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Outside the Box
Sept. 25, 2010, 12:01 a.m. EDT · Recommend (1) · Post:
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Contrary to Bernanke, economics did fail us
By Howard Gold
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) "” The financial crisis that reached its most critical phase two years ago with the fall of Lehman Brothers had some big winners"”in Asia, Latin America, and Scandinavia.
Most of the countries and regions that had a "good" crisis had lived through near-death experiences "” in Asia in the late 1990s and in Sweden in the early 1990s. They cleaned house and changed their behavior. Read about the countries that were the big winners from the crisis on MoneyShow.com.
The losers, though, are learning their lessons the hard way.
At a talk at Lincoln Center, "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps" director Oliver Stone tells Speakeasy editor Christopher Farley that the heated political climate in America has always existed.
The countries that have lost the most lived way beyond their means "” subsidized by speculative capital or the umbrella of a strong currency (the euro) to give their citizens a lifestyle they hadn't earned in competitive world markets. Government entitlements grew, along with complacency. Eventually, the merry-go-round stopped and the horses came crashing down.
The biggest losers came from the European periphery, whose worst basket cases "” Greece, Ireland, Iceland, and so on "” have become to this decade what Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico were to the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, some of the European walking wounded already have gotten the same kinds of massive international rescue efforts their Asian and Latin American counterparts received back in the day.
It's a stunning role reversal. "Certainly from a debt perspective, they're in much worse shape than the emerging markets right now," says Alexander Young, international equity strategist for Standard & Poor's Equity Services. "They're much closer to the "?crisis countries' of 10 to 20 years ago than to the emerging markets of today." Watch video of Ed Yardeni discussing whether Europe can be saved on MoneyShow.com.
So, here's my list of the biggest losers. Stock-market returns and data on gross domestic product played the biggest role in the rankings, but I also weighed intangibles "” the "how the mighty have fallen" factor. There's no shortage of those.
1.Iceland. Although it's by far the smallest of the countries on my list, with a population of barely 300,000, none was more devastated by the financial crisis. A magnet for the "party-hardy" crowd, Iceland went on a financial binge, too. Its big banks had big dreams and borrowed heavily to achieve them: Debt ballooned to six or seven times gross domestic product.
When credit disappeared after Lehman fell, Iceland went into cardiac arrest. Its stock market lost 90% of its value, GDP plummeted, and a massive devaluation of its currency, the krona, drove the population's standard of living down. Britons and others who poured their savings into Icelandic banks also lost their shirts. A criminal investigation continues.
2.Ireland. Remember the Celtic Tiger? Well, she turned out to be a pussycat with a shamrock. Ireland was the hot country of the 2000s as youth from throughout the euro zone flocked there for jobs in finance, software development, restaurants, what have you. When we visited in 2004, Dublin was bustling and full of construction cranes. The impoverished Limerick the late Frank McCourt wrote about so vividly in Angela's Ashes became a boom town.
That was then. A property bubble burst badly, leaving Irish banks technically insolvent and the government deeply in debt "” its ratio of deficit to GDP, at 14.3%, is higher than that of Greece. Policy makers moved quickly to slash spending and shore up the banks, but it wasn't enough. On Thursday, Irish debt traded at a record 4 percentage points over the equivalent German bonds.
The Irish government pledges to cut more, but you can't get blood from a blarney stone. Ireland's stock market, down 36.2% a year since Lehman's fall and 23.5% annually over the past five years, is the worst in Europe of those tracked by MSCI, Inc. GDP plunged 7.1% last year.
Fed chief Ben Bernanke says it was economic engineering that failed, not economic theory. But what good is theory if it can't stop such disasters?
5:15 p.m. Sept. 24, 2010 | Comments: 60
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