Skip to main content

The Global Economy and Financial Markets 10 Years After the Global Financial Crisis

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
20 Years of G20
  • 636 Accesses

Abstract

The paper gives a synoptic view of the evolution of macroeconomic policies from the time of the Great Depression and the current thinking in stabilizing business cycles and financial markets, and makes an overview of the policy response to the recent Global Financial Crisis. It analyses the adjustments made in the global economy in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, as also the adjustments in financial markets. The concluding section discusses the current prospects of the global economy, and the risks that possibly lie ahead.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Olivier Blanchard, chief economist of the IMF, and Lawrence Summers, president of Barrack Obama’s National Economic Council, when the financial crisis broke, are in “no doubt that, absent the strong monetary and fiscal policy responses we have observed, the financial crisis would have led to an outcome as bad or worse than the Great Depression”. See Blanchard and Summers (2017).

  2. 2.

    The most articulate proponent of this view was of course Friedman (1963) according to whom “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

  3. 3.

    The Taylor Rule formula interest rate =  0.5 (current GDP − potential GDP) + 0.5 (Actual consumer price inflation − target core consumer price inflation) + 2. The constant, 2, in the equation is the neutral policy rate, i.e., the policy rate when both inflation and growth are on target.

  4. 4.

    This decline has been attributed to technological change, productivity improvements, globalization and ageing. See Sanchez and Kim (2018).

  5. 5.

    Bernanke (2003) was critical of Japanese QE because according to him it was not aggressive enough.

  6. 6.

    Kuttner and Posen (2002) have argued that despite the sharp increase in nominal deficits, when the revenue shock is factored in, Japanese fiscal policy was actually contractionary in the nineties.

  7. 7.

    The fourth instrument was the ‘forward guidance’ on Fed policy that affected market participants’ behavior. See Bernanke et al. (2004).

  8. 8.

    The Feds Fund Rate (FFR) is the rate at which depositary institutions trade balances they hold at the Federal Reserve, and is set by the Federal Reserve. (LIBOR type benchmarks, on the other hand, are rates at which banks borrow from each other in the interbank market, and are market determined). The discount rate is the liquidity window at which depositary institutions can borrow from the Federal Reserve as a ‘last resort’, and is therefore usually set at a small spread above the FFR. The reserves held by depositary institutions with the Federal Reserve were interest free till the global financial crisis. It was constrained to pay interest on them in view of their growing size, as risk averse banks preferred to park their funds with the Federal Reserve as a result of risk aversion (Chart 9a). Large, sudden withdrawals can put downward pressure on the benchmark FFR.

  9. 9.

    Data on cyclical fiscal balances is from IMF’s Fiscal Monitor database. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/FM.

  10. 10.

    Even the IMF lent its weight to the decoupling hypothesis (Akin and Kose 2007; The Economist 2008).

  11. 11.

    In his Nobel Prize lecture delivered over three decades ago the economist Lewis (1979) observed that economic growth in developing countries was dependent on economic prospects in OECD countries that accounted for the major share of global demand.

  12. 12.

    The experience with fiscal policy during both the Japanese financial crisis of the nineties, and the more recent Global Financial Crisis has reopened the debate on the effectiveness of fiscal policy, and fiscal multipliers, in a liquidity trap. The role of fiscal policy in the recovery from the Great Depression before the “second dip” remains contentious. Till recently, following Milton Friedman, the focus was more on monetary policy driving the recovery. See Brown (1956). Romer (1993) concluded that it was mainly monetary policy that drove the recovery. Eggertson (2005, 2010) and have underscored the role played by fiscal policy in the recovery. See also De Long and Summers (2012). More recently Romer (2011) has argued that but for the fiscal stimulus the fall in consumption during the Global Financial Crisis would have been higher.

  13. 13.

    The G20 resolve was mindful of the disastrous snowballing impact of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs that aggravated the Great Depression in the 1930s (Sheel 2014, pp. 270–71).

  14. 14.

    Although Chinese TFP has also fallen in tandem with that of the US (Chart 5), Conference Board (2018) data shows that there are other developing Asian economies, particularly India, which are becoming more competitive through robust productivity growth.

  15. 15.

    The US and Euro area data is from the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank. The Japanese and Chinese data is from the FSB.

  16. 16.

    Mortgage based securities are issued by pooling mortgage receivables, while asset backed securities are issued by pooling of receivables from non-mortgage assets, such as credit cards, student loans, auto loans and home equity loans.

  17. 17.

    According to the Financial Stability Board (2017), those “ aspects of shadow banking considered to have contributed to the global financial crisis have declined significantly and generally no longer pose financial stability risks”.

  18. 18.

    While US Mortgage Related Securities have not shrunk since the crisis, in 2006 and 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis, almost two thirds of mortgage related securities outstanding were issued by private companies. This declined sharply in the wake of the financial crisis, and in 2018 about 85% of all such instruments were guaranteed by Government Sponsored Enterprises, namely Freddie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae (SIFMA op. cit).

  19. 19.

    Assets of ‘other financial intermediaries’, the FSB’s broad measure of shadow banking.

  20. 20.

    This corresponds to FSB’s Monitoring Universe of Non-Financial Institutions, or MUNFI (Bank of International Settlements 2018).

  21. 21.

    Or Economic Function 1, one of the five narrow measures of shadow banking of the Financial Stability Board. This narrow measure aggregated 13% of global financial assets globally at the end of 2016. Of this over 70% constituted collective investment vehicles such as Money Mutual Funds, real estate funds, credit hedge funds, mixed funds etc. that are susceptible to runs. Financial Stability Board (2019).

  22. 22.

    The central bank balance sheet data is from the data publicly available on the Federal Reserve and ECB websites. The fiscal numbers are from IMF’s Fiscal Monitor (2009).

  23. 23.

    For a detailed assessment of financial regulatory reform after the Global Financial Crisis (see Sheel and Ganguly (2016)). For an update on the current status of implementation of these reforms see Financial Stability Board (2018b).

  24. 24.

    Some of the left corrections, such as higher taxes on extreme incomes and wealth and universal basic incomes that involve rewriting social contracts could possibly have been attempted during the boom. These are now much more difficult with stalling growth, absence of animal spirits, and bloated central bank and Treasury balance sheets.

  25. 25.

    “Certainly prices of goods and services now being produced--our basic measure of inflation--matter. But what about futures prices or more importantly prices of claims on future goods and services, like equities, real estate, or other earning (financial) assets? Are stability of these prices essential to the stability of the economy? Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? And how do we factor that assessment into monetary policy? We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability” (The Federal Reserve Board 1996).

  26. 26.

    Financial cycles are driven by both equity and debt. The period in the run up to the Global Financial Crisis witnessed a financial super cycle in Advanced Economies because it was driven by a boom in both asset prices and leverage, whereas in the post crisis period the financial cycle is basically driven by only a boom in equity prices.

  27. 27.

    There are however at least three notable omissions in the post crisis regulatory rejig of the financial system. First, while the new leverage ratio under Basel III puts some roadblocks in the way of runaway leverage, the tax structure continues to favour debt over equity. Second, banks have been left with the option of determining their own risk weights, leaving them free to game their capital requirements. Third, while some steps have been taken to insulate MMFs from runs, the ‘mark to market’ model that according to Bair (2010), former chairperson of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, biases markets towards underestimating capital requirements during boom times, and can lead to fire sales during panics, has been left untouched (see also Forbes 2010).

  28. 28.

    In a recent article in Financial Times, Rachman (2019), chief Foreign Affairs commentator, sees the globalized world yielding to a two bloc world dominated by the US and China.

  29. 29.

    Cross country evidence indicates a fairly strong negative correlation between non-performing loans and economic growth (Balgova et al. 2016).

  30. 30.

    It was at a G-10 meeting in Rome in 1971 that the US Treasury Secretary John Connally made what was then considered an astonishing statement to his counterparts “the dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.”

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alok Sheel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Sheel, A. (2019). The Global Economy and Financial Markets 10 Years After the Global Financial Crisis. In: Kathuria, R., Kukreja, P. (eds) 20 Years of G20. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8106-5_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics