Roubini and Taleb: Government’s Socialization of Losses Is Destroying the Real Economy
by ilene - September 18th, 2009 1:49 am
Roubini and Taleb: Government’s Socialization of Losses Is Destroying the Real Economy
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
In an essay last month, Nouriel Roubini wrote:
This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest…
The releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending.
Roubini has previously written:
We’re essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and…losses socialized.
Now Nassim Nicholas Taleb is saying the same thing:
After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.
[Interviewer]: But aren’t those the very problems we’re supposed to be fixing?
NT: They’re all still here. Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient’s symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.
[Interviewer]: Are you saying the U.S. shouldn’t have done all those bailouts? What was the alternative?
NT: Blood, sweat and tears. A lot of the growth of the past few years was fake growth from debt. So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up. I gather you’re not too impressed with the folks in Washington who are handling this crisis.
Ben Bernanke saved nothing! He shouldn’t be allowed in Washington. He’s like a doctor who misses the metastatic tumour and