Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Willem Buiter certainly thinks so. His essay is, as usual, probably too long and dense for casual readers so I'll try to draw out some of the main points here. Before doing that, here is some background:

For quite some time now, the United States economy has been taking in more foreign investment than its citizens are investing abroad. Despite this negative net investment, American investors are earning more from their foreign investments (in aggregate) than the interest being paid on debts owed to foreign investors. This situation is what is being referred to when we talk of "alpha" - being able to secure positive returns despite a situation of negative net investment. This alpha has resulted from two factors: the very low rate of return offered on US assets and the increasingly risky nature of US-owned assets abroad (leading some to describe the United States as the world's largest venture capitalist).

Buiter outlines one possible explanation for the existence of alpha:

"Because of its unique position as the world’s largest economy, the world’s one remaining military and political superpower (since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991) and the world’s joint-leading financial centre (with the City of London), the US could offer foreign investors lousy US returns on their investments in the US, without causing them to take their money and run."

The problem is, to the extent that it ever existed, this situation has been undermined:
There is no chance that a nation as reputationally scarred and maimed as the US is today could extract any true “alpha” from foreign investors for the next 25 years or so. So the US will have to start to pay a normal market price for the net resources it borrows from abroad. It will therefore have to start to generate primary surpluses, on average, for the indefinite future.
Thems fightin words. In order to generate those primary surpluses, the American economy will need higher taxes and/or less government spending (as well as higher personal savings). Yet the prospective Obama administration's economic stimulus plan contains precisely the opposite: lower taxes and higher government spending.

Buiter doesn't expect to change the outcome of the stimulus package, but his point is this: while the short run effects of a stimulus package may be beneficial, it will destroy the long-run prospects for the entire US economy. In short, the US economy cannot afford a Keynesian stimulus package. He predicts a global dumping of US assets in 2-5 years.

I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Buiter's specific predictions on asset-dumping. Keynes himself pointed out that our ability to forsee the long-run is so limited as to be practically useless. Moreover, currency predictions are fickle at the best of times because everything is relative. For instance, even with current US economic weakness, we're seeing a flood to the US dollar a safehaven from other crashing currencies. So in two to five years, just about anything could happen. For more counter-arguments, see Free Exchange here and here.

Nevertheless, Buiter's overall concern is a real one and I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand. But I think the most important questions to policymakers with more short-run horizons still comes down to: what's the alternative? and can America really afford not to have a Keynesian stimulus? A political consensus appears to forming that makes the answer to that last question a resounding "no."

So either Buiter is overstating the extent to which investors will be scared off by higher US debt levels, or there could be some very real long-run consequences that will make Obama's Harlem-Globetrotter-esque economic advisors look like the Washington Generals.

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