Abstract
In 2009 the President of the UN General Assembly organised an ambitious conference to deal with the effects of the global financial crisis on developing countries. The draft document for the conference called for a coordinated $3 trillion ‘Global Stimulus for Restructuring and Survival’, intended to ‘help address the strains posed by economic downturn on the poor’ and ‘lay the basis for a new economy based on human needs, human rights and human security’.1 This bold idea did not survive the final vote. The world’s collective governments shied away from the notion of a global stimulus in the adopted resolution, which meekly concluded that ‘each country has primary responsibility for its own economic and social development’.2 The commandingly titled ‘Global Plan for Recovery and Relief’ adopted by the G-20 in April 2009 was similarly noncommittal about the allocation of responsibility for the costs borne by developing countries. The G-20 is willing to help, of course, but only because ‘emerging markets and developing countries… are also now facing challenges which are adding to the current downturn in the global economy’.3
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Notes
President of the General Assembly, ‘Draft Outcome Document for the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development’, 8 May 2009, pp. 5–6, http://www.un.org/ga/president/63/interactive/financialcrisis/outcomedoc80509.pdf, date accessed 6 October 2010.
United Nations General Assembly, Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly, ‘Outcome of the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development’, A/RES/63/303, 13 July 2009, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/63/303&Lang=E, para. 10 (date accessed 6 October 2010).
Jackie Calmes, ‘Republican Backpedals from Apology to BP’, New York Times, 17 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/politics/18barton. html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
World Bank, ‘Swimming Against the Tide: How Developing Countries are Coping with the Global Crisis’, March 2009, http://go.worldbank.org/ O9I08DS5B0, date accessed 6 October 2010.
International Monetary Fund, ‘Global Economic Prospects and Policy Challenges’, briefing prepared for the Meeting of Group of 20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, Busan, Korea, 4–5 June 2010, http://www.imf.org/external/np/g20/pdf/060410.pdf, date accessed 6 October 2010. The IMF uses the language of ‘contagion’ repeatedly.
Lara Marlowe, ‘Sarkozy Calls for Capitalism with a Dose of Morality’, Irish Times, 26 September 2008, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2008/0 926/1222374595726.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Diane Francis, ‘World Is Titanic without Paddle — Lula’, National Post, 15 April 2009, http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2009/04/15/world-is-titanic-without-paddle-lula.aspx, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Amongmany others, see Paul Thomasch, ‘Zelnick: Welcome to the Emergency Room’, Reuters, 4 December 2008, blogs.reuters.com/summits/2008/12/04/zelnick-welcome-to-the-emergency-room, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Emma Simon, ‘Financial Crisis: Is It Time to Invest?’, Daily Telegraph (London), 19 September 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/2992018/Financial-crisis-is-it-time-to-invest.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
World Bank, Global Development Finance: Charting a Global Recovery: I: Review, Analysis and Outlook, Washington DC: World Bank, 2009, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTGDF2009/Resources/gdf_combined_ web.pdf, p. xi (date accessed 6 October 2010).
World Bank, Global Economic Prospects 2010, Washington DC: World Bank, 2010, Table 1.1. India grew 9.1 per cent in 2007, 6.1 per cent in 2008 and 6.0 per cent in 2009; China’s figures were 13.0 per cent, 9.0 per cent and 8.4 per cent, respectively.
Dirk Willem te Velde, ‘The Global Financial Crisis and Developing Countries: Synthesis of the Findings of 10 Country Case Studies’, Overseas Development Institute Working Paper 306, London, June 2009, p. 1.
International Labour Organization, Global Employment Trends: May 2009 Update, Geneva: International Labour Office, 2009, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_106504.pdf, Table B2, p. 27 (date accessed 6 October 2010).
Chi-Chu Tschang, ‘A Tough Year for China’s Migrant Workers’, BusinessWeek, 4 February 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2009/gb2009024_357998.htm, date accessed 6 October 2010.
UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010, Paris: UNESCO, 2010, p. 3.
Thomas Palley, ‘Sovereign Debt Restructuring Proposals: A Comparative Look’ (2003) Ethics & International Affairs, 17/2, 26–33.
World Bank, World Development Report 2010, Washington DC: World Bank, 2010, Table 5.
Assuming that we could effectively distribute the resources. Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric, Cambridge: Polity, 2010, p. 70.
Kunibert Raffer, ‘Risks of Lending and Liability of Lenders’ (2006) Ethics & International Affairs, 21, 1, 85–106, p. 93.
Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ (1973) Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1, 3, 229_43, p. 231.
Ibid. See also Peter Singer, The Live You Can Save, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009, arguing that the money spent on luxuries can and should be donated to aid agencies saving children’s lives.
Christian Barry and Gerhard 0verland, ‘Responding to Global Poverty’ (2009) Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 6, 2, 239–47, pp. 239–40.
See, e.g., David Schmidtz, ‘Islands in a Sea of Obligation’ (2000) Law and Philosophy, 19, 683–705.
Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’ (2005) Philosophy & Public Affairs, 33, 2, 113–47, p. 118.
Similar claims are made by others who criticise more demanding principles such as the SAP. See, e.g., Richard Miller, Globalizing Justice, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, Oxford University Press, 2004.
These are the latest available figures. Malnutrition (2009): Food and Agriculture Organization, ‘1.02 Billion People Hungry’, news release, 19 June 2009, http://www.fao.org/news/story/0/item/20568/icode/en, date accessed 6 October 2010. Water and Sanitation (2008): World Health Organization and UNICEF, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2010 Update, Geneva: WHO, 2010, http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/9789241563956/en/index.html, pp. 6–7 (date accessed 6 October 2010). Electricity (2008): International Energy Agency, ‘World Energy Outlook: Access to Energy’, 2010, http://www.iea.org/weo/electricity.asp, date accessed 6 October 2010. Thomas Pogge relays this data on poverty in Politics as Usual; Matt Peterson compiled the data for that book.
World Bank, World Development Indicators Online, 2010, http://data.world-bank.org/data-catalog, date accessed 6 October 2010.
James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks and Edward N. Wolff, ‘The World Distribution of Household Wealth’, UNU-WNU Discussion Paper No. 2008/03, Helsinki, Finland, February 2008, http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/discussion-papers/2008/en_GB/dp2008-03, p. 7 (date accessed 6 October 2010).
United Nations, ‘Millennium Development Goals Indicators’, 23 June 2010, http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx, date accessed 6 October 2010.
For discussion, see Richard W. Wright, ‘The Grounds and Extent of Legal Responsibility’, (2003) San Diego Law Review, 41, 1425–531.
These notions are well described in Arthur Ripstein, Equality, Responsibility, and the Law, Cambridge University Press, 1999, on which the present discussion draws.
Shahan Mufti, ‘Cash-Strapped Pakistan Finds Few Friends in Time of Economic Need’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 October 2008, http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1023/p04s01-wosc.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
David Stern, ‘Economic Crisis Sweeps Eastern Ukraine’, 8 April 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08ukraine.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Orla Ryan, ‘Latvia’s Dramatic Fall from Grace’, BBC News, 8 June 2009, http://news.bbc.co.Uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8085007.stm, date accessed 6 October 2010.
For an illuminating discussion by a policy-maker about why so few foresaw the crisis, see David Gruen, ‘Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis’, Keynote Address at the Sydney Institute, 19 June 2009, http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1564/PDF/Sydney_Institute_Address.pdf, date accessed 6 October 2010.
See P.S. Atiyah, Introduction to the Law of Contract, 5th edn, Oxford University Press, 1995, esp. pp. 212–15, for discussion.
The United States Uniform Commercial Code, §2–615, for example, excuses a party from delivering goods specified in a contract when the reason for their failure to do so results from events such as ‘acts of God’ whose absence was a ‘basic assumption’ of the contract, whether or not such exclusion is specifically stated in the contract. For a detailed discussion of the jurisprudence and justification of these measures, see Alan O. Sykes, ‘The Doctrine of Commercial Impracticability in a Second-Best World’ (1990) Journal of Legal Studies, 19, 1, 43–94.
Richard A. Posner and Andrew M. Rosenfield, ‘Impossibility and Related Doctrines in Contract Law: An Economic Analysis’ (1977) Journal of Legal Studies, 6, 1, 83–118.
Verena Ross, ‘Lessons from the Financial Crisis’, speech to the Chatham House Conference on Global Financial Regulation, London, 24 March 2009, http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pages/Library/Communication/Speeches/2009/0324_ vr.shtml, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Stephen Labaton, ‘S.E.C. Concedes Oversight Flaws Fueled Collapse’, New York Times, 27 September 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/business/27sec.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Jesse Westbrook and Robert Schmidt, ‘Cox “Asleep at Switch” as Paulson, Bernanke Encroach’, Bloomberg, 22 September 2008, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aoM0mjulARQo&refer=home, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Alex Blumberg, ‘Now You SEC Me, Now You Don’t’, This American Life, 12 September 2008, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1260, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Jesse Westbrook, David Scheer and Mark Pittman, ‘Madoff Tipster Markopolos Cites SEC’s “Ineptitude”‘, Bloomberg, 4 February 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=axvJfch6PDjs&, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Kara Scannell and Sudeep Reddy, ‘Greenspan Admits Errors to Hostile House Panel’, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html?mod=todays_us_page_one, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Jeffrey Sachs, ‘The Roots of Crisis’, The Guardian, 21 March 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/21/therootsofcrisis, date accessed 6 October 2010. For an insightful overview of the relationship between low interest rates and the financial crisis, see ‘The Giant Pool of Money’, This American Life, 9 May 2008, http://www.thislife.org/radio_episode. aspx?episode=355, date accessed 6 October 2010.
For a discussion of this example and the (in)operation of risk in international lending, see Raffer, ‘Risk of Lending and Liability of Lenders’. For a more extended discussion of the various ways that the international lending system encourages problematic borrowing and lending, see Christian Barry and Lydia Tomitova, ‘Fairness in Sovereign Debt’ (2006) Social Research, 74, 2, 649–69.
It is worth noting that the domestic law of many countries has traditionally regarded loans to poor persons in distress, such as by payday lenders or check cashers, with great suspicion. For a discussion of this, see John Cartwright, Unequal Bargaining: A Study of Vitiating Factors in the Formation of Contracts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
As argued in David Miller, ‘National Responsibility and International Justice’, in Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’, New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.
Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, ‘The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going’, ProPublica, 9 April 2010, http://www.propublica.org/article/all-the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson, ‘SEC Accuses Goldman of Fraud in Housing Deal’, New York Times, 16 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/l 7goldman.html, date accessed 6 October 2010. See also Matt Taibbi, ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’, Rolling Stone, 9–23 July 2009, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Food and Agriculture Organization, ‘1.02 Billion People Hungry: One Sixth of Humanity Undernourished — More than Ever Before’, FAO Media Centre, 19 June 2009, http://www.fao.org/news/story/0/item/20568/icode/en, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Frederick Kaufman, ‘The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with It’, Harper’s, July 2010, pp. 27–34. Matt Taibbi relates the index to the oil price spikes of the past decade in ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’.
John Lanchester, ‘It’s Finished’ (2009) London Review of Books, 31, 28, available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/john-lanchester/its-finished, date accessed 6 October 2010. As a curious side-note, RBS was the biggest loser in the particular deal at the heart of the SEC investigation of Goldman: Landon Thomas, Jr., ‘A Routine Deal Became an $840 Million Mistake’, New York Times, 22 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/business/23cdo.html, date accessed 6 October 2010.
Christian Barry and Matt Peterson, ‘Dealing Fairly with the Costs to the Poor of the Global Financial Crisis’, in Ian G. MacNeil and Justin O’Brien (eds), The Future of Financial Regulation, Oxford: Hart, 2010.
Christian Barry and Matt Peterson, ‘Dealing Fairly with the Costs to the Poor of the Global Financial Crisis’, in Ian G. MacNeil and Justin O’Brien (eds), The Future of Financial Regulation, Oxford: Hart, 2010. Christian Barry originally posited this argument in ‘Applying the Contribution Principle’ (2005) Metaphilosophy, 36, 1/2, 210–27.
Sameer Khatiwada, ‘Stimulus Packages to Counter Global Economic Crisis: A Review’, International Institute for Labour Studies, Discussion Paper DP/196/2009, Geneva, 2009, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/publications/discussion/dpl9609.pdf, p. 1 (date accessed 6 October 2010).
House of Commons International Development Committee, Aid Under Pressure: Support for Development Assistance in a Global Economic Downturn, Fourth Report of Session 2008–9, vol. I, 19 May 2009, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmintdev/179/17902.htm, p. 28 (date accessed 6 October 2010).
Sylvi Rzepka, ‘The Big Post-Crisis Takeover: Trends in IFI Lending to Low Income Countries’, Eurodad Briefing, 8 April 2010, http://www.eurodad.org/whatsnew/articles.aspx?id=4066, date accessed 6 October 2010.
See, e.g., Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra and Thierry Tressel, ‘A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis’, IMF Working Paper WP/09/287, December 2009, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2009/wp09287.pdf (date accessed 6 October 2010), which notes that Countrywide Financial and Ameriquest Mortgage, two of the most egregious sub-prime lenders, spent almost $30 million on lobbying and political activities between 2002 and 2008.
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Peterson, M., Barry, C. (2011). Who Must Pay for the Damage of the Global Financial Crisis?. In: Dobos, N., Barry, C., Pogge, T. (eds) Global Financial Crisis: The Ethical Issues. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306950_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306950_8
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