Stiglitz: Wall Street Hypocrisy, Business as Usual

In a note available at Project Syndicate, Joseph Stiglitz reminds us of the ineptness, sometimes tragic ineptness, of Wall Street and the IMF. This account bears strikingly synchronous tones to our recent "The Economic Fallacy of Free Trade" in the PolicyIndex.

Ten years after the Asian Currency Crisis ...

.... Looking back at the crisis a decade later, we can see more clearly how wrong the diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis of the IMF and United States Treasury were. The fundamental problem was premature capital market liberalization. It is therefore ironic to see the US Treasury Secretary once again pushing for capital market liberalization in India – one of the two major developing countries (along with China) to emerge unscathed from the 1997 crisis.

It is no accident that these countries that had not fully liberalized their capital markets have done so well. Subsequent research by the IMF has confirmed what every serious study had shown: capital market liberalization brings instability, but not necessarily growth. (India and China have, by the same token, been the fastest-growing economies.) Of course, Wall Street (whose interests the US Treasury represents) profits from capital market liberalization: they make money as capital flows in, as it flows out, and in the restructuring that occurs in the resulting havoc. In South Korea, the IMF urged the sale of the country’s banks to American investors, even though Koreans had managed their own economy impressively for four decades, with higher growth, more stability, and without the systemic scandals that have marked US financial markets with such frequency. ....

The contrast between the IMF/US Treasury advice to East Asia and what has happened in the current sub-prime debacle is glaring. East Asian countries were told to raise their interest rates, in some cases to 25%, 40%, or higher, causing a rash of defaults. In the current crisis, the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank cut interest rates.

Similarly, the countries caught up in the East Asia crisis were lectured on the need for greater transparency and better regulation. But lack of transparency played a central role in this past summer’s credit crunch; toxic mortgages were sliced and diced, spread around the world, packaged with better products, and hidden away as collateral, so no one could be sure who was holding what. And there is now a chorus of caution about new regulations, which supposedly might hamper financial markets (including their exploitation of uninformed borrowers, which lay at the root of the problem.) Finally, despite all the warnings about moral hazard, Western banks have been partly bailed out of their bad investments.

Following the 1997 crisis, there was a consensus that fundamental reform of the global financial architecture were needed. But, while the current system may lead to unnecessary instability, and impose huge costs on developing countries, it serves some interests well. It is not surprising, then, that ten years later, there has been no fundamental reform. Nor, therefore, is it surprising that the world is once again facing a period of global financial instability, with uncertain outcomes for the world’s economies.

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There's more. Read it and weep.