The world financial system needs a radical overhaul, though last week's cosy Davos conference suggested otherwise
There is no one in control of the world's economy. And even if there were, there is no set of commonly agreed principles upon which governance could be based. We have some idea about what to do about mitigating the risks of, say, deep sea oil drilling or the overfishing of the oceans. But when it comes to how to organise the vast flows of trade and finance whose relative orderliness and growth are so crucial for prosperity and employment everywhere, there is an intellectual and political vacuum.
It is not as if the issues are unaired. Indeed, at Davos this year ? the annual get-together of world political and business leaders that increasingly reminds me of our party conferences in its combination of sonorous speechifying and backstairs wheeler-dealing between alpha males on the make ? you could hardly escape talking about them. Whether on the main platform, in the fringe meetings or in the bars, everyone was wringing their hands about too much public and private debt, too much underhand manipulation of exchange rates, whether bankers are right to insist it is back to business as usual and the astonishing rise in food and energy prices.
But if there is lots of talk, there is no agreement on what solid principles and governance are needed to secure change and underpin recovery. The fallback position on which pessimists or optimists can agree is to nod sagely that, confronted by whatever problem, there needs to be better co-ordination. Like apple pie and motherhood, co-ordination is the lowest common denominator to which even the most curmudgeonly Davosian can subscribe, but it raises all the questions. Who is to decide what the problem is and to which a co-ordinated response is required or how the pain should be distributed?
This matters. There are more than 200 million people unemployed worldwide, of whom 78 million are under 24. According to the International Labour Organisation, there are 1.5 billion people in vulnerable employment. The world population is going to rise by another 2 billion in the next 40 years, almost entirely in Asia and Africa. What are they going to eat, drink and do for energy when even current levels of food production, water supply and energy production are inadequate? As Egypt's President Mubarak fights for his political life from street protests fuelled in part by sheer economic desperation, suddenly the questions are no longer for Davos's seminar rooms ? they are urgent and real.
Answers will have to encompass what currency the world will use to do its international business in. Currently, this is the dollar ? as US treasury secretary John Connally famously said in 1971, our currency but your problem. The US is successfully spending its way out of recession and printing dollars in vast quantities, gloriously indifferent to the impact on all the countries and companies which hold dollars as their reserves. Can this continue? And what would replace the dollar?
Meanwhile, the Chinese are spending their way to yet more economic growth while rigging their exchange rate to boost their exports. I met any number of central bankers and finance ministers here from emerging economies who feel they have to rig their currencies just as the Chinese do, partly because they dare not let the Chinese steal a march on them and partly because they want to follow what seems to be a successful model of economic development. But whatever is unsustainable is sooner or later not sustained and there is a lot of unsustainable activity out there.
Last but not least, there are the super-powerful bankers who are exploiting the vacuum to make their super-profits again, insisting that the crisis is well and truly behind us. There was a lot of shock in Britain recently when Bob Diamond, the new CEO of Barclays, told a parliamentary select committee that the time for remorse from bankers was over. Evidently, he is not alone. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, led the pack at Davos, saying that banker-bashing must now stop and that banks needed to be left free in order to finance recovery. He even had the gall to insist that the main risk to the world economy was government debt and the US's $1.5 trillion budget deficit in particular.
Dimon is right to point to the risk, but criminally wrong to neglect the banks' role in creating the recession, of which the US budget deficit is the consequence, and doubly wrong never to challenge the power of the bond markets and financiers. Yet without a $1.5 trillion US budget deficit and government guarantees to the banking system, there would be no US and world recovery, no world banking system and no cocksure Jamie Dimon. Economist Simon Johnson, formerly chief economist at the IMF, regards him as the most dangerous man in America, ringleader of the intellectual and business forces that have so damaged the world.
Never has the interconnection between raw power and ideas been so obvious. Johnson can detail how every economist who takes a deregulatory, pro big bank line has received fees and income from the banks for his or her work, a stance that hardly wins him many friends. But it is a matter of dismay. It is absolutely obvious that today's banks are far too big, operate with far too little capital and deal in financial instruments that do far too little to finance genuine trade and investment. That is not a view heard in Davos.
Nor is there any compelling blueprint for how to organise the world's financial system any better. There is the world as it is ? multiple forms of capitalist economies deploying raw power to do just as they please ? and a utopia of freely floating exchange rates, free trade, free financial markets and tightly controlled government budget deficits. The model doesn't exist and even if it did we know enough about modern finance to know it would lead to another disaster. There needs to be a different prospectus that offers principles and governance for this imperfect world as it is.
The French promise action during their presidency of the G20 this year, but I doubt they will manage to move the Davos consensus. Indeed, David Cameron and George Osborne won an extremely warm response here as champions of that same consensus around which they have organised the coalition government's economic policies. Davos is well-meaning; it genuinely wants an inclusive, less unequal, more sustainable world, but balks at willing the means. I have been coming here on and off for more than 20 years and share the view of one battle-hardened veteran British business attendee: on the big calls, Davos is nearly always wrong. In which case, we should all be concerned, not least Mr Cameron, the audience's applause still ringing in his ears.
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