Tony Curzon Price

Tony Curzon Price is Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy. He received a PhD in economics from University College London (UCL), and worked as a jobbing economist for more than ten years. He founded a high-tech electronics compancy, Arithmatica, in 1998 and lived in Silicon Valley from 2001 to 2004.

He has lectured on economics and energy policy to postgraduates at Imperial College, London, and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Recent articles

Plan 'B"

Face up to it: the Brown re-capitalisation plan may not work. The banks have relied to a massive extent on Credit Default Swaps, a sort of insurance on lending. They have given themselves false comfort, and in some cases very real cash-flow, on an insurance pyramid that will not hold-up under even modestly higher default rates. Liabilities under these insurance contracts are vast. One hedge fund was insuring 100 times its cash base before it went under. If the banks that we are now the proud part-owners of end up being heavily exposed to these liabilities--the total CDS market is measured around $50 Trillion, almost 1000 times more than the Brown rescue--we should just cut our losses and let the banks go under.

The problem is the protection of the real economy. The Federal Reserve has shown the way here, with its direct lending to companies, started 2 days ago. We should start a new state bank, recruit bankers and accountants from the City, and get them to work on lending to the real economy. At first, they will not have the time to distinguish good and bad loans. They will have to be lax but short-termist in their lending decisions. Their task will be to rapidly and efficiently become ``relationship bankers''--understanding the underlying businesses they are lending to and setting appropriate and gradually tougher lending terms. Once financial flows to the real economy are safe, the state bank should be broken into 10 identical pieces and with 9 sold to private investors who will operate in a new regulatory regime. The tenth should remain in state hands, as a benchmark bank, a way for the state to stay close to what is happening in the markets.

It is disturbing that the Brown re-cap was hatched by the Treasury, the Bank of England and top bankers. The trouble any regulator has is that the people who best understand the business and the crisis are the people you are trying to regulate. This is the basis of every regulatory capture. You cannot trust what the knowledgeable say to you. If the liabilities of the banks start to mount, let's make sure this plan B is ready to be deployed.

Tony Curzon Price (openDemocracy, London):Paul Krugman has a simple model of the crisis that is a pretty useful tool to think about what is happening and what should be done immediately. It is not a model of why we got here, but a diagnostic tool for short term action.

First, Krugman's conclusions from the model are a) that taxpayers becoming shareholders in banks is a good next move and b) that international coordination of rescue plans is particularly important. Quoting him directly: 

First, it suggests that the core problem is capital, not liquidity - or at least that you can explain much of what's going on without appealing to a breakdown of buying and selling per se. To the extent that this is true, rescue plans centered on making troubled assets liquid, like the Paulson plan passed last week, won't do the trick. Instead, what's needed is an injection of capital, which can't reverse the original shock, but can undo the financial multiplier effect of that shock.

Second, the international implications: to the extent that we regard falling asset prices and their consequences as a bad thing, which we obviously do right now, this analysis suggests that there are large cross-border externalities in financial rescues. Macroeconomic policy coordination never got much traction, largely because economists never could make the case that it was terribly important. Financial policy coordination, however, looks on the face of it much more important. Capital injections by U.S. fiscal authorities would help alleviate the European financial crisis, capital injections by European fiscal authorities help alleviate the U.S. financial crisis. Multilateral Man, come home - we need you! 

I posted Gideon Rachman's FT column  on oD's The World link-watch page on diigo earlier today. Gideon writes:

Investment bankers, the shock- troops of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, were allowed to bet their banks on this new market, because regulators and politicians believed so firmly in the magical and self- regulating qualities of the market.

The same process of intellectual overshoot happened with other signature ideas of the Reagan- Thatcher era: privatisation, scepticism about environmentalism and democracy promotion.

Well ... I think there is a kind of "democracy promotion" --- the kind openDemocracy stands for --- that is not neo-liberal and is in the wings, waiting for its open moment, as it were.

That apart, Gideon's judgement of ``overshoot'' is very welcome. I wrote asking him about the idea of "progress"  -- did he think that was oversold too? The pessimistic conclusion to his column, in which he saw just a batting back and forth between over-regulation and over-deregulation, suggested that he might be shorting progress too. Can we socially  learn from these crises?

The essence of the de-leveraging crisis

Paul Krugman has a simple model of the crisis that is a pretty useful tool to think about what is happening and what should be done immediately. It is not a model of why we got here, but a diagnostic tool for short term action.

First, Krugman's conclusions from the model are a) that taxpayers becoming shareholders in banks is a good next move and b) that international coordination of rescue plans is particularly important. Quoting him directly:

First, it suggests that the core problem is capital, not liquidity - or at least that you can explain much of what's going on without appealing to a breakdown of buying and selling per se. To the extent that this is true, rescue plans centered on making troubled assets liquid, like the Paulson plan passed last week, won't do the trick. Instead, what's needed is an injection of capital, which can't reverse the original shock, but can undo the financial multiplier effect of that shock.

Second, the international implications: to the extent that we regard falling asset prices and their consequences as a bad thing, which we obviously do right now, this analysis suggests that there are large cross-border externalities in financial rescues. Macroeconomic policy coordination never got much traction, largely because economists never could make the case that it was terribly important. Financial policy coordination, however, looks on the face of it much more important. Capital injections by U.S. fiscal authorities would help alleviate the European financial crisis, capital injections by European fiscal authorities help alleviate the U.S. financial crisis. Multilateral Man, come home - we need you!

On the specifics of how to re-capitalise the banks, I have to agree 100% with the basic framework proposed by Willem Buiter.

The model makes it clear why we might want to re-capitalise the banks rather than allow the de-leveraging to run its course. Ordinary savers are quite right to be wanting to reduce their holdings of risky assets--they have understood that the investments they held were much less good quality than they previously thought. The price of houses, art works and all the bubble assets must still fall a great deal. But this adjustment, which is just a welcome return to reality, is creating massive knock-on effects as the ``Highly Leveraged Institutions'' of the financial sector have to reduce their lending because the price of the assets they were using as security for the lending is (rightly) falling. This forces the financial institutions to sell assets, making the problem worse. As Krugman points out, this is exactly the way that contagion spread from the Russian to the Asia to the Brazilian crisis in 1998.

Worryingly, the model leaves open the possibility of instability. In particular, if we --- we the ordinary savers --- become extremely unwilling to hold assets with any risk at all, then the model predicts that we spiral into a very nasty loop indeed. I do not think we are there yet, but the model underlines the importance of investor psychology at this point.

A financial system based on such highly leveraged institutions is not right. But we need to wean the system from that leverage slowly, giving the real economy time to adjust, while the logic of Krugman's de-leverage model is that this is being forced on banks at lightning speed. Re-capitalising the banks is a way of breaking the cycle of de-leveraging. Krugman's international conclusion comes form the fact that the banks all hold assets from all countries, so that asset price shocks ripple through the leverage multiplier much faster than would be suggested by the extent of movements of goods and services around the world. Krugman illustrates this with a nice graph.

So the way forward is becoming clear. Put capital into the banks following the Special Resolution Regime proposal of Buiter's to stabilise the system. Once the real economy has access to the credit it needs to operate, nationalise or hyper-regulate the banks and let the real economy slowly - over five years - reduce its dependence on bank credit.

The chart shows rest-of-world assets in the United States (red) and US assets abroad (blue) as a percentage of non-US GDP. What this shows is that when US asset prices fall, foreign financial firms feel the de-leveraging squeeze; and when foreign asset prices fall, so will US financial firms.

Sounds like a firm of City lawyers -- Krugman, Blinder & Co. In fact, it is half the panel line-up on this excellent film of the Princeton Economics Department panel on the subprime crisis.(YouTube embedded below - the whole thing is about 1 hr, with the first 1/2 hour most informative, IMO).

Unfortunately, Blinder is mostly cut. Brunnermeier is fascinating on really detailed stuff---economists will never be short of clever fixes to regulation problems; Hong is really  interesting --- I want to post on his point about the psychology and sociology of systems prone to bubbles; Krugman --- well, if you've followed him in the NYT, you won't find any surprises here.