Paul Krugman: Revenge of the Glut

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/opinion/02krugman.html?_r=1

Remember the good old days, when we used to talk about the “subprime crisis” — and some even thought that this crisis could be “contained”? Oh, the nostalgia!

Today we know that subprime lending was only a small fraction of the problem. Even bad home loans in general were only part of what went wrong. We’re living in a world of troubled borrowers, ranging from shopping mall developers to European “miracle” economies. And new kinds of debt trouble just keep emerging.

How did this global debt crisis happen? Why is it so widespread? The answer, I’d suggest, can be found in a speech Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave four years ago. At the time, Mr. Bernanke was trying to be reassuring. But what he said then nonetheless foreshadowed the bust to come.


(snip)
If you want to know where the global crisis came from, then, think of it this way: we’re looking at the revenge of the glut.

And the saving glut is still out there. In fact, it’s bigger than ever, now that suddenly impoverished consumers have rediscovered the virtues of thrift and the worldwide property boom, which provided an outlet for all those excess savings, has turned into a worldwide bust.

One way to look at the international situation right now is that we’re suffering from a global paradox of thrift: around the world, desired saving exceeds the amount businesses are willing to invest. And the result is a global slump that leaves everyone worse off.

So that’s how we got into this mess. And we’re still looking for the way out.

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1. Good article.

"And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another. All three nations are in deep crisis now."


Yes - they were supposed to be successful examples of Free Market philosophies. Those three countries should create statues of people stomping on Ayn Rand's books.