by Adam Tooze
Over the summer of 2015 the Fed prevaricated, but at the September FOMC meeting the question could no longer be dodged. The majority of analysts expected the Fed to move rates up a notch. But then came the shock devaluation of the yuan and the second slide in the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Whatever the limitations on the Fed’s mandates, markets were global. They could not ignore the threat from China. On August 24 America’s Dow Jones lost 1,000 points and the Fed pulled back. The normalization of US monetary policy was put on hold and Janet Yellen made no secret of the board’s reasoning. Instability in China was the key. In the press conference on September 18, 2015, as she explained the FOMC’s decision, journalists counted Yellen making six references to China and ten to “global” factors. Unlike in 2013, when it had been India and Turkey under pressure, the risk of spillback from China to the United States was too important to be ignored. Indeed, the effect of Chinese deflation on the world economy was so powerful that there was no need for the Fed to pile on with its own interest rate increase.14
For Beijing the Fed’s forbearance came as a relief. The Chinese liked the idea of the Fed acknowledging interdependence. In October 2015 finance minister Lou Jiwei had the temerity to tell a meeting of the IMF that the Fed couldn’t raise interest rates because China was on the line. “The United States isn’t at the point of raising interest rates yet and under its global responsibilities it can’t raise rates,” Lou said. The United States, he argued, “should assume global responsibilities” because of the dollar’s status as a global currency.15 In the United States the reaction was more mixed. As troubled American market watchers immediately pointed out, Yellen’s conditioning of US policy on China enormously complicated the business of interpreting the Fed’s next move. The markets had predicting the Fed down to a science. No one in the West was sure that they knew how to read Beijing.16
In December 2015, on the basis of America’s own improving jobs market, the FOMC went ahead and raised rates. It was the first rate increase since 2006.17 Yellen’s announcement made clear that the Fed intended to set a signal that the recovery had consolidated. But on both wings of American politics it was hotly contested. Bernie Sanders supporters rallied outside the New York Fed building demanding to know “What Recovery?” Millions of Americans were still a long way from where they were in 2008. On the other hand, conservative opinion, eventually joined by Donald Trump, was irate that Yellen had not moved sooner. The message from the markets was similarly mixed. Initially in December 2015 investors were relieved that the Fed had finally embarked on normalization. Then the uncertainty in China and the emerging markets and the collapse in oil prices came back to the fore. The year 2016 began with a major market sell-off. By mid-February the S&P 500 had fallen by 11 percent. Once more the Fed paused, a decision vindicated over the summer when markets reacted to Brexit with a spectacular sell-off. A fact too often overlooked by those struggling to understand Hillary Clinton’s defeat in November 2016 is the sheer nervousness about the US economy. Eight years on from 2008, the Sanders-Clinton-Trump contest was not set against the backdrop of a boom. So uncertain was the mood that the Fed did not consider it safe to raise rates until the end of the year, when the Trump bump was in full swing and the specter of global deflation had finally lifted.
II
In 2015–2016 the world economy dodged a third installment of the global crisis. The emerging market recessions remained confined to individual economies—Russia, Brazil, South Africa—and particular commodities—notably oil. The downturn did not become generalized. It did not spread to the advanced economies. The slow recovery of the eurozone, Britain and the United States continued. Too easily forgotten, this fact should frame our understanding of the extraordinary political and geopolitical turmoil of the years since 2013. In the Ukraine crisis the commodity price collapse even worked to the advantage of the West in multiplying the pressure of sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, the Greek drama of 2015, Brexit and Trump’s election all took place against the backdrop of a nervous calm. We did not in 2017 face the full force of Paulson’s question: How would America and the world have fared if Trump at his inauguration had faced the kind of challenges facing Obama in 2009?
But though crisis was avoided in 2015–2016, the stakes were going up. If we go back to the period before 2008, a “China crisis” had seemed in the cards then. But what worried observers was the possibility of a mass sell-off of dollar-denominated assets by China’s reserve managers. As the storm clouds gathered, holding China in place was the first priority of Paulson’s Treasury. And Paulson was willing to pay a high political price for doing so. Brad Setser’s quip was to the point: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “too Chinese to fail.”18 Nationalizing them helped to prevent a simultaneous Atlantic and Chinese crisis with consequences too awful to contemplate. But Paulson’s financial diplomacy also highlights the fact that in 2008, managing Sino-American financial relations was still very much a matter of intergovernmental relations. By contrast, in 2015–2016 not only were the risks on the Chinese side but the people moving the money were private businesses and investors. In less than ten years, Chinese commercial and financial integration had come a staggeringly long way. Given the narrative unfolded in this book, this has daunting implications.
This book has examined the struggle to contain the crisis in three interlocking zones of deep private financial integration: the transatlantic dollar-based financial system, the eurozone and the post-Soviet sphere of Eastern Europe. The challenges were immense. The implosion entangled both public and private finances in a doom loop. Bank failures forced scandalous government intervention to rescue private oligopolists. The Fed acted across borders to provide liquidity to banks in other countries. The crisis spilled over into a question of international relations: Germany and Greece, the UK and the eurozone, the United States and the EU. And those questions were not posed in a power-political vacuum but in a geopolitical force field, graphically illustrated by the clashes with Russia over the destiny of Georgia and Ukraine. The challenges were mind-bogglingly technical and complex. They were vast in scale. They were fast moving. Between 2007 and 2012, the pressure was relentless.
In its own terms, as a capitalist stabilization effort, the response patched together by the US Treasury and the Fed was remarkably successful. Its aim was to restore the viability of the banks. It not only did that but also provided massive liquidity and monetary stimulus to the entire dollar-based financial system, to Europe and the emerging markets beyond. All the more telling was the inability of the Democratic Party that carried the brunt of the effort to capitalize in political terms. In fact, TARP and the bailouts became dirty words and the Fed suffered a spectacular loss of legitimacy. Overshadowed by memories of 2008, the 2016 election delivered a stark verdict. With Trump as president and the Republicans dominating Congress, it is an open question whether the American political system will support even basic institutions of globalization, let alone any adventurous crisis fighting at a national or global level.
Faced with this American abdication, one might once have suggested that the euro area could provide an alternative. But the failure of the ECB, Germany and France to devise a workable crisis-fighting strategy made the euro into a source of danger and instability for the world economy between 2010 and 2015. If it was saved, it was in large part due to outside pressure and assistance. Nor is it reassuring that the necessary measures were for a painfully long time resisted by Germany, the eurozone’s most powerful member. Far from seeing Europe as a promising partner for global economic governance, Beijing and the rest of the G20 were repeatedly left wondering what on earth the Europeans were up to.19 The Germans might reply that they were teaching discipline, forcing Europe to prepare for a future of global competition. But what use was that if not only Greece but Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy were overwhelmed by the immediate crisis? Finally, in 2012, what Monti politely referred to as the “mental block” was overcome. The ECB’s newfound activism stab
ilized bond markets. But further progress on the essential financial underpinnings of banking union have been painfully slow and Berlin still blocks the path to the issuance by Europe of a common safe asset, aka eurobonds.20 As ever, the Franco-German axis is key. In 2017 the vote for Macron was a vote for Europe. Not for Europe as it stands, but for a new course.21 That depends on Germany. In May 2017, faced with the disaster of Trump’s foreign policy, Merkel declaimed the need for Europe to forge its own path. But whether Berlin will be a partner for such a project after the German elections of 2017 is an open question. The rise of the AfD is ominous. It is now largely known as a racist anti-immigrant and refugee party. But it had its origins in 2013 in furious right-wing reaction to Draghi and the ECB. No less consequential for Europe is the end of the grand coalition. The role of the FDP in Merkel’s handling of the eurozone crisis in 2010–2012 was baneful, as was that of the right-wing CSU in Bavaria. At the time of writing, Europe waits for the formation of a new German government.
The transatlantic relationship is not built on money alone, of course. It is meshed with deep cultural, political, diplomatic and military relations. And those extended, or at least so it seemed, to Eastern Europe, which was so eagerly integrated into the EU and NATO in the early 2000s. In East Asia, America’s alliance system was always more loosely knit. And the victory of the West in the cold war was far from complete. China’s economic triumph is a triumph for the Communist Party. This is still the fundamental reason for doubting the possibility of truly deep cooperation with China in global economic governance. Unlike South Korea, Japan or Europe, China is not a subordinate part of the American global network. When the United States extended swap lines in 2008, it was acting in a zone that is both a depoliticized realm of economic activity and yet framed by a deep power relationship. The politics of Chinese foreign investment and suspicion of the role played by its state-owned enterprises suggest that deeply shared economic interests, of the kind that legitimated the Fed’s swap lines for Europe, will be far harder to develop. And experience on the frontier of Western power in Eastern Europe hardly gives grounds for optimism about the ability of either Washington or the Europeans to conduct financial diplomacy in areas of real geopolitical tension. During the height of the crisis in 2008–2009, the West was, frankly, neglectful of Eastern Europe, despite the fact that talk of NATO expansion had led to a war with Russia in Georgia only weeks before the outbreak of the crisis in August 2008. In 2009, significantly, it was veterans of the George H. W. Bush administration who were warning that Eastern and Western Europe were once more at risk of dividing. Then, in 2013, the EU sleepwalked into confrontation with Putin over Ukraine. And all of this at a moment when the Obama administration was pushing TPP, seen in Beijing as aggressive containment, and Japan and China were confronting each other over rocky islands in the East China Sea. No doubt the Trump administration is unpredictable, but it was on Obama’s watch, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, that relations with Russia and China escalated to this degree. Russia survived sanctions because of its reserves. China’s resources are far larger. Perhaps they are such that one does not need to envision a world of truly close cooperation between the Fed and the PBoC. But those Chinese reserves are the result of the system of financial regulation and exchange control that the West has for so long criticized. China’s ability to stop the drain of its foreign exchange reserves involved a renewed tightening of those controls. In economic terms it was only partially successful. And within China itself it involves a power struggle between those parts of the elite whose primary concern is to get their wealth to safety and the regime managers struggling to preserve stability. Huge financial risks remain. As the great economist Abba Lerner once cuttingly remarked, “Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain.”22 The future of China’s political economy and its relations with the West do not belong to that domain.
III
The events of 2015–2016 in China recall another major theme of this book. Even to a regime as competent and well informed as that of China, the economic setbacks came suddenly and unexpectedly. We have various words for this—panic, crisis, freeze, implosion, run, sudden arrest, sudden stop, radical uncertainty—and all these descriptions of what has happened or has threatened to happen to the global financial system since 2007 point to one thing: the fact that on top of the structural, slow-moving tensions that global integration may generate, it also produces sudden ruptures, events that cannot be fully accounted for or reduced to structural terms, or regulated by law. These crises are hard to predict or define in advance. They are not anticipated and often deeply complex. And they are urgent. Such moments demand counteracting intervention. They demand action. It is this juxtaposition that frames the narrative of this book: large organizations, structures and processes on the one hand; decision, debate, argument and action on the other.
One way to think of such moments is in terms of the metaphors of emergency, or of firefighting. Among American crisis fighters, military vocabulary was commonplace: maximum force, the Powell Doctrine, shock and awe, big bazooka. But one might also say that what is called for is that intangible and volatile thing, political leadership and action. This depends on formulating plans and programs, rallying support and fending off opposition.
When the financial crisis escalated in the waning days of the Bush administration in 2008, doubts about American leadership were rife. And as far as the Republican Party was concerned, they were amply justified. At that critical moment the Republican Party failed as the bracket between its mass base and the imperatives of systemic stabilization. It was that experience that Paulson saw reenacted in even more extreme form in 2016, in the disempowerment of the Republican elite and the selection of Trump as candidate. In 2008 the systemic interest in a bailout was obvious. It extended across the Atlantic. But in its political essentials it took a fragile cross-party coalition assembled by elite Republicans and the Democratic Party leadership to hold the United States together and provide the underpinnings for the global stabilization efforts of the Fed and the Treasury. America’s subsequent political polarization and Trump’s election in 2016 throw the historic significance of that coalition once more into stark relief.
This is the American side of the drama. As such it has global significance. But it has its counterparts everywhere touched by the crisis. In Europe and in Asia too. The eurozone crisis posed the question over and over again. How could coalitions be assembled for unpopular but essential actions? Whose will, stamina, endurance, interests and willingness to compromise would prevail? It is shocking, perhaps, that this degree of indeterminacy should characterize one of the most vital pivots of the global order. But building such ad hoc and lopsided political coalitions is what the governance of capitalism under democratic conditions entails. In the twentieth century, it was what made the difference between the Treaty of Versailles and the Marshall Plan, or Herbert Hoover’s and FDR’s responses to the Great Depression. The political in “political economy” demands to be taken seriously.
Since 2007 the scale of the financial crisis has placed that relationship between democratic politics and the demands of capitalist governance under immense strain. Above all, this strain has manifested itself not in a crisis of popular participation, or the ultimate control of policy by elected leaders, but in a crisis in the political parties that have historically mediated the two. It has tested their programs, their coherence and their ability to mobilize support, and they have been found wanting. In many countries this has swept away the moderate parties of the Left, in Greece and France most notably. They paid the price for their inability to constructively counter the stresses of the eurozone crisis. In the Bundestag election of 2017, both of the two main parties in Germany, widely seen as the country that came through the crisis least affected, slumped to historic lows in popularity. In the United States and Britain it is the mainstream parties of the Right that have suffered
the critical fracture, with dramatic consequences in the form of Brexit and potentially even more far-reaching implications from the increasing incoherence of the Republicans in the United States. The GOP commands an impressive vote-winning organization, a take-no-prisoners media machine, deep fund-raising resources. But to judge by the record of the last ten years, it is incapable of legislating or cooperating effectively in government.
Given the once fashionable view that we live in an age of postdemocracy, or even postpolitics, the significance of these strictly political developments comes as something of a surprise. By dint of their massive weight, complex social systems such as the financial markets, and apparatuses like the modern state and the interstate system that it inhabits, create a sense of solidity. They make us doubt whether they could possibly be amenable to political agency, decision or debate. We suspect technocratic preemption and usurpation around every corner and often with good reason. There are ways of describing the operations of these systems that void the presence of politics. But if a history such as this has any purpose, it is to reveal the poverty of such accounts. Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant “systems” and “machines” and apparatuses of financial engineering. Success and failure, stability and crisis, can indeed pivot on particular moments of choice. It is not for nothing that we refer to a “Lehman moment.” And there were others: Deauville; Cannes 2011; “whatever it takes”; not to mention the Brexit referendum or the jaw-dropping American election of November 2016.