Great Recession

...the world economy is expected to have contracted 1.1 percent in 2009 from the year before - the first annual decline in world output in more than half a century.

(Economic Report of the President, 2010)

In their report, the Economic Advisors to the President referred to the events of 2008 and 2009 as the Great Recession, suggesting a parallel with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like the Great Depression - and unlike other recessions - it had a simultaneous impact on most of the world's economies. But in other respects it was unique. There had been no precedent for such extensive damage to the world's financial system, nor for the coordinated measures that were taken to avert what was feared to be its imminent collapse.

Policy issues remain concerning the management of the recovery from the recession and the measures needed to avoid its recurrence.

Overview

The Great Recession came after a twenty-year period that has been termed the "Great Moderation", during which recessions had been less frequent and less severe than in previous periods, and during which there been a great deal of successful financial innovation. Attitudes and habits of thought acquired during that period were to have a significant influence upon what was to come. In the United States it was characterised by the large-scale granting of credit to households and between 1980 and 2007 personal saving rates dropped to 2 per cent of disposable income from their previous average of 9 per cent and there was a house price boom that has since been categorised as a bubble.

The financial crash of 2008 struck the major economies at a time when they were suffering from the impact of a supply shock in which a surge in commodity prices was causing households to reduce their spending, and as a result of which economic forecasters were expecting a mild downturn. The trigger that set it off was the malfunction of a part of the United States housing market that resulted in the downgrading by the credit rating agencies of large numbers of internationally-held financial assets to create what came to be known as the subprime mortgage crisis. That crisis led to the discovery that the financial innovations that had been richly rewarding traders in the financial markets, had also been threatening their collective survival. The crucial nature of that threat arose from the fact that the global economy had become dependent upon the services of a well-functioning international financial system. What was generally considered to be the impending collapse of that system was averted towards the end of 2008 by widespread governmental guarantees of unlimited financial support to their countries' banks.

The consensus view among economists was that the combination of monetary and fiscal expansion that was then undertaken by policy-makers was nevertheless necessary to avoid a greatly intensified global recession, possibly on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s - although there was a body of opinion at the time that considered a fiscal stimulus to be unnecessary, ineffective and potentially damaging. Before those policy actions could take effect, there were sharp reductions in the levels of activity in most of the world's developed economies, mainly because of the discovery by banks and households that they had been overestimating the value of their assets. That discovery prompted banks to reduce their lending, at first because of doubts about the reliability of the collateral offered by prospective borrowers and later, when those doubts receded, in order to avoid losing the confidence of their depositors by holding proportionately excessive amounts of debt. The practice of debt reduction (known as deleveraging) was also adopted by those households that had acquired historically high levels of indebtedness, many of whom were experiencing unaccustomed falls in the market value of their houses. The effect of deleveraging by banks and by households was, in different ways, to increase the severity of the developing recession.

By the spring of 2009, the recession had involved most of the world's developed and developing economies, and although limited economic growth had returned to many economies by the end of 2009, unemployment continued rising and output gap estimates revealed the continuation of substantial underutilisation of productive capacity. Governments had been forced to borrow money by issuing bonds to offset the fiscal consequences of their automatic stabilisers and their fiscal stimuluses, as a result of which there had beem substantial increases in national debt. In late 2009 and early 2010, the bond markets added several percentage points to the interest rates to be paid on the bond issues of several European governments to compensate for what was seen as a slight risk that they might default on repayment, and in 2010 the economic policies of most developed countries came to be dominated by the problem of reducing national debt without hampering recovery.

(Links to news reports of the key events of the recession are available on the timelines subpage, accounts of the impact of the recession on individual countries are available on the addendum subpage, and definitions of the terms employed are available in the economics glossary and the finance glossary).

Background: the great moderation (1985 - 2007)

Developments in the western economies

For about twenty years before the onset of the Great Recession, all of the major market economies except Japan's had been experiencing a hitherto unaccustomed stability, following a sudden reduction of their output volatility in the mid-1980s to about a third of its previous level. It was not clear at the time whether the "Great Stability", as it came to be called, should be attributed to to luck or to judgement, but the US Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke has been inclined to attribute it to the adoption of an economic policy , referred to by others in America as the "Greenspan effect" , and Charles Bean (the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England) has described the transition from what had been thought of as the Keynesian use of fiscal policy - through the unsuccessful monetarist attempts to target the money supply, to what he refers to as "the neo-classical synthesis" or as "new Keynesian", under which monetary policy was targetted on the output gap using an empirical relationship such as the Taylor rule. Confidence in the new policy in the early 21st century was such as to enable Robert Lucas, the then President of the American Economic Association, to announce that " the central problem of depression-prevention [has] been solved, for all practical purposes .

The international financial system

There was a contrasting increase in the volatility of the international financial system - which experienced 139 financial crises during the 24 years from 1973 to 1997, compared with 38 during the previous 26 years . Many of those crises were associated with the development of globalisation and its accompanying large and volatile international capital flows. At first the predominant direction of flow was from the developing countries to the developing countries, but that changed toward the end of the 20th century. The oil-exporting countries as well as Japan, China, and some other east Asian emerging developing nations accumulated large current account surpluses, and correspondingly large current account deficits developed elsewhere, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain. Flows of capital into the advanced countries rose from about 8 per cent of world GDP in 2002 to about 16 per cent in 2007 . Nearly all of the corresponding investments of the surplus countries were in the government bonds or government-guaranteed bonds of the deficit countries and the increased demand for those bonds enabled their issuers to reduce their yields - typically from a real (ie inflation-adjusted) yield of 3 per cent in 1990 to less than 2 per cent in the early 21st century.

The housing markets

The increased availability of credit at low interest rates prompted large household debt increases in the United States and Europe, much of which was used to finance expenditure on housing. In response to the increase in demand there were almost unprecedented increases in house prices in several countries. In the United States real (inflation-corrected) prices rose by nearly 85 percent between 1997 and 2006, in the United Kingdom there was an (uncorrected) rise of 180 per cent , in Spain they nearly trebled, and in Ireland they more than quadrupled . By 2005, some economists in the United States had become convinced that an asset price bubble had developed , but Ben Bernanke (then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers) reported that "... although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals" and that "a moderate cooling in the housing market, should one occur, would not be inconsistent with the economy continuing to grow at or near its potential next year". In the event, price increases grew more rapidly over the following year and a half.

Commodity prices

International commodity prices doubled between 2005 and mid 2008, a trend that has been attributed to their relative attractiveness as investments as well as growing demand by China and other developing countries , and the price of crude oil doubled between 2007 and 2008, which had the effect upon the commodity-importing economies of producing modest reductions of household spending power and company profits.

Deregulation

American attitudes about regulation changed substantially during the final three decades of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1970s, policy-makers grew increasingly concerned that economic regulation protected inefficient companies at the expense of consumers . Deregulation of the banks began in the 1980s and involved a combination of changes in federal and state statutes and changes in regulatory and judicial interpretations of existing laws, culminating in the passage of the Banking Act of 1999, and there were similar developments in other developed countries. Until the 1980s, investment banks were not normally permitted to undertake non-financial activities, nor other financial activities such as branch banking, insurance or mortgage lending. In the 1980s, however, there was extensive deregulation of the banks with the intention of increasing competition and improving efficiency. Reserve requirements were relaxed and restrictions upon the range of their financial activities were generally relaxed or removed.

Financial innovation

A reduction in the yields on government bonds prompted investors to seek higher-yielding alternatives, and the finance industry employed a great deal of high-powered ingenuity to meet that demand. They were helped in that endeavour by a series of Nobel-prize-winning advances in financial economics that had been made in the 1970s and early 1980s; by the deregulations of the 1980s; and by the work of a group of brilliant mathematicians that came to be known as the "quants". The economists had developed a succession of theories based upon adaptations of the the efficient market hypothesis, including portfolio theory and the capital asset pricing model; on the basis of which the quants developed and operated a range of computer packages that could provide precise estimates of an investor's "value at risk" derived from probability analysis of previous experience. Armed with more sophisticated methods of assessing risk, the banks and other financial intermediaries increased their capacity to provide credit to producers and consumers by distributing the risks and rewards involved more widely among those most willing to accept them. The devices adopted for that purpose included a vastly extended application of the techniques of securitisation, involving the conversion of their loans into packages of bonds that were graded according to the credit risk ratings provided by the credit rating agencies. The traditional banking practice of holding loans on their balance sheets until they were repaid, gave way to the strategy known as originate and distribute, under which those packages of bonds were sold to pension funds, insurance companies and other banks. That procedure removed the loans from the balance sheets of the banks, and the institutions of the growing shadow banking system, thus enabling them to increase activity without breaching the reserve ratio requirements of the financial regulators.

Financial crisis (2007 - 2008)

In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer and communications technology. A Nobel prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in the derivatives markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.

(Testimony of Dr. Alan Greenspan before the Committee of Government Oversight and Reform October 23, 2008[2])

What came to be known as the subprime mortgage crisis had its origin in repayment defaults by some Americans with low credit ratings who had borrowed money to help pay for house purchases. When house prices were rising, many of them had been able to get the money needed for repayments by further borrowing (because of the increased collateral that the price increases enabled them to offer). But the sharp fall in the market value of their houses that occurred in 2007 deprived them of that option, and left many of them owing more than their houses were worth - making default a rational, and sometimes unavoidable, recourse.

The financial crisis began in early June 2007, when surge in defaults led the credit rating agencies to downgrade their ratings of securities based upon those mortgages, and banks holding such securities found themselves unable to use them as collateral for their borrowing needs. This created financial problems that started with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and then shifted to the major banks . In that month, hedge funds guaranteed by the American Bear Stearns bank ran into difficulties, and mortgage defaults led subsequently to the collapse and a government rescue from bankruptcy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Uncertainty about the quality of banking assets made banks reluctant to lend to each other and the important interbank market vitually ceased to operate, triggering a growing credit shortage.

The events of 9th August 2007 marked first upsurge in the intensity of the crisis. The French bank BNP Paribas announced that it had suspended withdrawals from three of its hedge funds on the grounds that it had become impossible to value their mortgage-backed assets. On the same day it became apparent that European banks were experiencing serious liquidity shortages when it was learned that they had sought help from the European Central Bank. Other banks throughout the world cut back on their lending in an attempt to offset the increase in their leverage brought about by the downgrading of their mortgage-based assets. The fear of default fed on itself as a result of more and more major bank failures in 2007 and 2008 as well as many failures of other businesses - often because they found themselves unable to roll-over their debts. In March 2008 the United States authorities organised the rescue of the Bear Stearns (the world's fifth largest investment bank)].

The second upsurge of financial panic started on 12th September 2008 with the failure of the Lehman Brothers bank (the world's largest bankruptcy), and the massive losses that were consequently suffered by operators in the money market and there was a sudden surge in its required interest rates . After that failure, the banks suffered a complete loss of confidence in each other, investors suddenly lost confidence in the banks, and fears that borrowers might default made everyone reluctant to lend money. Banks and other businesses found that they could not borrow for longer than overnight, and by early October even overnight credit became scarce. It become apparent that a collapse of the entire financial system had become a distinct possibility, and the Governor of the Bank of England warned that "Not since the beginning of the First World War has our banking system been so close to collapse".

The International Monetary Fund's economists estimated in October 2009 that the global writedowns of the value of financial assets resulting from the crisis to have totalled $3.4 trillion.

Policy response (2008 - 2009)

Financial policy

In the course of the first two weeks of October 2008 a series of banking systems rescue plans had been launched. The UK had announced large scale plans to inject capital into its banks and to offer unlimited guarantees on the debts of all of its banks, and similar action had shortly after been agreed by European leaders and by the President of the United States. The national rescue systems that were actually adopted by the principal banking countries differed only in detail from those initial proposals. It was recognised that those actions were temporary treatments, not remedies, and remedial measures were also set in motion in the course of 2009, as described in the paragraph below on diagnosis and remedies.

Monetary policy

The Federal Reserve Bank, the Bank of Japan and the [[Bank of England made a series of discount rate reductions to near zero levels in the 4th quarter of 2008 and the 1st quarter of 2009 (and the European Central Bank made a series of reductions to reach 1 per cent in the 2nd quarter. When it became clear that those moves had not achieved the intended easing of the credit crunch it was decided to adopt the controversial and largely untried policy of quantitative easing.

Fiscal policy

In a significant departure from the accepted practice of relying solely upon monetary policy to stabilise their economies, most industrialised countries adopted fiscal stimulus packages to augment the already substantial expansionary influence of the automatic stabilisers. Those moves frequently involved departures from recently adopted deficit-limiting rules, including The European Union's Stability and Growth Pact, and the United Kingdom's Code for Fiscal Stability and levels of national debt ranging from the UK's 44 per cent of GDP to Japan's 188 per cent were forecast to rise to at least double their existing proportions of GDP .

Economic downturn (2007 - 2009)

(downturns in individual countries are dealt with in the addendum)

The economic downturn started in the United States in 2007, where a combination of rising oil prices, falling house prices and credit shortages was having a depressing effect on household spending and business investment. During the next three quarters, the American downturn continued and similar depressing effects were being felt by the economies of the other advanced economies. The economies of the developing countries were also beginning to suffer and by the 4th quarter of 2008 recessionary pressures were being felt in all of the world's economies. The price of crude oil fell sharply, to reach 25 per cent of its 2008 peak during the first quarter of 2009 , and there were substantial downturns in the housing markets of several advanced economies (including Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Spain and the United Kingdom).

In 2009, for the first time since the Great Depression, there were simultaneous reductions in the growth of nearly all of the world's economies - although there were large regional variations. There was little change to the economies of Southern Asia; those of East Asia were less adversely affected than most; the economies of China and India experienced significant growth rate reductions; and all the high-income economies of America, Europe and Japan, together with most of the other developing countries, went into recession. The severest effects were upon the economies of Russia, the Baltic States, Iceland and Ireland.

There were marked international differences in the nature of the recession experience. In several countries, (including the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland ) the recession had the historically rare characteristics of a balance sheet recession, which they suffered as a result of the downgrading of their assets that occurred in the course of the American subprime mortgage crisis. In the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, the effect of deleveraging by the banks was accentuated by attempts by businesses and households to reduce their inflated levels of debt. The collapse in world trade that occurred at the end of 2008 affected the export-intensive economies of Germany, Japan and China, the fall in commodity prices hit the economies of the commodity-exporting developing countries, and the international credit crunch created financial problems for developing countries who found themselves unable to roll-over maturing short-term debt. Thus the recession struck widely for reasons that often had nothing in common with the events that set it off.

Recovery (2009 - )

Confidence in in the interbank market was restored by February 2009, and it became clear that the threatened collapse of the international financial system had been averted. By the middle of 2009 there were signs that the credit crunch was weakening.

Most economies had returned to economic growth by the end of 2009, but there were numerous exceptions. Iceland's economy was not expected to recover from its exceptionally deep recession until 2011 and contractionary fiscal policies that were adopted in order to reduce national debt, were expected to delay economic recovery in Ireland and Greece.

Even where growth had resumed, the recovery was generally weak, and differing estimates of national output gaps all indicated the presence of very substantial amounts of unused resources suggesting that without a high degree of labour market price flexibility, high levels of unemployment would probably persist into 2010 and beyond.

Policy-makers were faced by the fiscal dilemma, that arose from the conflict been the wish to reduce national debt and the wish to avoid creating another downturn. In October 2009, the International Monetary Fund advised that, notwithstanding rising public debt in many countries, fiscal stimulus needed to be sustained until the recovery is on a firmer footing and may even need to be extended,but that it could lose its effectiveness in the absence of convincing reassurances to investors that government debt will eventually be rolled back.

Aftermath (2010 - )

During the early months of 2010, national authorities in most of the developed countries were concerned both with the danger of a renewed downturn, and with the need to maintain investors' confidence in their ability to service their bonds. On the one hand, there was an awareness that the contribution to the recovery that had been due to the replacement of depleted stocks would not continue, and that the deleveraging of high pre-recession levels of household and commercial debt might continue to hamper growth. On the other hand there was awareness that increased borrowing that had occurred during the recession - mainly to compensate for the reduction or tax revenues - had increased their national debt, often to higher levels than had previously been reached in peacetime. That gave rise to concerns that it might become necessary to add a risk premium to the normal interest rate in order to maintain investors' willingness to buy their bonds. In extreme cases, rumours of of impending sovereign default could generate a herding response, leading to a progressive escalation of their risk premium and to a self-fulfilling threat to a country's fiscal sustainability. It turns out, however, that the need to pay a risk premium on the interest rates on a government's bonds depends less upon the level of national debt than upon the attitude of the market to that government. The fact that the bond market imposed higher risk premia on the bonds of the Eurozone's PIIG (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece} governments than upon the bonds of more deeply-indebted governments such as Japan's, has been attributed to an attitude toward them of debt intolerance . It has been suggested that the bond market took account of the necessary absence of offsetting exchange rate movements, and were sceptical about compensating offers of support from other Eurozone governments. In the case of the 2010 Greek debt crisis, it has been suggested that the country's deceptive conduct and its default record were contributory factors.

The cost of the recession

The problem of estimating the cost of the recession is immensely difficult, requiring a comparison between its actual outcome and the outcome that would have eventuated in its absence. Even to estimate its actual output presents difficulties that may not be confidently resolved for many years. An attempt has nevertheless been considered necessary in order to provide a datum against which to relate the costs of prevention. An estimate by Bank of England has put the present value of the cost of the output that has been lost at 3½ times world GDP, on the basis of which their Andrew Haldane has suggested that if only 25 percent of that loss were permanent, the present value of its global cost could amount to 90 per cent of the value of a year's output .

Diagnoses and prescriptions

Causes

Even before the banking meltdown had been averted, attention was being given to the problem of identifying its causes with a view to avoiding another financial crisis (or, failing that, of limiting its severity). Many explanations were put forward. Some were concerned with the conduct of those involved, including the shortcomings of bank executives and their advisors, the laxity of their regulators, the indifference of the central banks, the incompetence of the credit rating agencies, and the inaction of governments. Some were concerned with institutional factors including, the inadequacy of financial regulation, and the lack of coordination between monetary policy and financial regulation. The concern felt by many people that a global disaster had been sprung on them without warning was expressed by the Queen of England when, on a royal visit to the London School of Economics, she asked "Why did no-one see it coming". The School's Director assured her that economists had issued warnings, and a follow-up letter attributed their lack of influence among decision-takers to "wishful thinking combined with hubris" . {The warnings included those of Paul Volcker, and William White .). But a group of eminent economists believe that the economics profession cannot escape responsibility for the crisis. Positions of influence had in their view been occupied by economists who had a mistaken view of how the economy works. Among that group, George Akerlov and Joseph Stiglitz argue that a major cause of the crash of 2008 had been the use of models embodying the efficient markets hypothesis and, more generally, to the belief that financial markets are inherently stable. The economist Paul Krugman claims that those responsible for economic management had acted either on the belief that free-market economies never go astray, or the belief that deviations could readily be corrected by the central banks, and that economists' preoccupation with elegant mathematical models had led them to "mistake beauty for truth". A contrary view is taken by Nobel prizewinner Myron Scholes (joint creator of theBlack-Scholes model which embodies the efficient markets hypothesis), who defends the use of models and attributes any adverse consequences to their misuse, saying "you can build a wonderful car such as a Porsche or a Lamborghini and turn it over to someone to drive it who has no skills and causes it to crash".