Germany is Old too

So, the butcher's bill on Ireland is in and stands at 85 billion Euro jointly financed by the EU (the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) and the European Financial Stability Mechanism), the IMF and bilateral loans from a number of countries including Sweden, Denmark and the UK. Of course, it only worked a couple of hours and today markets are reeling again in the face of the Eurozone crisis which seem to have no end. Worryingly, markets seem to be contend on going for all together larger game this time around with Spanish bonds bearing the brunt of the attention.

In principle and fact I agree with RBS' Harvinder Singh (via FT Alphaville's Neil Hume) that the only possible end game at this point is that things get so bad that some form of fiscal unity and/or a joint Eurozone pooling of risk through the issuance of an EMU bond. Illuminati's Jim O'Neill is a little more sanguine although he ultimately also invokes the point that the core and especially Germany must go all in, in its effort and comittment to keep the Eurozone in one piece.

I know that all this may come of as scaremongerings, but the farther we move forward into this mess, the more it is beginning to look like calm and calculated analysis rather than prophecies of doom.

So, Can Germany Pay?

On that note, I thought that I would highlight an issue which has not yet been debated much in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. In this sense, we always hear about CDS or yield spreads to Germany and still; to the extent that we are talking "EU money" we know that  it is the German taxpayer who must foot the majority of the bill.

So, can Germany really pay all this?

The recent economic narrative on Germany suggests that it can. In fact, Germany has been hailed as the rock onto which all other shipwrecked European economies must turn to in the hour of need with GDP growth rates in Q2 and Q3 (2010) exceeding expectations. And with the German export machine back in full swing, there seems to be nothing standing in the way of Germany saving the world, let alone Europe.

Now, this is not entirely true of course and one major part of the difficulties encountered in the course of the past months has been the obvious (and natural) resistance of the German taxpayer in simply accepting to pay for the mistakes and overspending of others. And one would assume that the reluctance to do so stems not only from a feeling of unfairness, but also from a genuine fear that Germany simply won't be able to pay even if the good intentions can be mustered in the first place. As such the following point emphasized today by a friend of mine is important;

Spain’s external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% (closer to 90% today) of GDP more than it has external assets. As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I. We don’t know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

So, when Merkel notes that bondholders must also share the losses she is naturally referring to the fact that Germany cannot be expected to bailout all the Eurozone's periphery's international investors. However, what she is perhaps forgetting is that Germany itself holds a non-neglieble amount of those very same net external assets that Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have built up.

However, even considering this point, the reality is still that as the economic conditions of the periphery has deteriorated and morphed into a calamity so it seems that the well known structural problems of the so-called core have been forgotten. Beauty, wealth and economic travails are as most other things a relative entity it seems.

On that note, allow me turn the tables on the discourse a little. Consequently,  the Economist recently ran a special report on Japan essentially focusing almost entirely on the fact that Japan is the most rapidly ageing economy in the world and this represents the main challenge for Japan as an economy and as a society. I am a demographic fan boy, I know, but still the analysis in the Economist makes sense. Deal with the demographic challenge or else ...

So, which economy might then be the second most rapidly ageing economy in the world? Right, you guessed it; Germany.

(click on pictures for better viewing)

I should think that these charts are rather self-explanatory and note in this context that the German debt/GDP has gone from about 63% of GDP in 2007 to 84% in 2010. Further, according to the IMF this will increase to just hy of 90% in 2014. Naturally, none of these calculations factor in any extra liabilities Germany will have to assume to keep the Eurozone together in that period, so your guess is as good as mine as to the final figure in 2015.

The question which seems to whisper in the wind (and which may sooner rather than later turn into a roar) is then just how Germany is going to be able to shoulder all those bailouts when the real bailout it needs to think is the one of its own welfare state as the weight of population ageing sets in. Of course, Germany could in principle sacrifice any build up of assets in Asia, Latin America and the rest of the emerging world and devote its entire surplus powers to financing excess investment and consumption in the Eurozone periphery and Eastern Europe ad infinitum. But somehow, this does not strike me as a viable long term solution since this has already been tried and well, it got us into this mess in the first place. 

I guess, the contrarian Masters of the Universe might immediately see this as a case for buying German CDS in a punt on the event that the benchmark itself came under pressure. I think this would be premature, but there is definitely a narrative and discourse missing in the current Eurozone debacle not about whether Germany is willing to pay, but indeed, whether she will be able too.

Demographics and the Anatomy of International Capital Flows

In a week where the deck of cards that make up the Eurozone got its so far largest jolt and where there is now not only an imminent danger of a total economic collapse in Greece but also, much more worryingly, signs that Germany herself are beginning to tire of a common monetary union I thought it would be nice to take a longer term and structural perspective on the global economy. And what better way to do this than to dig into the world of academia.

As some of you may know I recently earned my degree from the Copenhagen Business School and on that occasion I also produced a thesis which I'd like to share here.

This thesis is built upon two core arguments. The first is the notion that the demographic transition should be narrated through the perspective of ageing rather than population growth and the second is that ageing on a macroeconomic level represents a strong driver of international capital flows. These two arguments are used to discuss the standard prediction in a life cycle framework that ageing leads to dissaving in the aggregate and thus how old economies should tend towards running current account deficits. Using Japan and Germany as the subjects of analysis, this thesis develops the idea that rapidly ageing societies are not, in the main, characterized by dissaving but rather by the fight against it. Finally, a small empirical exercise acts as a perspectivation on the results to suggest why ageing might lead to a reliance on exports and foreign asset income to achieve growth and what this means in a global context.

In many ways, the ideas, thoughts and arguments that have gone into this work are shaped by the discussions and the activity here at this space and my interaction with the people I have come to know through my online presence. In this way, it is only apt that I present it here I think.

I believe that works such as this (and any other academic/economic piece of research) should be judged on two separate accounts. One is its contribution to the methodology, discourse and lingo of its specific academic field which in my case is international macroeconomics and the second is on its contribution to the more market and policy oriented aspect of its topical sphere which in this case is the international economy and in particular global current account imbalances. I believe my thesis has something to offer on both accounts.

On the first, I will immediately disappoint the purists in announcing that my thesis does not develop a new model although I believe there are clear pathways from the arguments for anyone who likes to tinker with neo-classical modelling. In stead, I think there are two important points that I would like to emphasize as future reference and working points for my academic colleagues.

The first is that economists need a much more broad and dynamic theory of demographic changes than is the original idea of a demographic transition. In my thesis I present this through an attempted coup de grace of the notion that demographic changes should be seen through the perspective of population growth. As an alternative I propose a focus on population ageing. In itself this is not controversial and is already an inbuilt narrative in many (if not most) macroeconomic studies that deal with demographic change [1]. However, my aim here is more fundamental. What I consequently want to establish is the simple fact that the demographic transition is not over and not only that, it is non-linear and path dependent. Once we realize this, it opens up a whole new area of research in which macroeconomics is fused with anthropology and life course theory (sociology) in a way which I believe is crucial in order to truly understand what the macroeconomy, as we tend to call it, actually is.

Second, I raise and discuss the issue of dissaving as a function of old age. Specifically, I imply (although I do not show formally) that what may appear obvious on the microeconomic level may not be so obvious on the macroeconomic level. In other words, there is a an aggregation problem [2] here and it is exactly tied to the fact that while dissaving may seem imminently rational and inevitable in a microeconomic perspective it is not all obvious to me why societies as a whole should want to dissave in the context of persistently low fertility rates and rapid population ageing. Realizing that dissaving will at some point be a binding constraint for e.g. an economy such as a Japan in which ageing simply continues relentlessly, I develop the idea that rapidly ageing societies are not, in the main, characterized by dissaving but rather by the fight against it which has come to represent the key proposition of my thesis. I show this in relation to Germany and Japan as the two oldest economies in the world and try to build frame of reference on which to examine and judge other economies who will inevitably move in the same direction as these two economies.

Finally, and on the second overall account it is with no hesitation whatsoever that I claim how my thesis goes a long way to frame the Gordian knot currently facing the global economy as it exits its worst recession since the great depression. In short, if ageing economies find it difficult to create growth based on domestic demand and momentum and if they are reluctant to rapidly dissave into a very uncertain future where they would rely on foreign credit, the logical consequence is that they must be dependent on exports to grow. Now, the onset and path of this export dependency may vary from country to country, but in a world where all economies are ageing and where, worryingly, a large host of economies are converging to very low levels of fertility, it creates an obvious and practical problem. Who is going to run the deficits to match the desired level of savings of all these ageing economies?

Naturally, not everybody can export at the same time but just take a look at the discussions currently characterising the global economy. Everyone who is claiming a recovery is claiming one on the basis of growth in external demand, but this obviously cannot be true. So, you get the trade wars between China and the US, you get internal squabbles in the Eurozone over whether Germany should sacrifice its competitiveness and just how Greece, Spain etc are suppose to pay down their debt while seeing some form of growth at the same time. All this is about a lot of economies feeling the real and future pressure of deleveraging while only a few brave souls dare to proclaim that they seek growth through domestic sources. Something has to give and one obvious result will be lower trend growth quite simply because there will be lower accumulation of debt either because the capacity to pay off debt has shrunk or because the current level of liabilities disallows any further rapid debt accumulation. However, another consequence will also be an externality represented this higher level of desired external savings present in so many economies at the same time and behind it all, as a the underlying current, I believe is demographic change and how it affects the working of modern capitalist systems.

So, am I going for an early catch of the nobel here?

Hardly and thus the thoughts above represent my attempt to take the conclusions of my work as far as possible (and possibly way too far) on an overall conceptual level. Consequently, if you care to leaf through the thing, you will see lots of concrete empirically rooted points and arguments which are more down to earth than the barrage you have just worked your way through above.

In the end and because of my desire to continue my studies on a PhD level, I have (unconsciously I think) written my thesis with an open end and with many strings that can and should be picked up later. This is naturally what I hope to do in the future. For now, I invite you to have a look and by all means do not read it all, but you may just find some it interesting. Comments of all kinds are naturally welcome.

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[1] - After all, it goes back to the idea of a life cycle and more formally the notion of overlapping generations which are two classic methodological concepts in macroeconomics.

[2] - Aggregation problems are not new of course and have haunted macroeconomic representative agent modelling for a long, long time. However, I think that the specific issue in the context of the life cycle in many ways represent the original sin in the context of aggregation problems (but I may be wrong here).

Down to Earth in Germany?

(click pictures for better viewing)

It was hard not to sense that part of the IMF's recent inquiry into Germany's economy was also aimed at asking the country to eat a little bit of humble pie in the context of the ongoing difficulties facing the Eurozone. Consequently, Germany has been the poster child for the good pupil in class and  an example to follow as the world seemed to have  come to a near end in Greece, Spain and elsewhere. Today's hint from the IMF should alert us to the fact that all is not well in the so-called engine room of Germany.

(quote Bloomberg)

The International Monetary Fund cut its growth forecast for Germany after a recovery in Europe’s largest economy came to a halt, and said the government needs a “credible” plan to reduce its deficit. The IMF expects the German economy to expand 1.2 percent this year and 1.7 percent in 2011, the Washington-based lender said in a report published today. In January, the fund forecast growth of 1.5 percent in 2010 and 1.9 percent next year.

(...)

The IMF urged the German government to foster domestic consumer spending. “Strengthening domestic sources of growth will help cushion the German economy against external shocks as well as benefit the euro-area countries and the global economy by reducing trade and payments imbalances,” according to the report.

(...)

Germany mustn’t lose sight of its goal of fiscal consolidation, and policy makers must be careful as they exit from the economic support measures put in place during the global financial turbulence, the IMF said in the report.

“The authorities face the challenge of sustaining recovery while preparing to exit, as part of an international coordinated strategy, from the extraordinary measures introduced during the crisis,” it said. “Over time, fiscal policy will have to transition from support to credible consolidation.”

There are two concrete points of note above the first about how Germany should see to it that it expanded domestic demand has already gotten plenty of air time not least in the context of Merkel's continuing nein to any suggestion that Germany should aid Southern Europe in their plight through giving a little back in terms providing demand for imports.

The problem is of course that Germany is structurally positionend to be a supplier of a excess savings to the global economy through an external surplus. And the reason, well try almost four decades worth of below replacement fertility and next to non net migration, but I guess most of you know my rant here.

More importantly, this points us to the real underlying issue  in the context of a global economy. In a recent very astute comment, Martin Wolf coined the concept Chermany to signify the folly of Germany and China in believing that they can demand that hitherto prolifigate deficit nations scale down while they continue ramping up external surpluses. This simply does not add up. Wolf really manages a home run with the following observation;

Behind all this is a fundamental divide. Surplus countries insist on continuing just as before. But they refuse to accept that their reliance on export surpluses must rebound upon themselves, once their customers go broke. Indeed, that is just what is happening. Meanwhile, countries that ran huge external deficits in the past can cut the massive fiscal deficits that result from post-bubble deleveraging by their private sectors only via a big surge in their net exports. If surplus countries fail to offset that shift, through expansion in aggregate demand, the world is inevitably caught in a “beggar-my-neighbour” battle: everybody seeks desperately to foist excess supplies on to their trading partners. That was a big part of the catastrophe of the 1930s, too.

So, Germany suffers from a bit of dillusion here. However, what caught my eye in particular was also the IMF's subtle but firm indication that Germany also has to tend to its public finances and now that growth seems to be less vibrant than initially assumed, it is all the more important that Germany takes proactive action sooner rather than later. And herin lies of course the rub since Germany is only surpassed by Japan when it comes to demographic ageing and thus the future liabilities of Germany are substantial.

True; Germany is moving into this with an overall lower level of debt/gdp and if there is something the Germans take pride in, it is their ability to impose self-inflicted pain and austerity to correct and to increase competitiveness and achieve growth from external sources. Yet, this brings us right back smack into the wall here since this is exactly where we don't want Germany to go, but exactly because of the demographic prospects, it is where Germany must go. In this way, Germany needs an external surplus for the same reason that Japan needs one; the expected return in the German economy and the underlying future government liabilities would not allow Germany to finance an external deficit at "acceptable" yields. This is curious in light of that that the yield on German bonds are used as benchmarks for the obvious reason that Germany is a net external lender, but what if this changed?

Of course, this is not only about Germany, but also about the majority of the Eurozone edifice which leaves, yet again the tricky question of just how we are to find those brave economies willing to stand on the opposite part of the scale as ageing and overleveraged economies crowd the savings surplus side.This is really the question we must answer (c.f. Wolf above) even if it is indeed tempting to rely on Germany to do the heavy lifting. So far, the signals from Germany have suggested that this won't happen with the good will of the German government, but ultimately it won't happen because Germany is fundamentally unable to step up to the plate and provide the capacity for the surplus of others.

One would hope that as Germany slowly wakes up to this reality and the limitations of its own economy, it will hopefully bring the country and her politicians back down to earth.