Research Papers on Ready to Eat Food

CRISES Paul Krugman, January 2010 As this is formally chronicle on this program as the Nobel lecture, I suppose that Im expect to focus on the work for which I was honored with the prize. And in so far proud as I am of the work I and legion(predicate) other(a)s did on increasing-returns trade and economic geography, given what is happening in the orb and given what Ive vauntinglyly been running(a) on these past twelve years that work is non upper to the highest degree in my mind. Fortunately, on that points an out.The Nobel committee did cite another line of work that goes back to the out hard-boiled good paper I ever wrote A model of equipoise of payments crises, published in 1979 simply originally written while I was in still in grad school. When Im in an expansive mood, I like to say that I invented property crises not the thing itself, which goes back to the invention of paper money, but the modern academic writings. And business has been good ever since.Now, m ost of what has gone wrong with the domain of a function these past two years has not stockpilen the form of upright silver crises (though give it clock the Baltic nations, in particular, seem soundly positioned to follow in Argentinas footsteps). provided in that respect atomic number 18 strong parallels among the kinds of crises we rattling leave been experiencing and what those of us in the notes crisis biz call third-generation crises. Both the similarities and the differences are, I think, illuminating. 1So without but ado, let me launch into a discussion of currency crises, their relationship to fiscal crises in general, and what all of that tells us round on-line(prenominal) prospects. A storey of violence The sudden implosion of world monetary markets, trade, and industrial production in 2008 shocked many if not most economists. I think its fair to say, however, that planetary macroeconomists were less startled. Thats not to say that we predicted the cr isis speechmaking in person, I saw that we had a monstrous housing sing and expect bad things as it deflated, but two the form and the scale of the crease surprised me.What is true, however, is that international macroeconomists were a contende, in a way those who foc utilize in the first place on domestic data were not, that the world frugality has a tarradiddle of violence. Drastic events sudden sorry attacks that emerge out of a manifestly clear blue sky, abrupt economic implosions that slash very gross domestic product by 5, 10, even 15 percent are regular occurrences on the international scene. Let me illustrate the point with the figure below, which shows peak-to-trough declines in real gross domestic product during third generation currency crises (a term Ill pardon in a little while).This list is close to, but not identical to, the Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) list of banking crises as R&R point out, crises ofttimes combine elements of several of their i fill out types. What Ive done in this cocktail dress in a poor mans homage to Reinhart and Rogoffs awesome data-collection effort is scan the Total Economy Database for all cases of s come up GDP declines in high-and middle-income countries since 1950, then do some cursory historic research to ask whether they fit the profile of a third-generation crisis. 2 GDP declines in third-generation currency crises Mexico 1994 Korea 1997 Chile 1981 Malaysia 1997 Finland 1990 Thailand 1997 Indonesia 1997 Argentina 2002 5 10 15 20 A few observations First of all, were talking huge declines here Depression-level, in some cases. You can see why international macroeconomists were more attuned to the possibility of disaster than domestic macroeconomists if you were looking only at US data, your idea of a really bad slump would be 1981-1982, when real GDP fell only 2. 3 percent. Second, if you k instantly a bit about the history, you get a very strong mother wit of just how wrong conventional wisdom c an be.Reinhart and Rogoff emphasize the this time is diametrical syndrome, the way people wave off clear parallels to former crises. Id go a bit further and argue that theres a strong pride goeth before a take syndrome. In many if not all of these cases, the dry land in gesture was everybodys darling just before the disaster. Chile was a showpiece for Chicago School policies in action. I remember personally the enormous optimism about Mexico on the eve of the tequila crisis I was very less-traveled at a 1993 meeting of investors where I raised some questions about prospects.Argentinas currency board was lionized by the Cato Institute, the Wall highway daybook editorial page, and so forth. The countries caught up in the eastern hemisphere Asian crisis were the subject of glowing reports, including a study World Bank study. 3 by and by the incident, of course, everybody saw many flaws in each afflicted countrys economic model just as everyone now sees the depravity of t he U. S. financial system, a system that was being praised just yesterday as one of the wonders of the world. Finally, note that half my examples are from the late-90s easternmost Asian crisis.That crisis had a profound effect on some of us. Nouriel Roubini was transformed from a mild macroeconomist into Doctor Doom. I lost my faith in the meliorate powers of central bankers, and wrote the original edition of The Return of Depression Economics. In essence, the East Asian crisis awakened us to the particular that there were more dangers in the world economy than were dreamt of in textbook macro. unless what were these dangers, anyway? Generat(ion)ing crisis solely crises are divided into three parts. OK, whitethornbe not. But the currency risis literature has evolved in three generations, successive accounts of what can cause sudden speculative attacks on currencies. First-generation models began, at least(prenominal) in my mind, with wise words from the regulator of the Bank of Portugal. Back in 1976, a group of MIT graduate students was working at the Bank, thanks to a personal connection between the regulator and Dick Eckaus. Portugal at the time was 4 a bit of a crazy place, still suffering from the mild chaos that followed the overthrow of the dictatorship the year before.The economy had stabilized after an initial slump, but the currency was chthonic pressure, with reserves rapidly dwindling. It turned out later that most of the reserve loss was imputable to strange exchange hoarding by commercial banks which was kind of funny, since at the time those banks were state owned. But in any case, the governor made a remark that intrigued me When I hurl six months of reserves, he said, I go out corroborate no reserves. What he meant was that once reserves dropped below some critical level, there would be a run on the currency that would quickly exhaust any(pre tokenish) was left.There were already economic models like this, albeit of very recent time of origin and not only about foreign exchange. Notably, Salant and Henderson (1978, but circulated as a working paper in 1976), in an compendium of gold prices, inclined part of their paper to attempts to stabilize gold prices with stockpiles. They showed that an unsustainable stabilization scheme would at last collapse in a speculative run that quickly faltering the remaining stock, which is more or less what happened in March 1968. I realized that this was in effect what Silva Lopes had been saying about the escudo.Translating that acuteness into a fully-specified model was a bit tricky. Krugman (1979) was more complicated than it should view been it took the work of Flood and Garber (1984) to get it in comprehensible form. But the bequeath was a extremely suggestive analysis of speculative attacks on stiff exchange rates. 5 But there were puzzles with that analysis. Some complained about the un commensurateness between super smart speculators and super stupid pr esidencys. More compelling, in my view, was the fact that the story didnt seem to fit very well with what actually happened in many currency crises, peculiarly in good countries.For example, neither the superior crisis of 1931 nor that of 1992 seemed to be mainly about dwindling foreign exchange reserves. Instead, both seemed to be about governments who found that their commitment to a fixed exchange rate was interfering with attempts to achieve domestic objectives, especially full employment. When speculators began to bet on an abandonment of the currency peg to deal with pressing domestic concerns, spiking interest rates sharply increased the bell of defending that peg hence, a crisis, with speculators in effect forcing the governments hand.In an influential survey of evidence from the 1992-1993 European crisis, of which the fall of sterling was one component, Eichengreen, Rose, and Wyplosz (1995) coined the term secondgeneration models to describe models that tried to captur e this quite different kind of crisis dynamics. The most influential modeling came from Obstfeld (1994), who showed that this kind of analysis powerfully suggested the possibility of multiple equilibria countries in a vulnerable state could get word a currency crisis whenever investors believed that such a crisis was imminent, or for that matter believed that other investors believed in a crisis.But two generations of crisis theory, it turned out, were not enough. Second-generation crisis models suggested that succumbing to a speculative attack should be good for employment and GDP no longer constrained by the exchange rate commitment, a government would be free to 6 expand demand. That is, in fact, what happened in the wash of the two sterling crises, 60 years apart I used to joke that Britain should erect a statue of George Soros in Trafalgar Square, to thank him for acquiring the UK out of the ERM.But its not what happened to Mexico after the tequila crisis, or the East Asian e conomies after the crises of 1997, or Argentina after the collapse of convertibility in 2002. In all these cases the collapse of a fixed rate under speculative attack was followed by a severe contraction in the real economy. Hence the development of third-generation models. These models e. g. Krugman (1999), Aghion et al (2001), Chang and Velasco (1999) emphasized private-sector balance sheets, especially firms or banks with foreign-currency debt.The key argument was that a currency derogation set off by speculative attack would sharply worsen balance sheets, as the domesticcurrency rank of foreign-currency debt rose. This in turn would damage the economy, e. g. by uncheerful investment, which would feed back into further currency depreciation, and so on. Some models worried the possibility of multiple equilibria, but even without such multiplicity there was the clear possibility of disproportionate depreciation and out couch decline from an adverse shock, including the end of a bubble payd by foreign capital.Or to put it a different way, what happens in a third-generation currency crisis is a fell circle of deleveraging. Hence the severe cost to the real economy. One question you mightiness ask is whether this diagnosis is all ex-post rationalization. Did the theory of third-generation currency crises actually succeed in predicting any crises? The answer is yes Argentina, which, alas, played out exactly as expected. 7 Before I proceed to the relationship between currency crises and the financial crises that have afflicted all of us recently, let me briefly ighlight two form _or_ system of government issues that arise in the context of third-generation crises. First, does this analysis argue that troubled economies with large foreign-currency debt should subjugate currency depreciation? This is a highly relevant question right now for the Baltics, which, as Ive already mentioned, are currently in a situation highly reminiscent of Argentinas position just before the collapse. It might seem, given the account Ive just provided, that Latvia or Estonia should do anything doable to avoid devaluation. But thats not right.Suppose that the underlying problem is a level of prices and wages that makes your production uncompetitive typically the mo of an earlier period of excessive capital inflows. Then what must happen, kinda or later, is a decline in prices and wages relative to those in your trading partners a real depreciation. This can happen through nominal currency depreciation but this has the unpleasant consequence that the real value of foreign currency debt will rise, creating a deleveraging crisis. Unfortunately, the alternative is worse. Real depreciation without nominal depreciation must take place through deflation.And this operator that the real value of all debt, not just foreigncurrency debt, rises. So the deleveraging crisis will be even worse if you dont depreciate. 8 A second issue concerns the role of capital mobility. Clearly, substantial capital mobility is a prerequisite for third-generation crises, which cant happen unless youve already run up a large foreign-currency debt. And in the crisis, its capital flight that leads to the large depreciation that in turn worsens balance sheets. So there is a clear case for temporary capital controls a sort of curfew on capital flight in the heat of a third-generation currency crisis.But what does all this have to do with the current problems of the United States and other groundbreaking countries? Deleveraging crises similarities and differences In the movie The Longest Day theres a scene involving a German general who is first shown preparing for a war game in which he will play the American commander. He tells his aide that he plans to surprise everyone by landing, not at Calais, but in Normandy but not to worry, the Americans would never do that. Then, when the invasion begins, he mutters, Normandy How stupid of me Now you know how some of us felt as the current crisis unfolded. By 2006, huge U. S. urrent account deficits suggested that the dollar would have to fall eventually, and the fact that U. S. real interest rates werent significantly high than rates in other major economies suggested that markets werent taking that fact into account. So there was reason to expect a Wile E. brush wolf moment a moment of sudden realization leading to a 9 sudden dollar fall. But U. S. external debt, although large, is overwhelmingly dollar-denominated. So America didnt seem vulnerable to a third-generation currency crisis. No worries, then, right? Yet the logic of the models should have suggested that there were, in fact, reasons to worry.After all, a vicious circle of deleveraging could arise as easily on the asset side as on the liability side, as historied in Krugman (2002). It should have been easy to put the evidence of a big housing bubble together with the concepts of third-generation crisis theory to see how a m ean deleveraging cycle could occur without the original sin of dependence on foreign-currency debt. Sadly, about nobody certainly not yours truly put the pieces together. Even those of us who diagnosed that housing bubble correctly failed to foresee the financial implosion that would follow.Normandy How stupid of me But now it has happened. How does the crisis we have actually stumbled into compare with a currency crisis, both in terms of outlook and in terms of the policy chemical reaction? One difference one might have expected to be important is the role of monetary policy. The normal front line of defense force against recession involves cutting interest rates. For a country facing a currency crisis, however, that defense is of ambiguous value cutting rates may help domestic demand, but it may also weaken the currency, intensify the vicious circle.For a country facing an asset-side deleveraging spiral, however, interest rate reductions are all good in 10 addition to their usual effects, they persist asset prices and help balance sheets. So you might have expected central banks to be very effective in fighting asset-price-driven deleveraging. In reality, however, the monetary line of defense was quickly overrun reductions in policy rates quickly ran up against the zero lower bound, and that was that, at least as far as conventional monetary policy was concerned.We should have seen this coming Krugman (2002) laid it all out, but nobody the author include took the message to heart. Meanwhile, theres another difference between currency crises and asset-side crises that makes the latter look worse namely, the fact that asset-price deflation, unlike currency depreciation, has no indirect stimulative effect on the economy. As Calvo et al (2006) have stressed, financial crises in emerging markets are often followed by phoenix-like recoveries, with the downswing giving way to very rapid growth.Key to these recoveries is the fact that a severely depreciated currency makes exports extremely competitive, leading to a large electropositive swing in the trade balance. As with the outturn declines associated with third-generation crises, the violence of these turnarounds is take aback to economists accustomed to the tameness of U. S. data. The figure below shows the current account shiner for each of the cases shown at the beginning of this paper that is, the extent of the swing from current account deficit on the eve of the crisis to the maximum current account surplus following the crisis. 1 Current account reversal as % of GDP 0 Mexico 1994 Korea 1997 Chile 1981 Malaysia 1997 Finland 1990 Thailand 1997 Indonesia 1997 Argentina 2002 5 10 15 20 25 These are awesomely large swings. In part, no doubt, they were due to the import-compressing effect of recession. But mostly they represent a gain in competitiveness due to plunging currencies. Plunging prices of houses and CDOs, unfortunately, dont produce any fit macroeconomic silver lin ing. This suggests that were un in all likelihood to see a phoenix-like retrieval from the current slump.How long should recovery be expected to take? Well, there arent many useful historical models. But the example that comes nighest to the situation facing the United States today is that of Japan after its late-80s bubble burst, leaving serious debt problems behind. And a maximum-likelihood estimate of how long it will take to recover, based on the Japanese example, is forever. OK, strictly speaking its 18 years, since thats how long it has been since the Japanese bubble burst, and Japan has never really escaped from its deflationary trap. 2 This line of thought explains why Im skeptical about the optimism thats widespread right now about recovery prospects. The main argument behind this optimism seems to be that in the past, big downturns in the worlds major economies have been followed by fast recoveries. But past downturns had very different causes, and theres no good reason to regard them as good precedents. life in a crisis-ridden world Looking back at U. S. commentary on past currency crises, whats striking is the combination of moralization and complacency.Other countries had crises because they did it wrong we werent going to have one because we do it right. As Ive stressed, however, crises often perhaps usually happen to countries with capacious press. Theyre only reclassified as sinners and deadbeats after things go wrong. And so it has prove for us, too. And despite the praise being handed out to those who helped us avoid the worst, we are not handling the crisis well fiscal stimulus has been inadequate, financial support has contained the damage but not restored a healthy banking system. wholly indications are that were going to have seriously depressed output for years to come.Its what I feared/predicted in that 2001 paper Intellectually consistent solutions to a domestic financial crisis of this type, like solutions to a third-generati on currency crisis, are likely to seem too radical to be implemented in practice. And fond(p) measures are likely to fail. 13 Maybe policymakers will become wiser in the future. Maybe financial reform will reduce the occurrence of crises major financial crises were much rarer between the end of World War II and the rise of financial deregulation after 1980 than they were before or since.Meanwhile, however, the fact is that the economic world is a surprisingly dangerous place. REFERENCES Aghion, Philippe, Philippe Bacchetta, and Abhijit Banerjee, 2000, Currency Crises and financial Policy with Credit Constraints (unpublished Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University). Chang, Roberto and Andres Velasco 1999, Liquidity Crises in Emerging Markets theory and Policy, NBER Working Paper No. 7272. Eichengreen, Barry, Rose, Andrew, Wyplosz, Charles and Dumas, Bernard, Exchange Market Mayhem The Antecedents and slipstream of Speculative Attacks, Economic Policy, October.Flood, Robert, and Peter Garber 1984, Collapsing Exchange Rate Regimes Some elongated Examples, ledger of International Economics, Vol. 17, pp. 113. Krugman, Paul, 1979, A Model of Balance of Payments Crises, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 11, pp. 311-325. Krugman, Paul, 1999, Balance Sheets, The Transfer Problem, and Financial Crises, in Flood, Robert, Isard, Peter, Razin, Assaf, and Rose, Andrew, eds. , International finance and financial crises essays in honor of Robert P . Flood, Jr. , Kluwer.Krugman, Paul 2002, Crises the succeeding(prenominal) generation in Assaf Razin, Elhanan Helpman, and Efraim Sadka, eds. , Economic policy in the international economy essays in honor of Assaf Razin, Cambridge. Obstfeld, Maurice 1994, The Logic of Currency Crises, Cahiers Economiques et Monetaires, Bank of France, Vol. 43, pp. 189-213. Reinhart, Carmen and Rogoff, Kenneth 2009, This Time is antithetic Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton. Salant, Stephen and Henderson, Dale 1978, Market Anticipations of Government Policies and the Price of Gold, Journal of Political Economy 14