source of private sector financing in Europe in contrast to the US for example. Banks in Europe also have mortgages on their balance sheets, whereas in the US Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac soak up these mortgages and are government-sponsored institutions. The staggering difference in the assets of banks in Europe and the US is not automatically a sign of different trends in financialisation but points also to some more long-standing differences in the nature of private sector financing. The report also notes that the restructuring of the banking sector which occurred in the US post-Lehman, in particular the collapse of small and medium-sized banks, has not occurred in Europe. The level of total assets has thus remained constant, propped up by ECB and national government intervention in Europe. Here there is a marked difference between Europe and the US: interventions in Europe have prevented restructuring, in the US they were a conduit for change.

There is no particular European story to the growth of the financial sector in Europe. Some specific features of bank intermediation have interacted with more generic features of financialisation that we can observe in Europe and elsewhere. What is less clear from the report itself is whether the growth of the financial sector has been the result of changes within the non-financial sector, a freer regulatory environment or simply the working out of a speculative frenzy within financial institutions aiming to make more money in the short term, with little regard for longer term consequences. The recommendations of the report suggests it believes that the latter two factors are the most important.

Still no alternative to austerity

An interesting post on austerity over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog. It makes the point that British business – generally in favour of austerity measures when they were first introduced back in 2010 – is now beginning to change its mind. It’s not difficult to work out why: Britain is facing a third quarterly decline in GDP, with a 0.5% contraction in the British economy expected for the second quarter of 2012. For the UK this is particularly galling given the fiscal boost of the Olympics and the expectation that this would mean a heady summer for at least some British businesses. Perhaps it is true that as many people left the UK as entered it for the Games, making the net effect close to zero.

The Economist’s post suggests that the tide is perhaps turning in the UK, with austerity giving way to a new consensus around pro-growth measures. It notes that Cameron’s government is considering an “economic regeneration bill” for the Autumn and that Boris Johnson – with an eye perhaps on the Tory leadership – is talking up the need for big government infrastructure projects (based around London, of course).

The difficulties faced by the UK economy should give food for thought to those arguing that the route to economic growth lies via an exit from the Eurozone. One might have expected the UK to boost competitiveness through cheapening its currency but – on the contrary – the British pound has become something of a safe haven for those with lots of cash. Life outside the Eurozone may mean currency flexibility and low borrowing costs but that isn’t helping the British economy. The debt burden for individuals and businesses, incurred in the heady pre-2008 years, is still depressing growth and holding back new investment plans.

The idea that the tide is turning at the level of elite opinion is difficult to substantiate. There were always voices calling for moderate fiscal stimulus alongside cuts in government spending. Back in 2010 the debate between the Tories and Labour was not about whether the government should drastically reduce spending – both agreed that it should – but it was all about timing. Shock treatment versus gradual reductions eased along via some discretionary spending. Austerity was the backdrop with the debate focused on how, not if. Little, it seems, has changed.

As noted on The Current Moment last week, the debate in the US presidential campaign is also about how the government’s deficit can be reduced, with both camps fighting over who is more credible in their deficit-cutting plans. In France, a government was elected with an ostensibly pro-growth agenda. In his campaign speeches, Hollande regularly fulminated against austerity politics, claiming he represented an alternative. And yet – bar the few measures introduced that are intended to put a little more money in people’s pockets – the real challenge for the Hollande government is the 2013 budget and finding the money to meet its balanced budget obligations. Much to the chagrin of the left of the Socialist Party, Hollande has signed off on the EU’s fiscal compact with little regard for the growth measures he had promised. Budget cuts will be financed in part via higher taxes but also via spending cuts. The Greek premier, Antonis Samara, is about to undertake a desperate trip to Paris and Berlin where he will ask for a bit more leeway in his efforts at balancing the Greek deficit. Merkel and Hollande are shifting all responsibility for the decision on whether to grant Greece an extension to the Troika, as if the issue was a technical one to be decided by accountants from the European Commission. From the US through to Europe, there is little evidence that the tide is turning.

Even though economies are stagnating under the burden of austerity measures, the intellectual case for an alternative still needs to made. Until then, it will be more of the same.

Interview with Hillel Ticktin

Following up on last year’s Current Moment interviews, today we are publishing an interview with Hillel Ticktin, Emeritus Professor of Marxist Studies at the University of Glasgow. An internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Professor Ticktin co-founded in the early 1970s the journal Critique.  He has published numerous books and articles over the years. In 2010, Critique published a special issue on the current crisis to which Ticktin and others contributed.

Eurozone leaders are going on record saying that the worst of the sovereign debt crisis is over. Are they right to be so optimistic?

No. But then, the Eurozone country politicians are not going to tell the truth as to what they think, as it would spook the markets. Without growth, it will be impossible to solve the indebtedness problem, and Germany is insisting on harsh terms for giving loans, so harsh that there will be negative growth. This is clear in the case of Greece, where the newspapers are talking of the need for a future Third Bailout. But in reality it is highly likely that other countries will require further substantial loans. While Portugal will not be too much of a problem, a Spanish or Italian bailout cannot be financed on present Eurozone funds.

Yields have fallen on sovereign debt as the European Central Bank (ECB) has injected over 1 trillion Euros of liquidity into the European banking system in the form of longer-term refinancing operations. How has the crisis changed the ECB and has the ECB been the saviour of the situation?

The ECB has clearly put off the day when the crisis will have to be faced down. Banks have acquired sufficient liquidity to avoid problems and have invested money in their governmental bonds. The rational solution would have been the issuance of sufficient Eurobonds which would be used to fund the various countries involved. Since the Eurobonds would be backed by the successful Eurozone countries, investors will buy them. The ECB has produced a temporary measure but the amount of money involved is insufficient. Until the ECB can act as the Central Bank of an independent country in order to issue as much liquidity as it sees fit, and can help to issue Eurobonds, it is not fit for purpose.

The European approach has combined the backdoor provision of liquidity to its banking system with a frontdoor assault on government budget deficits and on national labour markets. What is your assessment of this approach overall?

Crazy. It is not really a European approach so much as a Conservative policy supported by the UK Conservative party, the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats in Germany, the Republican Party in the USA etc. It is not supported by the social democrats in France or Germany. Hollande has made that very clear. Of course in practice the social democrats do not live up to their promises, but they would ease the situation and might be pushed further by popular pressure. The question is why such a policy is being adopted at all, given that it cannot possibly work, and indeed is not working. It looks as if a section of the bourgeoisie has decided to take the opportunity to attack the working class so far that they would end up with a 19^th century approach to social relations. That, in turn, would ultimately destroy the social democratic parties and replace them with revolutionary left wing parties. Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.

A feature of the politics of the Eurozone crisis has been the replacement of democratically-elected governments with technocrats. This occurred in both Italy and Greece. Does this signal a trend of some kind, that economic imperatives are being placed above political ones for instance? And does it suggest that European integration today is really about preserving the Euro?

This is an inevitable feature of the present. Once the majority of the population began to turn to the left, as in Greece, the capitalist system itself began to be threatened. The use of the army is not possible at the present time. Nor is a far right popular movement based on the so-called ‘middle class’, So they have had the ingenuity to invent a new undemocratic category of a non-political government,  which makes a mockery of the Parliamentary system.  This is much like the idea that US judges of the Supreme Court are above politics when they pronounce on political measures, even though they have been specifically appointed for political reasons. It does not fool the working class but people may be grateful that it is not worse. Since it will not work, there will have to be even more undemocratic solutions. In the UK during the Great Depression, there was a National Government. In effect a coalition of all the large parties. The fact is that the Parliamentary system was already cracking, so this is another stake in its heart.

There is no question that ‘economics is being placed above politics’. The only rational way to run a union with a common currency is to accept that the richer areas will help fund the poorer areas, in order both to help them catch up but also to maintain cohesion, based on principles of human rights. European countries usually accept such obligations, unless they accept that parts of their country will break away. After all, Germany taxed the West Germans to help the absorption of East Germany. Today, however, the ruling parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland appear to reject such an approach. The reason ultimately lies in the fear of instability in those countries. So, economics is not really being placed above politics, depending on one’s definitions of politics and economics. Instead one politics is replacing another. The reason is discussed in the answer to the next question.

Is there an alternative to this approach of national budgetary austerity combined with a pan-European fund intended to offset any threats to Europe’s banking system.

As the current approach is being widely applied and is widely distrusted, and can only fail, there has to be another alternative if humanity is to survive, whether in or out of the Eurozone.

We are in a downturn of depression proportions. The last Great Depression only ended with the World War. War, on that scale, is however, excluded at the present time. The only way out of the present impasse is for a rationally planned economic reconstructive process, with governments playing a leading role. As the ruling class supports small government and the extension of private enterprise, it will oppose any such move. On the contrary, it is afraid that any attempt to go for reflation with government participation will lead to a political upheaval. In my view, they are right that the population will demand increased economic and political participation under conditions of full employment. That is in effect the immediate alternative, which is why the ruling class wants to take the opportunity, instead, to achieve a defeat of the working class of epochal proportions. Looked at this way, the policy of austerity is a defensive measure to preserve capitalism. Seen this way the policy is not crazy but rational, even if its application is mad.

The future is not as apocalyptic as it might seem from that last sentence, since the most likely result for the present is that the austerity policy will be pulled back, even if only by social democrats. Growth will be low, poverty increasing and discontent rising. Ultimately there will be a denouement, but when is not yet clear.

Expropriating the expropriated (1983-2009), or, Why It’s the Top 20 not Top 1% That Matter

Recently, the Economic Policy Institute published “11 Telling Charts from 2011,” including the following one showing the share that different segments of the US Population took of the wealth gain from 1983-2009.

When we first looked at this chart, we started reading from the left and adding the numbers but did a double take by the time we added the Top 1%, Next 4%, Next 5%, and Next 10% – or the top 20%. Add their shares together and you get 101.7%. At first that just didn’t seem right, since our assumption was that when you add up all the shares one would get 100%. Naively, we had assumed that, while radically unequal, the gain in wealth for all quintiles would positive. A piece of folk philosophy in the United States is that the rich can gain huge gobs of money and power, so long as the poorest can also have some piece; and that those who rise do so on their own merits, but not by making the worst off even worse off. That, as it turns out, is also a premise of the most influential theory of justice in contemporary political philosophy, which states that the only permissible inequalities are those that make the worst off better off than they otherwise would be under pure equality.

The past twenty-five years have followed a different path from mainstream, common sense theories of justice. The worst have been made worse off. Meanwhile, the massive gains of the top 20% were only as large as they were because wealth was redistributed from the poor to the rich (with very moderate gains for the top 20-40%). The expropriated were expropriated some more.

These figures are even more important than the income inequality statistics with which everyone is now familiar, because those income statistics alone give the impression that, at the very least, nobody is being made worse off. In addition, wealth is a much better indicator of social and economic power than income, as it shapes individual bargaining power, determines who controls investment, and establishes the distinction between those who are economically secure enough not to have to work, and those who aren’t. Looking at the graph again, a key political point emerges, which we have made before: the problem is not with the 1% alone. The expropriators area larger class than that. After all, the next 4% took just as large a share of the total wealth increase, and overall, the top 20% are doing quite well. To reuse a chart we have used before, the top 20% control 85% of the total wealth in the United States, and if residential wealth were removed (at least, value of primary homes), that would undoubtedly rise much higher.

So the current political obsession with the 1% introduces a very problematic distortion into the actual dynamics of class, and the real distribution of wealth and power, in the current political economy. We are the 99% has a wonderful, quasi-universalist ring, but actually real distinctions under the rug, and implicitly dodges hard conversations about the real class composition of the United States. A real critique would have to reach beyond mere populism.

Interview with Peter Hall

Continuing the series of The Current Moment interviews, today we are publishing an interview with Peter Hall, Krupp Foundation professor of European studies at Harvard University. Peter Hall has published widely in the field of European political economy and comparative politics. His published books can be viewed here. One of his recent papers explores the political origins of the current economic crisis.

 

What are the stories right now that you think people either aren’t paying enough attention to, or about which we have the wrong view?

On this side of the Atlantic, we are mesmerized by the fiscal dimensions of the global economic crisis and not nearly attentive enough to what will be required to ensure the U.S. remains competitive and capable of robust economic growth over the longer term.  Above all, that will require large investments in human capital and public infrastructure, since these are the resources on which all kinds of businesses depend for success.  Despite the efforts of some analysts, such as Michael Spence, and of President Obama himself to argue that, by focusing on these issues, we can address the immediate problem of unemployment and long-term growth together, these issues have not yet become central to public debate.  I wish Americans could see how rapidly China is moving on these fronts and how fruitful such strategies have been in parts of Europe, such as Finland.  We are so obsessed with the short-term, on both economic and electoral fronts, that we are moving far too slowly to lay the basis for renewed growth over the long term.

In Europe, discussion of the Euro crisis is dominated by many myths.  But the one yet to be questioned at all seriously is the myth that deregulating markets in labor and goods so as to intensify competition in them will regenerate growth in the southern European economies.  Such moves are typically described as ‘structural reform’ – a term that has become the mantra of the EU and IMF.  In the long run, structural reform may make some economies more competitive, but to pretend that it will revive economic growth in the short to medium term is an illusion.  Yet this illusion is at the center of most of the plans concocted to revive the southern European economies and resolve the Euro crisis.

For obvious reasons, this is a convenient myth, but it is an empty slogan, all the more pernicious because it diverts attention from the role that government has to play in the revival of economic growth.

Let’s turn to the Eurozone debt problem. The dominant view is that Greeks and Italians are corrupt, inefficient and lazy, and that is why they find themselves in this mess. What is your view of what is going on?

For the most part, this is a canard, encouraged far too quickly by many politicians in northern Europe who reacted to the sovereign debt crisis as if it were an issue of morality rather than a crisis with economic and political foundations that threaten the viability not only of the Euro but of the EU.  Those politicians now realize the full dimensions of the crisis, but their initial reactions has made the task of persuading their electorates to accept measures that might genuinely cope with it much more difficult.

The difficulties from which Greece and Italy are suffering have something to do with problems of political, as well as economic, development.  Both countries would be better off with public institutions less prone to corruption.  But to suggest that that their people are not working hard enough or retiring too early is to misrepresent the problem altogether.  Comparative data suggest that the de facto retirement age is not very different in most of southern Europe than in northern Europe and that the southern European countries have taken just as many steps as those in the north to make their markets more competitive over the past ten years.

The roots of the Euro crisis lie, at a much more basic level, in asymmetries in the organization of the political economies in the north and south of Europe.  In general, as David Soskice and I observed in Varieties of Capitalism (2001), the organization of the political economies of northern Europe gives their firms capacities for wage coordination, skill formation and continuous innovation that suit them well to operate strategies of export-led growth, and EMU provided them with guaranteed markets in the rest of Europe.  By contrast, history has left the southern political economies with fissiparous trade unions and limited capacities for concerted skill formation or continuous innovation.  In the past, they coped with that by operating growth strategies led by domestic demand and then devaluing their currencies to offset the inflationary effects of such strategies on their external competitiveness.  In EMU, they were unable to do that.  Instead, not unreasonably, they took advantage of the cheap credit flowing from northern Europe to promote economic growth.  But, unable to offset the inflationary effects through devaluation, they lost competitive advantage to the north.  The result can be seen in the gross imbalance of payments between the two parts of the Eurozone.

The standard recipe for the recovery from the Eurozone crisis is austerity and structural reforms in the peripheries, plus some recapitalization of banks. Do you think this is the right way to go?

To appreciate the Euro crisis, we have to realize that there are two sides to it.  On the one side, there is the longer term problem of how to devise a structural adjustment path that will restore prosperity to both the south and the north.  On the other side, this is a crisis of confidence, notably in the markets for sovereign debt but spreading over time to the European financial system as a whole.  The European Union has remarkable capacities for muddling through, and, given enough time, I believe it can resolve this long-term problem adequately if not perfectly.  But it is never going to get to the long term if it does not effectively address the immediate crisis of confidence and, as everyone now acknowledges, its efforts to do that over the past year have consistently offered too little, too late.

The immediate crisis is what worries me.  With respect it, there are two issues.  Is there a way for the members of the Eurozone to restore confidence in the markets?  And, if that can be identified, will the member states and the ECB be willing to take the requisite measures.  At this point, I think, as do many others, that the only way to restore confidence in the bond markets is for the ECB to guarantee the sovereign debt of its member states against default, except perhaps for Greece where the markets have already priced in a default.  Various schemes have been mooted whereby the ECB might do this, indirectly if not directly.

The problem is that it will not be easy for the ECB or the member governments to do this.  Mario Draghi and the German government currently oppose such a step.  It is forbidden by Article 123 of the Treaty establishing EMU, and the German Constitutional Court likes to take that Treaty seriously.  The only ray of light here is that the relevant resolution passed by the German CDU at its recent conference does not entirely rule out such a step, describing it as ‘a last resort’.  I think the time for last resorts has come, and I could imagine a deal in which the member governments agree to much stricter enforcement of fiscal targets and long-term support for the ECB in return for a measure of this sort.  However, it is an entirely open question whether the Eurozone governments have the political wherewithal to make this move.  If they do not, I think the crisis of confidence is likely to persist and strengthen until an Italian, Spanish or even Belgian default looms, and then it may be too late to save the Euro.  It takes a confidence trick to resolve a crisis of confidence and the sooner one acts, the less costly the resolution.

What do you think would address the trade and debt imbalances between Northern and Southern Europe? Do you think it can be done within the European monetary order?

This is a question about whether balanced structural adjustment is feasible over the long term within the confines of EMU.  Certainly, the current approach of imposing all the costs of adjustment on southern Europe (of which Ireland can be considered an honorary member) is likely to fail.  Except possibly in Ireland where growth is gradually picking up, there is no reason to expect that rapid enough growth can emerge from such austerity to render the debt load of these countries sustainable.  At a minimum, long-term stability depends on a more coordinated set of fiscal policies in which some reflation in northern Europe is married to a softer adjustment path in southern Europe.  However, this will not be easy to secure.  In particular, as Wendy Carlin and David Soskice have observed, reflation poses risks to the wage coordination on which the northern European economies depend for their competitiveness.

Even then, for reasons I have noted, there is some question about whether the southern European economies can prosper within EMU.  Portugal and Greece, in particular, do not have especially strong export sectors and are not likely to grow them overnight.  These countries have long depended on growth strategies that are accompanied by moderate levels of inflation and, because the ECB has to pursue a monetary policy of one-size for all of Europe, it cannot always dampen down that inflation effectively.  In the wake of the sovereign debt crisis, borrowing costs are likely to remain higher in the south, which will help.  But the danger is that, if the southern European governments cannot pursue growth led by domestic demand for fear of its inflationary consequences, they may experience only low levels of growth for the foreseeable future.  Structural reform will help in the long run but likely only a little.

It may well be that Europe can live with persistent imbalances of payments at some level, but the question is whether more effective coordination of fiscal policies will be enough to allow the southern European economies to grow at rates that are politically acceptable to their electorates.

The hegemony of the demand for austerity is striking. It is offered as the solution to the Eurozone crisis, as well as to the American situation – the US Congress even created a supercommittee to find savings. Yet it seems odd to have such agreement around austerity in the midst of a potential double dip recession. What is wrong with the demand for austerity? How do you account for the strength of this common sense?

The demand for austerity can be explained to some extent by the fact that we have just lived through a period in which financial innovation married to inadequate financial regulation made possible much higher levels of leveraging of assets, leading to higher levels of debt, whether in the public or private sectors of the U.S. and Europe.  To some extent, we are paying today for what we ate yesterday.

The best way to pay back these debts, of course, is from the fruits of more rapid economic growth and that is most likely to be secured, as John Maynard Keynes argued, by reflationary policy. Thus, in the context of global recession immediate austerity does not make good economic sense.

To explain why so many are advocating it, then, we have to recognize that economic policy, whether at the national or international level, is rarely driven entirely by concerns about how to improve overall economic well-being.  It is made by actors, who may be political parties or governments, who are also seeking distributive benefits for their constituents, and, in many cases, these distributive demands are cloaked beneath calls for austerity.  Thus, the demand of several northern European governments, including the Finns and the Dutch as well as the Germans, for austerity in southern Europe is motivated, to a significant extent, by a concern to ensure that they do not pay the costs of adjustment in the wake of the Euro crisis.   I see the demands for austerity of many Republicans in the U.S. as an effort to cut public spending programs that they think serve Democratic rather than Republican constituencies.  If distributive concerns were not at the heart of those demands, those Republicans would be much less reluctant to raise taxes in order to balance the budget.

In the US, there is an influential view that we need to have continued expansionary monetary policy but contractionary fiscal policy. That seems to be the recipe of the moment, with the Fed even contemplating another round of quantitative easing. What do you think of this approach to inadequate demand and balance sheet problems?

As the French would say, I am willing to accept this for lack of something better.  Something better would be a coordinated reflation in which more expansionary fiscal policy was now playing a larger role.  We have arrived at this situation, I think, because central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the ECB, have been willing over the past three years to do what governments have been unwilling or unable to do.  For that, they deserve considerable credit.  One can reasonably ask whether the best way to respond to an era marked by a large expansion in lending is to pump even more money into the system, but, since inflation remains low in most of Europe and North America, partly because the trade unions have been so weakened and unemployment is high, this seems to be an appropriate strategy.  In the absence of a substantial fiscal stimulus to aggregate demand, however, it is unlikely to lower unemployment much.

Debt, especially mortgages and student loans, have become a major issue over the past few years. What if anything do you think should be done about it? How should we understand the growing debt of American households in the past decades?

As Ragurham Rajan and others have pointed out, in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s, easy consumer credit and home equity loans became a substitute for social policy.  They have been the means ordinary people with little in the way of savings used to survive adverse life events and fluctuations in the economy.  Student loans can be seen, in similar terms, as a substitute for publicly-funded education.

They can also be seen as a key component of the growth model operated in the United States over that period.  Growth in this country was led by domestic demand and the only way to sustain demand in an era when disposable income for households at or below median incomes stagnated was to promote the kind of asset boom in housing that gave many the illusion that their wealth was increasing even if their income was stagnant.

In the past two years, as home prices declined and some forms of credit became harder to secure, American households increased their savings and that, in itself, is gradually reducing the debt burden of the private sector. I do not see any need to take steps to further reduce that debt.  Indeed, it is difficult to see how the American economy can continue to grow without the availability of such credit.

However, there are serious longer-term problems on the horizon.  More than half the American populace has no savings for retirement at a time when larger cohorts can be expected to retire and health-care costs continue to rise exponentially, eating into the disposable income of many families.  Part of the problem is that most of the fruits of economic growth over the past three decades have gone to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.  In the long run, the solution will have to entail engineering a more equitable distribution of wealth so that ordinary working families have the means to increase both their savings and their spending.

One thing that seems to tie the American and European situation together is the considerable growth of financial activity. Is there anything to the view that the last decades can be understood as a period of financialization? If so, what does it mean to say the economy has become financialized?

Seen from a long-term perspective, this does indeed look like an era of financialization.  The share of profits in the economy going to the financial sector expanded dramatically.  With the invention of new financial derivatives and the development of financial markets, many firms ostensibly devoted to manufacturing, such as General Motors, have made an increasing share of their profits from financial activities that leverage their capital.  That has contributed, in turn, to rising income inequality at the high end of the distribution, as those skilled at financial engineering generated profits large enough to allow them to demand astronomical levels of compensation.

In my view, it would be an exaggeration to say that the economy has become ‘financialized’.  There are still many productive components of the American economy that do not turn on finance.  However, it is apparent that we are all vulnerable to the systemic risks that a large financial sector, increasingly devoted to speculation, entails, and that is a serious cause for concern.  Although some of the financial innovation of recent decades has made some markets more liquid and borrowing easier for some productive firms, I doubt that this type of ‘casino capitalism’, to borrow a phrase from Susan Strange, ultimately contributes enough to economic prosperity to justify those risks.  We are currently paying serious costs for this and, unless financial regulation becomes more stringent than is currently anticipated, I think there will be more to pay.

Related to that question, what do you think accounts for the ‘bubbliness’ of the US and European economies, and especially the scale of these bubbles? We have seen a number of different bubbles and credit crises – housing bubbles in the US, UK, Ireland, and Spain; sovereign debt events in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, perhaps even France. While there was the dot come bubble in the late 90s, and the East Asian financial crisis, those don’t seem to have had the magnitude and systemic character as the latest period. What is, or isn’t, different about what we’re experiencing now?

I do not believe that any single set of factors can explain these diverse developments.  The housing bubbles can be explained, at least in basic terms, by a long period of easy credit, made possible, as I have noted by the expansion of the financial markets in various kinds of derivatives.  That was made possible, in turn, by what I consider lax financial regulation.  It is ironic that economists liked to describe this period as an era of ‘great moderation’.  In each case, however, some ancillary factors were at work.  In Spain, the cost of borrowing was greatly reduced by the confidence effect associated with entry into EMU.  In Ireland, it was encouraged by rapid rates of economic growth.

The sovereign debt crisis has more complex roots.  In Greece, which enjoyed the same easy access to credit as Spain, the fiscal fecklessness of the government is notable.  In Ireland, some of the problems can be attributed to the government’s mistaken decision to guarantee the bonds of its banks.  In different ways, Portugal, Spain and Italy remained creditworthy on the fundamentals but fell afoul of the spreading crisis of confidence in the markets, which has yet to take its last victims.  There are some parallels with the East Asian financial crisis.  The current crisis is worse partly because it has struck the major financial sectors of the western world and we now face the question of who will rescue those who normally do the rescuing.

How optimistic/pessimistic are you about the ability of national democratic procedures to provide solutions to the current economic crises in Europe and in the US? What do you think of the recent proliferation of technocratic governments in Greece and Italy? Does the current crisis expose some basic tensions between capitalism and democracy? If so, how exactly?

In this as in every other case, as Winston Churchill once said ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.  The notion that governments led by geriatric Eurocrats will resolve their countries economic problems more readily than elected governments is another of those illusions that bedevil the Eurozone.  They have legitimacy in Brussels but imposing austerity is ultimately a task that demands domestic political legitimacy.  I see this as a stop-gap solution that might, at best, persuade officials in Brussels and Berlin that everything has been tried and they must pay more heed to the pain and demands of national electorates.

It is obvious that the cumbersome decision-making procedures of the European Union are not up to the task of heading off a crisis in the financial markets.  But that is not a problem with democracy.  It is a problem of international negotiation.  Democracy enters the picture to the extent that the views of national electorates limit the willingness of their governments to share the costs of adjustment, and that is admittedly a problem for Europe.  A continent so proud of the ways in which its social policies reflect ‘social solidarity’ has been unable to summon up the sense of continental solidarity that would justify a more equitable and efficient solution to the crisis.  But social solidarity does not simply bubble up from below.  It is created by inventive political leadership and we are still waiting to see if the political leaders of Europe are capable of that.

On the larger question, my view is that the global financial crisis has thrown into stark relief the importance of the state in any democratic system.  The crisis itself is rooted in failures of financial regulation that can be linked to the unwillingness of governments to assert the authority of the state on behalf of the people against powerful financial interests.  And the inadequacy of the response to the crisis, especially in the U.S., can be attributed, in some measure, to the widespread reluctance on the part of many people to trust the state with their resources.  In many respects, that is the legacy of the neo-liberal era that followed the economic crisis of the 1970s, when many policy-makers and citizens became disillusioned with the capacity of governments to direct the economy.  Hence, the American government faces the current crisis hobbled by rising levels of distrust in government.  It is not acting more forcefully on the fiscal front partly because large segments of the American population are willing to vote for politicians who claim that government is the problem rather than the solution.

What are your views of the nascent protests (Occupy Wall Street, Indignados) developing in response to the introduction of austerity packages in Europe and the US? Are these movements a continuation of or a break with the anti-globalization movements of the past? Are they likely to fundamentally change public perceptions and government policy or will they have only a very small lasting impact?

There have been two notable political responses to the current economic crisis.  One is marked by a backlash against immigration, in both the U.S. and Europe, reflected in the growing popularity of radical right parties in Europe and the salience of immigration to national political debates in the United States.  This is a familiar feature of economic crises.  The U.S. has a long history of nativist movements.  The other is reflected in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its European analogues.  I can only hope that the former is contained and the latter encouraged.

It is difficult to see how these sporadic protests can be translated into any immediate changes in policy, not least because they have yet to articulate clear political demands.  However, I think they are having an impact.  They have struck a chord in popular opinion.  They bring issues of unemployment and inequality to the fore.  In the short term, I think that may influence voters in American elections next year, and, over the medium term, I believe that even these limited protests will help to shift political discourse in directions that favor those seeking to address issues of inequality and unemployment.

Interview with Arthur Goldhammer

As part of our ongoing series of interviews, we have today responses from Arthur Goldhammer. Art runs the excellent French politics blog, is on the editorial board of French Society, Politics, and Culture, and chairs the Visiting Scholars series at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. He is a writer and translator of more than 120 books from French to English, including a translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He has written and commented on both the US and European dimensions of the recent financial crisis, and we have asked him to elaborate his views.

What are the stories right now that you think people either aren’t paying enough attention to, or about which we have the wrong view?

I think we need to pay more attention to how the expansion of lending was financed by what Hyun Song Shin, Joe Danielsson, and Jean-Pierre Zigrand call “passive investors,” namely, household savers, value-oriented money market funds and pension funds (see here). Ben Bernanke called attention to a “global savings glut” due to the US-China trade imbalance, but Shin points out that the Chinese by and large did not buy risky mortgage-backed securities. Instead, he notes the existence of a “global banking glut,” as passive investors provided cheap financing that allowed European banks to expand their lending dramatically during the early 2000s. It was this intermediation of US funds through global European banks that fueled both the US mortgage bubble and the various bubbles that occurred in Europe.

Let’s turn to the Eurozone debt problem. The dominant view is that Greeks and Italians are corrupt, inefficient and lazy, and that is why they find themselves in this mess. What is your view of what is going on?

Low productivity and laziness are not the same thing. Greek workers in fact put in more hours per year than German workers, but they do not produce as much per hour of work because the German and Greek economies are radically different in structure. Given the low cost of government borrowing before 2009, however, the Greek government increased its purchases over many years, which drove up unit labor costs relative to Germany while putting money into the pockets of workers, encouraging them to buy imported goods. In other southern-tier countries, the details of the picture vary but the overall pattern is the same: wage-inflation in the south combined with wage-stability in Germany, where unions and management cooperated to foster export-led growth. Inevitably, this structural disparity reached its limit. To be sure, deficiencies in Greek and Italian governance contributed to the crisis, but they are not its root cause.

The standard recipe for the recovery from the Eurozone crisis is austerity and structural reforms in the peripheries, plus some recapitalization of banks. Do you think this is the right way to go?

“Structural reform” can mean many things. Too often it is simply a euphemism for “scale back the welfare state” and “make it easier to fire unwanted workers.” Clearly, a more far-sighted structural reform, oriented toward education, job training, and productivity-enhancing investment is needed to put Europe on a more balanced growth path. In the short run, austerity is harmful because it will reduce aggregate demand. The theory of expansionary contraction is wrong: business confidence will be undermined, not increased, by simultaneous fiscal retrenchment across the Eurozone.

What do you think would address the trade and debt imbalances between Northern and Southern Europe? Do you think it can be done within the European monetary order?

Germans need to consume more, save less, and agree to a fiscal union that will allow for transfers of wealth to poorer regions. Politically, however, the latter will not be easy to achieve, since Germans were assured when the euro was created that they would never be part of a “transfer union.” The German Constitutional Court might even veto any such proposal. This could doom the Eurozone. But German gains from the euro have been so substantial, and the costs of a collapse of the Eurozone would be so great, that it is possible to envision evolution on this point. I am not sure that it can come fast enough, however, to save the system, especially if the European Central Bank refuses to purchase sovereign debt on the primary market to keep Italian borrowing costs within reason.

The hegemony of the demand for austerity is striking. It is offered as the solution to the Eurozone crisis, as well as to the American situation – the US Congress even created a supercommittee to find savings. Yet it seems odd to have such agreement around austerity in the midst of a potential double dip recession. What is wrong with the demand for austerity? How do you account for the strength of this common sense?

It is not easy for people to think in terms of a general economic equilibrium. Politicians often fall back on homely household analogies: “a family cannot indefinitely spend more than it earns,” etc. Other simple homilies abound: “Debt got us into this mess, we cannot get out by piling on more debt.” The paradox of thrift is difficult to grasp. It is hard, moreover, for many people to place confidence in “the Keynesian solution,” because there is so much controversy over what it means. Keynesianism was only dimly understood during the Great Depression, and the immense deficits incurred in World War II were not taken on in virtue of an intellectual conversion to Keynesian ways of thinking. The so-called Keynesian demand management that took hold in the 60s is really a separate body of doctrine from Keynesian teachings about the liquidity trap, and demand management policies were discredited by the stagflation of the 70s. The economics profession itself is so far from consensus about Keynesianism in either normal times or liquidity traps that it would take a leap of faith for the average informed voter to countenance the vast deficit spending that some theorists say is necessary to restore growth. So things will have to get worse before practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are willing to put themselves deliberately into the hands of some defunct economist.

In the US, there is an influential view that we need to have continued expansionary monetary policy but contractionary fiscal policy. That seems to be the recipe of the moment, with the Fed even contemplating another round of quantitative easing. What do you think of this approach to inadequate demand and balance sheet problems?

I think that quantitative easing is helpful but that its operation is too slow and will eventually have to be supplemented by a more expansionary fiscal policy. The latter must be accommodated by monetary policy, but monetary policy alone cannot do the trick. Without growth, the Eurozone debt crisis will worsen, and “quantitative easing,” which has already occurred there, will have to take the form of monetization of the debt, which the ECB has thus far staunchly resisted. But the gallows will concentrate the minds of central bankers, unless political chaos erupts first.

Debt, especially mortgages and student loans, have become a major issue over the past few years. What if anything do you think should be done about it? How should we understand the growing debt of American households in the past decades?

I think the housing market will correct itself but the damage to millions of lives could be limited if the government were to take a more aggressive line on mortgage modification. Student debt is another matter because expectations about the returns from education change very slowly. Too much hope is being invested in education, and inevitably many students will emerge with more debt than their future incomes can justify, imposing a durable drag on the economy. Law schools may have over-expanded, for instance, turning out more lawyers than the economy can remunerate at the levels students expected when their students took on heavy tuition burdens. On the other hand, the high cost of medical care might be alleviated if our medical schools produced more doctors, increasing competition and thus reducing fees for service, but unless there is a corresponding decrease in the cost of medical school, the burden will be borne by the students. But an over-indebted graduate is not like an underwater homeowner. The graduate’s freedom will be inhibited if she can’t service her debt, but the only appropriate bailout is sweeping social change.

One thing that seems to tie the American and European situation together is the considerable growth of financial activity. Is there anything to the view that the last decades can be understood as a period of financialization? If so, what does it mean to say the economy has become financialized?

There is no doubt that finance-related activities have accounted for a growing share of GDP and that much of this activity has been unproductive. But how much? It’s hard to know, because efficient economic growth does require intermediation between passive investors and active entrepreneurs. We have also learned that regulation of finance is not always helpful because it provides incentives for capital to seek unregulated niches in which to operate less transparently. For instance, the Basel II banking regulations appear to have contributed to the growth of the “shadow banking system” implicated in the mortgage financing debacle. Governments have nationalized banking systems in the past without always achieving more transparent or efficient financing. Nevertheless, I think increased public oversight of leveraged institutions is inevitable. And I’m not sure that there is any justification at all for hedge funds and other leveraged private equity firms operating largely outside the regulatory structure that applies to banks. Given the over-representation of financial operatives in the very highest income brackets, increased marginal tax rates on top earners, recently recommended in this paper by Peter Diamond and Emanuel Saez, might, if not curtail financial activity, at least yield revenues that could be put to alleviating the damage.

Related to that question, what do you think accounts for the ‘bubbliness’ of the US and European economies, and especially the scale of these bubbles? We have seen a number of different bubbles and credit crises – housing bubbles in the US, UK, Ireland, and Spain; sovereign debt events in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, perhaps even France. While there was the dot come bubble in the late 90s, and the East Asian financial crisis, those don’t seem to have had the magnitude and systemic character as the latest period. What is, or isn’t, different about what we’re experiencing now?

I think that the scale of the bubbles is related to the “banking glut” discussed above. There also seems to be a “herd mentality” at work in investment banking circles, perhaps owing to the way in which bankers are recruited, trained, and rewarded. But I don’t know enough about these matters to offer specific recommendations.

How optimistic/pessimistic are you about the ability of national democratic procedures to provide solutions to the current economic crises in Europe and in the US? What do you think of the recent proliferation of technocratic governments in Greece and Italy? Does the current crisis expose some basic tensions between capitalism and democracy? If so, how exactly?

I do not believe that so-called technocratic governments will survive for very long. The question of capitalism and democracy is larger than I want to take up here. To be sure, the crisis has exposed the power of financial institutions to insist on their due and to exert pressure on democratic institutions. But the money that has been lent includes the savings of millions of ordinary citizens, whose interests deserve protection as much as, if not more than, the interests of the borrowers, who after all have benefited from the use of the loaned funds over a long period of time. Our normal democratic procedures, which are intended to reconcile large-scale conflicts of interest of this sort, do not function well in an international context in which complicated technical issues are involved. We must not, however, throw up our hands in despair, lest the comprehensible rage of those whose trust has been abused give rise to some regrettable reaction.

What are your views of the nascent protests (Occupy Wall Street, Indignados) developing in response to the introduction of austerity packages in Europe and the US? Are these movements a continuation of or a break with the anti-globalization movements of the past? Are they likely to fundamentally change public perceptions and government policy or will they have only a very small lasting impact?

I think the protest movements have called attention to growing inequality, which excessive borrowing had in part masked. I believe that the movements are new and to a large extent independent of anti-globalization actions. They reflect a desire for increased voice, especially for the young, in democratic polities that had become overly focused on freeing markets, reducing taxes and preserving benefits for the old. If the movements are to have lasting impact, however, they need to influence the electoral process, and I am not sure that they have the numbers, leadership, or organizational skills to do so. Finally, the most recent protests are only one among many signs of a more general crisis of legitimacy throughout the democratic world. Elites have claimed too large a share of productivity gains and too great a monopoly of life opportunities for their children. Without reform, the center cannot hold. Even with reform it may be too late.

What, finally, do you think the appropriate political response is to both these crises and their aftermath?

Although there will inevitably be political responses of many kinds, what is really needed, I think, is an intellectual response to guide the politics: there is clearly something wrong with our understanding of economics, especially in the areas of monetary systems and macroeconomic stabilization. Until we achieve new clarity in these areas, politicians will flail at problems whose origins they do not fully grasp, and people will demand solutions that are incoherent and therefore potentially destructive. We must be wary of our own certitudes. As we saw in the Great Depression, statesman convinced of the virtues of the gold standard acted in ways they believed were right but that we know were wrong. We are similarly in the dark and should therefore proceed tentatively, experimentally, until we are confident that we are moving toward the exit. In the meantime, income must be redistributed downward and elites must loosen their stranglehold on upward mobility through education.

Regulation, Discretion, Democracy

Congress refuses to spend anymore but never fear, the Fed is contemplating a new round of quantitative easing and Obama is extending an (admittedly weak) administrative program to reduce housing debt. In a broad sense, what we are seeing is a familiar feature of crises – real or manufactured: the expansion of discretionary, especially executive, power. After all, who controls the deeply undemocratic Fed? A Fed able to undertake an entirely independent economic policy from actual apparatus of government. And while Obama has been reluctant to use executive power to put the squeeze on banks, improve financial regulation, and prosecute fraud, he too seems able to do a bit of an end-run around the slower, conflict-ridden legislative politics.

But more is at stake here than just a question of the relations between branches of government, or of the relations between elected officials and barely accountable bodies like the Fed. A second issue is the relationship between the daily practice of governing and democratic representation. Call this the representation game and the first one the discretionary power game. The first game tends to boil down to trying to limit and reduce the kinds of unchecked or arbitrary power exercised in the name of managing a crisis. That is an important project in a democracy, but it’s not the only one.

After all, modern states are currently saddled with an enormous administrative apparatus that cover a wide range of issues. The size and complexity of the modern economy, and the speed with which events take place unavoidably lead to the creation of administrative bodies like the SEC, FDIC, Treasury, and so on. To be sure, the specific bodies created, their formal authority, their composition, their mandate, are all a question of politics, not necessity. But it remains the case that governing in any particular area requires some kind of body that engages in the day-to-day activities of ruling, and this is almost never an activity of elected representatives themselves.

Again, representatives could be a lot better about congressional or parliamentary oversight, and about carefully crafting mandates rather than producing vaguely defined agencies with expansive regulatory powers. But to a degree, discretion will be built into the administrative apparatus. It cannot be eliminated.

This changes the democratic game, and shows us why movements like Occupy are important. The mainstream view is that the central democratic task is to elect representatives who will serve the public interest, or at least be responsive to the majority. And that democratic power is exercised by holding these representatives accountable for their actions. The anti-mainstream view, sometimes found in the Occupy movement, is that real democracy rejects representation and majority rule; instead, it is about direct participation and consensus. This debate misses a vital dimension of democratic self-government that goes directly to the management of the economy, and to questions of whose interests are served by the actual exercise of state power.

The missed dimension is how the actual governing apparatus – the regulatory bodies, the administrative agencies, the courts, the consultative groups, and other myriad authorities – uses its power, especially its discretionary power. Will it prosecute systemic fraud, use every measure it can to force banks to modify underwater mortgages, police banking practices, issue advisory and mandatory rules spreading risk fairly? Or will it try to force attorneys-general into weak settlements with banks and shovel fraud under the rug? As we have written before, the nature of a settlement on mortgage fraud is very important not just as a matter of immediate justice, but also of managing risk and future regulation. To a degree these regulatory outcomes depend on calculations about what will eventually happen at the ballot box – and thus on the familiar question of formal accountability. But even those electoral calculations depend on the current ability to mount pressure on the government. Those forms of pressure feed into predictions about what will happen electorally. And that latter power is a matter of social mobilization.

Moreover, the day-to-day contest over governing is also a matter of knowledge and ideas – specifically the knowledge and ideas that are in play, among the chattering classes, out in the public, and within the halls of power. Here again, social protest is part of transforming the kinds of ideas and the pieces of knowledge to which the state must respond. We have already seen the ability of the Occupiers to change national and international conversations. The power that movements like Occupy wield is always more nebulous because it has no formal, legal backing – it is not like a vote. But it is no less important for attempting to influence the ineliminably discretionary power exercised by administrative agencies. Constant social pressure and attention is probably the main way of securing a (more) democratic form of representation by these bodies, who are otherwise so easily influenced by powerful, wealthy interests.

To be sure, there are limits to this democratization of administration. At least from a democratic standpoint, it would be better if the Fed, or whatever lender of last resort there is, were more directly under public control. And there are agencies that it would be better to get rid of or slim down. Indeed, the dizzying array of agencies, and the simultaneous contraction of fiscal stimulus at the local, state and now federal level, alongside the expansion of (deeply regressive) monetary stimulus makes it difficult even to get clear on lines of responsibility and causal effects. But the apparatus of day-to-day self-government, especially when it comes to economic policy, will necessarily be administrative as well as legislative. Oversight, regulation, even just administration of the rule of law, are all exercised mainly by non-elected officials. Shaping the exercise of that power – so easily captured by those better able, and better financed, to operate in the halls of power – is one of the singular tasks of a social movement. Unresponsive representatives are not the only political agents that need whipping into line in a modern republic.