Reply #60: Europe's looming crisis

[Ghost Dog]

Iain Macwhirter (New Statesman)
Published 30 October 2008

It was Europe’s dark secret. While American banks were lending irresponsibly to homeowners who couldn’t pay, European banks were lending to emerging countries who couldn’t pay. Europe’s sub-prime crisis has now come home as heavily-indebted nations of the eastern bloc – Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Baltic states – are collapsing one by one into the arms of the IMF. “Icelandisation” is the new spectre stalking Europe.

And, as with sub-prime in urban America, this latest crisis was shockingly predictable. I visited Latvia at the height of the credit bubble 18 months ago, and it was clearly an accident waiting to happen. Riga, the capital, was bristling with upmarket shopping malls and classy bars that were all quite empty. Stalin-era flats were being sold for $200,000 in a country where the average wage was less than $400 a month. Latvia has hardly any industry, no energy and few natural resources apart from trees. But such was the irrational exuberance of foreign banks like Swedbank, it was awash with credit.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, western European banks have lent more than $1.5trn to eastern Europe. Austria has loans equivalent to 80 per cent of GDP and stands to make huge losses as Hungary and Ukraine collapse.

This week, the Austrian government had to cancel an auction of government bonds because it could not be sure that investors would buy them. It is not inconceivable that Austria itself could end up needing to be rescued.

Other European countries implicated in global sub-prime include Spain, which has loaned immense sums ($316bn) to Latin American countries such as Argentina. Britain has $329bn tied up in Asia - or did until values collapsed in the Asian stock market rout. Japan's Nikkei index fell to a 26-year low this week, wiping out tens of billions of yen. The losses are now winging their way home to British pension funds and banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC.

Banks behaving badly, then, but what's new there? Well, the Bank of England told us this week that global losses so far from the financial crisis amount to $2.8trn. But this includes only a fraction of the likely losses from global sub- prime, which have yet to land on balance sheets.

...

Ultimately, what is needed is an international central bank with the resources to provide liquidity guarantees, recapitalise banks and regulate international financial flows. This is an immense task, and the world may not yet be ready for it. But it is not a new idea: John Maynard Keynes argued for precisely this during the Bretton Woods negotiations in 1944. He even suggested a world reserve currency "bancor". This is the kind of thinking we need today.

The alternative, if nothing is done, is international tension, even war. Consider failing Ukraine with its large Russian population and its dependency on Russia for energy supplies, right at the moment when Russian dreams of becoming an energy superpower have been dashed by the collapse of the oil price bubble. Or look at nuclear Pakistan, where the entire country is disintegrating in financial chaos. And what about China? Will all those unemployed workers - where half the toy manufacturers have gone bust - go peacefully back to the paddy fields?

When heads of the "G20" group of nations meet in Washington on 15 November for what is being called "Bretton Woods II" they will not just be dealing with a banking crisis. They will be deciding the future of civilisation.

/... http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2008/10/european-banks-crisis-imf