Sozialalmanach - Caritas Luxembourg

The above three features of loose monetary policy, the savings and trade imbalance,
and lax regulation ultimately exacerbated the pro-cyclical and self-reinforcing nature of the
downturn. For the past two decades, increase in US debt came from the financial innovation,
rather than the real economy. Once, a home owner took out a mortgage, and household
debt increased. But since the late 1990s, mortgages could be used to secure mortgagebacked
securities, and those securities could in turn be used to secure a collateralised
debt obligation. The end result was more borrowing, but no more real economy activity.
Moreover, when assets, driven by cheap money, came to be bought not because of the rate
of return on investment but in anticipation that such assets and securities can be sold at a
higher price, the stage was set for an asset bubble of overvalued stocks in relation to real
economy fundamentals. The history of the current crisis is therefore perhaps less a tale
of greed or improvident borrowing than it is a tale of profligate lending. Examining the
supply of credit provides a far more telling analysis than looking at its demand by ordinary
consumers. Maier 40 claims that while governments adopted the imperatives of balanced
budgets, inflation targeting, deregulation, and privatisation (thus constraining the money
supply), the private financial sector was allowed to use financial innovation to create as much
money as it saw fit. This led to massive – though fictitious – wealth creation throughout the
1990s. It was thus not greed, but rather the necessity and availability of credit that led to the
overwhelming indebtedness of American citizens. In retrospect, it can be argued that the
compression of incomes in the US throughout the neo-liberal period was compensated by a
reduction in household savings and mounting private indebtedness, which allowed spending
patterns to be kept virtually unchanged. At the same time, limited social safety nets forced
the government to pursue active macroeconomic policies to fight unemployment, which
increased government indebtedness as well. Thus, growth was maintained at the price of
increasing public and private indebtedness, adding to the already existing macro imbalance.
Privatized money production on a hitherto unknown scale can be understood as a
response to the general stagnation of growth and profitability after the 1970s. The inevitable
result was a rapidly growing debt pyramid vastly in excess of the real economy’s ability
to pay. In the era of neo-liberalism, structural inequalities were allowed to persist and
widen further, both within and between countries. Indeed, Tony Atkinson 41 finds that
while many developed countries saw their GDP increase by up to 25% over the past fifteen
years, median incomes barely rose at all (and in some countries even declined), revealing
a highly skewed distribution of growth. In macroeconomic parlance, increased inequality
implies weak domestic demand: the skewed wealth distribution and high unemployment
40 Maier (2009).
41 Atkinson et al. (2002).
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