financial crisis

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Technology Is the Way Out of Economic Doldrums

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This article originally appeared in National Journal

FAIRFAX, Va.—Tyler Cowen says he’s a “small-l libertarian,” but as the prolific George Mason University economics professor talks about jump-starting the economy, it’s clear his ideology isn’t easy to pigeonhole. Cowen says he believes government can spur innovation, but he’s skeptical of regulations and would slash 80 percent of them. In his 2011 book, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, he argues that we can fix things. The United States, he says, hasn’t lost its greatness.

Cowen, 50, earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard but has further-flung interests. After watching the legendary Spassky–Fischer chess match in 1972, the 10-year-old Cowen started playing the game and, five years later, became the youngest state champion in New Jersey history. He gave up chess for economics. “More interesting,” he says. “And it pays better.”

His curiosity is eclectic. His most recent book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies,explores the food marketplace, which has interested him since age 20, when he first lived abroad in Germany.

“Food is about innovation, small business and big business, entrepreneurship. How do you judge quality? Globalization. Key themes for the world.”

Edited excerpts from an interview follow.

How big an economic fix are we in?

COWEN: It depends on relative to what. We’re still one of the richest countries in the world. A lot of the nonmaterial aspects of our life have gotten a lot better, including social tolerance. So it’s hardly dystopia. But it is still the case we’re planning and spending as if we’ll grow 2 to 3 percent [annually], and we might just grow 1½ percent. That is a disaster. We are not adjusting our expectations to the reality. That said, I do think we will get out of the great stagnation. A lot of the stuff that will get us out of it, we’ve already done. 

Such as?

COWEN: The Internet. The Internet is still [a] somewhat immature technology, and you’ll see education, health care, and retail all fundamentally restructured for the better through the Internet. The Internet and smart machines, software, artificial intelligence—that conjunction of concepts is getting better rapidly. 

Can we return to economic greatness?

COWEN: We have never left greatness. In some ways, you could argue we are the only great country in the world—though Canada and Australia have good claims. In absolute terms, this country has never been better. It’s just the rate of economic improvement has slowed.

Does government have a role in spurring innovation?

COWEN: If you turn on a TV show from, say, the early 1970s, it is remarkable how much life looks familiar. You could take the people from that show and put them [here and now]. Except for computer Internet stuff, they could operate everything. That suggests progress has been slower than [since] earlier in the 20th century. But Internet, computers, artificial intelligence, smartphones—all that has been phenomenal. The government should fund science much, much more—basic research. 

Must we change our expectations of what government will do for people?

COWEN: In terms of spending and borrowing, our expectations have been out of whack with reality since the end of the Clinton administration. Now, these forthcoming technological breakthroughs will help, but we shouldn’t always assume they will translate into tax revenue. You can see a lot of great things coming and still worry about the budget. Take the music sector, which for listeners is better now than it ever has been by a lot. But the revenue in that sector has kind of collapsed. Journalism, too: A lot of stuff is great for readers, not good for revenue. It’s because of technology. We need to be very careful about equating progress with more revenue. For now, this connection between revenue and well-being is a much bigger disconnect than in the past. I sometimes say I am a “happiness optimist” but a “revenue pessimist.”        

The New York Times: Losing Faith in American Institutions

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

As Tyler Cowen (and then I) wrote about earlier this week, trust in government is declining.

The decline in American trust is not unique to government, though, and it’s also not terribly recent.

Gallup has just released its latest figures on Americans’ confidence in various institutions. The numbers are all pretty grim, with new lows recorded for Americans’ confidence levels in public schools, churches, banks and television news.

These latest record-lows were within the margin of sampling error for last year’s measurements, I should note, but the longer-term trend is still down, down, down.

Here’s an interactive chart I put together showing the share of Americans who have expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in a selection of major institutions since 1973:

Click on almost any category charted in the graph above, and you’ll see that confidence has generally been falling. (Mousing over individual data points will show you the specific share of American adults expressing confidence in any given year, too.)

Institutions that have enjoyed a relatively steady increase in public confidence — like the military — are the exception.

It’s not clear why trust in so many major institutions is falling. Clearly the trend predates the financial crisis. Maybe more combative political rhetoric is to blame. Maybe it’s a more sensationalistic, 24-hour news media cycle. Maybe it’s the rising “myth of the meritocracy,” as Christopher Hayes argues in his new book.

Or maybe the relative transparency afforded by the Internet age has given Americans more evidence that the organizations they used to trust can make mistakes.

In any case, if these trends continue, they could further diminish the potency of various policy tools, as Mr. Cowen explained.

(Results for the latest Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted June 7-10 with a random sample of 1,004 adults, 18 or older, living in the 50 states or the District of Columbia. The maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points.)


The New York Times: Broken Trust Takes Time to Mend

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

President Obama caused a stir recently when he said that “the private sector is doing fine” and pinned many of the nation’s economic troubles on a decline in public-sector employment. He cited some interesting numbers, but he didn’t draw the right lesson — namely, that America is witnessing a collapse of trust in politics, including the shaping of its broad economic policy.

Since Mr. Obama took office, 780,000 private sector jobs have been created, while the number of public sector jobs has fallen by about 600,000, mostly at the state and local level. A quick look might suggest that we need only to bolster the number of public sector jobs to have a healthier economy, but there is a deeper way to think about the problem.

State and local governments are controlled by politicians and, indirectly, by voters. And for better or worse, those voters have lost faith in the social returns of these jobs and our ability to afford them. The voters have responded by looking to cut expenses, and they’ve chosen state and local government employment as a target.

During the financial crisis, the prices of stocks, homes and other assets all fell, leaving the American public feeling less wealthy. In fact, the Federal Reserve reported last week that the crisis had erased almost two decades of accumulated prosperity for a typical family. The American economy and its financial system failed a giant stress test, at least when compared with previous expectations. Feeding the fears today are the crisis in the euro zone, the slowdown in China and political polarization at home.

In short, there is a prevailing sense that we are simply not as safe, financially speaking, as we used to be. The productive capacity of the economy may appear largely intact, but the perceived risk is significantly higher.

Should state and local government jobs be such a low priority? There is considerable disagreement on this issue, but voters in most states have hardly been screaming to have those fiscal decisions overturned. Indeed, voters in San Diego and San Jose, Calif., chose earlier this month to sharply reduce pension benefits of city workers. Clearly, the decline in perceived wealth has brought a new, hard-to-manage shift away from government investment.

In response, some people have moralized about this shift — sometimes by telling voters they’re stupid to let government shrink. But that kind of talk can lower public trust even further. First, we all need to understand the problem.

SIMPLY recreating those state and local government jobs, without making other significant and confidence-restoring changes, may not bring much prosperity. After all, if the public feels a basic need to take less risk and to invest less money, such tinkering with one part of government spending would only bring demands to make offsetting cuts somewhere else.

The slow cure for this problem is to allow asset prices, along with perceived wealth and trust, to return to or exceed the previous levels over time. Americans would then spend and invest more money, bolstering both aggregate demand and supply, and in both the private and public sectors. But the process would be cumbersome, partly because trust is more easily destroyed than restored.

Various policies that are being put on the table, including forms of fiscal and monetary stimulus, try to accelerate this repair process. They would all be likely to underperform, partly because the public, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t see them as ways to rebuild confidence. We have become skeptical of our own macroeconomic authorities and abilities, and that, in turn, makes successful policy harder to pull off.

For instance, there is a good case to be made for monetary expansion, given the current low rate of inflation and high rate of unemployment. But if fear of inflation puts off the American public, such a policy will again underperform, relative to what we have learned in textbooks. There won’t be a credible commitment to see the monetary stimulus through, as people panic that resulting inflation will be used to redistribute wealth. (Although Sweden and Switzerland have had effective monetary policies recently, both of those countries have especially high rates of trust in government.)

The American problem is a particularly strong spin on John Maynard Keynes’s concept of “animal spirits” — the human emotion that drives confidence. These days, however, it’s often the government that is spooking Americans. Too much debate is focusing on textbook remedies, and not enough on just how much trust has been broken.

We often hear the argument that our government should borrow and spend more money because the real rate of return on government borrowing is so low, as evidenced by bond yields. Maybe, but those yields are low because alternative investments are perceived as so risky, and people want a haven for their money.

Should government double-down on these risks by borrowing more money and pursuing more investment? After all, such a policy is supposed to be self-validating because of the accompanying economic stimulus. But will it be seen that way? Will government protect us from the risks of its potential mistakes?

That’s not an easy debate to settle here, but suffice it to say that without more trust, it won’t happen on a large scale.

The reason that we aren’t getting more expansionary macro policy is fundamental: a lack of trust. It’s not an easy problem to fix, but the place to start is by recognizing it.


Business Insider: How the Fed Destroyed its Credibility

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This article originally appeared in Business Insider

The Fed’s credibility is obviously important. If people believe that they can and will do what they say they’re going to do — and that it will have the desired effect — they can affect the the real economy (at least short-term) by just making promises — Open Mouth Operations. (Though they must actually do things to their balance sheet, sometimes — rather than just promising to make future promises — to avoid the Turtles All The Way Down problem.)

Also obvious: the Fed has great inflation-fighting cred. They’ve fetishized inflation and that credibility for thirty years. People feel damned confident that they can and will successfully stomp on price spikes — especially wages. That’s what they do. That fixation has continued even through four years in which runaway inflation has manifestly notbeen a credible threat.

Meanwhile, their unemployment-fighting cred is in the tank. If they announced today that they’re going to do whatever is necessary to bring unemployment down to X%, people would seriously question their ability to do so, even their future commitment to doing so.

Tyler Cowen agrees:

The Fed, at least right now, is not able to make a credible commitment toward a significantly more expansionary policy for very long. … The market expectation has become “the Fed can/will only do so much.”

Why? Because in their frantic obsession with inflation (explanation here), they missed their chance to demonstrate their unemployment-fighting moxie. The time to do that was 2008 and 2009, when 1. unemployment was spiking and 2. monetary policy had a lot more traction on unemployment. They could have not sabotaged the fiscal efforts.

Again, Tyler agrees:

The Fed already has failed to act, for whatever reasons. That makes it all the harder to achieve the credible commitment now.

Now people may be confused, thinking that because the Fed didn’t do what was needed to fight unemployment, it couldn’t have. This could result in them believing that it can’t, now. This is obviously faulty reasoning, but the conclusion could still be correct.

I don’t know for sure. Two questions, using a fairly extreme scenario to make the conundrum clear:

1. If the Fed had bought a trillion dollars of S&P 500 stocks in 2008, would it have prevented (or greatly reduced) the unemployment carnage?

2. If the Fed bought a trillion dollars of S&P 500 stocks today, would it bring unemployment down significantly?

On #2, Tyler thinks not — that action today would have a fifth or a tenth of the effect that ’08 action would have had — for several reasons, mainly having to do with reduced potential. (Arguably caused by the Fed’s inaction.)

But one thing seems clear: that inaction (or sabotage, if you prefer) seriously damaged the Fed’s growth-enhancing, unemployment-fighting credibility. By sabotaging fiscal, it has sabotaged its own ability to reduce unemployment (or increase NGDP) by simply making promises.

 

The New York Times: A Power Vacuum Is Killing the Euro Zone

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

As problems mount in the euro zone, it’s increasingly evident that we’ve been witnessing an institutional failure of monumental proportions.

What is to be done about Greece? Simply keeping it in the euro zone won’t help much, even if it’s possible.  The continuing crisis has sapped confidence in banks not only in Greece, but also in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, though to varying degrees.  Unless there are explicit guarantees to these banks soon, the market will likely take a further turn for the worse.

An absence of guarantees could prompt a broader chain reaction of capital flight and bank collapses across several countries.

The basic problem is that many people won’t keep their euros in a Greek bank, and perhaps not in a Spanish bank, either, when those euros can be moved to Germany or some other haven.

Yet German citizens do not appear ready to guarantee Spanish banks or, by extension, the whole credit system of Spain and the other periphery nations. Guarantees of that scope are probably impossible and may also require constitutional changes in some nations.

We thus face the danger that the euro, the world’s No. 2 reserve currency, could implode.  Such an event wouldn’t be just another depreciation or collapse of a currency peg; instead, it would mean that one of the world’s major economic units doesn’t work as currently constituted.

We are realizing just how much international economic order depends on the role of a dominant country — sometimes known as a hegemon — that sets clear rules and accepts some responsibility for the consequences.  For historical reasons, Germany isn’t up to playing the role formerly held by Britain and, to some extent, still held today by the United States.  (But when it comes to the euro zone, the United States is on the sidelines.)

There appears to be a power vacuum, and the implications are alarming. We may be entering a new world where international cooperative arrangements, in environmental areas as well as finance, are commonly recognized as impossible.  If the core European nations cannot coordinate effectively, what can we expect in dealings with China, Russia and other countries that have less of a common background and understanding?

In the euro zone, we are seeing two refusals to cooperate: Germany won’t renew financial pledges to Greece without Greek compliance on previous agreements, and Greece doesn’t want Germany to control its national budget.  Both seem reasonable positions, and maybe they are, but reasonable positions can apparently destroy an international agreement rather easily.

Is there a way out?  To seek a binge of pro-growth government spending, in the hope of stimulating economies, is to assume what already stands in doubt. The crisis has reached a head partly because the market already lacks trust in the periphery governments to invest money for sustainable economic growth.

There is also talk of forming a true fiscal union, but that seems to be doubling down on a bad idea.  If the euro zone cannot summon enough cooperation now, how is any union requiring tighter cooperation supposed to work?  How would national budgets be set and approved?  A credit collapse remains a real possibility.

Is it too late for monetary policy to make a difference?  The other euro-zone nations might allow Greece to leave, while guaranteeing payments for food and fuel, both of which Greece imports, for a reasonable period.  Higher price inflation might then depreciate the euro, limit the need for difficult downward wage adjustments, and help Spain and Italy improve their competitiveness.  The inflation could come through central bank bond purchases from the troubled nations, thus easing their debt problems.  That may be the only useful option still on the table.

But that’s also not easy.  First, economically healthier nations may be reluctant to accept the inflation, which would represent a rather direct, continuing redistribution of wealth to the troubled debtor countries.

The second problem is that some of the banking systems in the periphery nations may be too broken for monetary policy to take hold.  Imagine the European Central Bank trying to infuse new money and credit into Spain, while bank deposits move quickly to Germany, Switzerland and other safer places.  Again, why would anyone want to keep money in the bank of a fiscally troubled nation?  That loss of confidence will not be easily repaired.

Since December, the European Central Bank has lent more than a trillion euros to euro-zone banks, but that has bought no more than a few months of peace.  It isn’t clear how much more can be done.  It probably is about time to judge the euro zone as a failed idea — and rarely is it wise to double down on failed ideas.

What is most disturbing is that the euro-zone nations are democratic, protective of basic liberties, and have advanced intellectual and research communities. The final lesson of this debacle is that smart nations with noble motives can make very big mistakes.  And that should concern us all.

Choices for Greece, All of Them Daunting

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This article was originally published in The New York Times

Without outside help, Greece is probably insolvent right now. In evaluating the country’s prospects, it’s worth asking what it would take for Greece to pay all of its bills and what kind of damage we might expect along the way.

The answers are to be found not only in statistics — like the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio, now running at more than 140 percent for Greece, and headed higher — but also in human sentiments and solidarities. A considerable amount of Greek patience and German flexibility and sacrifice are minimum prerequisites for turning back a major disaster in the making.

To put matters in perspective, the Greek economy is less than 2 percent of the overall economy of the European Union. That seems a manageable size for an aid-based solution; estimates in the neighborhood of 200 billion euros in aid (close to $300 billion) are common. The real difficulty is in maintaining global financial confidence while the losses are distributed in an orderly manner.

That isn’t as easy as it may sound. About 30 percent of the Greek debt is held by Greek sources, including the banks and the Greek government, in its social security funds. A default on the latter assets would mean that the Greek government was defaulting on itself. It would still have to come up with much of that money or face a total political and economic meltdown.

The private sector can be persuaded to realize some losses on Greek debt, but there is a risk of setting off a Lehman Brothers-like financial panic, especially if there is a judgment of complete or selective default from the credit agencies. Standard & Poor’s warned of such a judgment last week. Big penalties for private creditors may also have weighty implications, because of the potential for a chain reaction — in which credit dries up for Ireland and for Portugal, which ran into fresh trouble when Moody’s downgraded its debt last week. Furthermore, the private sector holds only about a third of the Greek debt total — and that involvement is falling rapidly — so bondholders cannot be the only fall guys.

Then there is the European Central Bank, which holds about 18 percent of the debt. The wealthier European Union nations could transfer funds to Greece and the central bank as permanent debt relief, rather than continuing with debt rollovers that may look similar to Ponzi schemes. As it stands, vulnerable countries are being pushed into ever-higher debt levels. Yet the central bank has strict rules, including a no-bailout clause and price stability as the sole goal of monetary policy, while the European Union often requires member unanimity for major changes.

In other words, these rules were written to prevent what is now the only coherent response to Greece’s troubles — namely, a timely recognition of the losses and an agreement that they will be shared jointly in some way.

And don’t forget that more than 40 percent of the European Union’s budget is taken up by subsidies to farmers, leaving little room for subsidies required in an emergency like this. The union was not designed to turn on the proverbial dime.

The closer you look, the worse it gets. German politicians promised their voters that the euro would never lead to fiscal union or tax increases, yet aid to Greece would put those issues on the table. Political support for costly transfers also seems weak in the Netherlands, Finland and other northern European nations.

Furthermore, for Greece, such a bailout would not count as a long-term solution. Paying back one’s creditors is not the same as resuming economic growth, and the country would still face the fallout not only from its spending cuts and tax increases, but also from sharing a monetary policy and exchange rate that for it is deflationary. Relative to the size of its economy, the total Greek spending cuts now being contemplated are proportional to the United States government cutting $1.75 trillion. (Even if you believe government needs to shrink, it would be hard to pull off such a big change on short notice.) Right, now Greece’s gross domestic product is falling at a rate of more than 3 percent a year.

Even if a Greek default didn’t wreck broader markets, it wouldn’t cure Greece’s problems. The Greeks are still borrowing, so a default would dry up some of their funds and force the government to make even bigger spending cuts.

If it left the euro zone, Greece could reap the substantial benefits of a currency depreciation, but doing so would also set off huge runs on banks. And the country has no alternative paper currency ready for use.

If you are a euro optimist, you might believe that the day of reckoning for Greece will be stalled long enough for Portugal, Ireland, Spain and possibly Italy and Belgium to recapitalize their banks and trim their government budgets. You might believe that of the Greeks will eventually default, but that by the time the contagion effects are checked, the Greeks will have pulled in some aid, and the global impact will be a mere hiccup instead of a new financial crisis. But that still will leave Greece with no clear economic path forward. For a best-case scenario, that’s not very good.

If you are a pessimist, you might see such a response as an unworkable plan of naïve technocrats. Here’s your line of reasoning: At some point along the way, democracy is likely to intervene: either Greek voters will refuse further austerity and foreign domination, or voters from northern Europe will send a clear electoral message that they don’t support bailouts. And there’s a good chance one or both of those events will happen before a broader European bank recapitalization can be achieved. In the meantime, who wants to put extra capital into those ailing Irish, Portuguese, and Spanish banks anyway?

In an even bleaker scenario, bank recapitalization won’t be realized anytime soon and those same economies will show few signs of growing out of their debts. A broader financial crash will result, and it won’t be contained by an easily affordable bailout.

Those are the choices playing out now, in the streets of Athens and in the halls of power centers like Washington, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Stay tuned. There’s a lot of news on the way, but probably very little of it will be good.

How Will Greece Get Off the Dole?

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This article was originally published in The New York Times

Greece is a relatively wealthy country, or so the numbers seem to show. Per-capita income is more than $30,000 — about three-quarters of the level of Germany.

What the income figures fail to capture is the relative weakness of Greece’s economic institutions. They are not remotely comparable to those of Germany and some of the other better-governed European Union nations, which is why the current crisis will prove so difficult to solve.

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund have arranged an enormous bailout package. But it’s not just a question of supplying funds to get Greece through a short-term debt crisis, or of cutting the Greek government budget, but of whether the country will see much future economic growth.

Consider the World Bank’s Doing Business index, which ranks countries according to the quality of their regulatory environment for commerce. The index places Greece at No. 109, just behind Egypt, Ethiopia and Lebanon. For the category of “high-income countries,” the Greek ranking is next to last, ahead of only Equatorial Guinea, which has oil wealth.

Greece has a malfunctioning fiscal system in which the shadow economy is estimated to be roughly 20 to 30 percent of the reported economy and tax evasion may run at $30 billion a year. Simply collecting taxes that are legally due would help bring Greece’s books into balance, yet even this simple remedy does not appear imminent.

As the World Bank index suggests, government funds are often spent hindering production rather than supporting it. This gives one clue as to why the numbers make Greece appear richer than it really is. Public expenditures are valued at cost when measuring gross domestic product, yet arguably the quality of Greek public services, per dollar spent, is less than that of many wealthy countries. Nonetheless Greece plunged ahead and joined the euro zone in 2001, with some unfortunate consequences.

Greece’s currency, the euro, is stronger than that of its neighbor Turkey, so a holiday in Greece is more expensive. Yet Greece has not built enough luxury hotels, golf clubs and resorts to justify the cost difference. Over all, the greater expense of Greek goods and services, which are paid for in euros, lowers the country’s international competitiveness. Ideally, they should be priced in a weaker currency, which would be appropriate for a poorer country.

Over time this problem will worsen if productivity in Germany and France grows at consistently higher rates and the value of the euro puts Greek exports increasingly out of sync with market realities. One painful way out of this dilemma would be for Greece to engineer a continuing deflation of wages and prices, but Greek voters have already taken to the streets to pressure their government to preserve salaries and benefits, and planned deflation is difficult to sustain in any case.

The Germans and the French have been complicit in treating Greece as a wealthier country than it really is. The strong euro keeps exports from the poorer euro zone nations noncompetitive and also makes it easier for Greece and other lower-income euro zone nations to buy German and French exports; both tendencies benefited German and French commercial interests.

To make matters worse, following its accession to the euro zone, Greece began spending and borrowing as if its future productivity would be high. The European Central Banktreated Greece as a fiscally responsible nation by buying some Greek bonds, which were then highly rated. Many European banks followed suit, and this meant an unjustified credit boom for the Greek state. Greece was able to pursue unsustainable policies; for instance, many Greeks retire before age 60 with benefits at three-quarters salary. Such a luxury is uncommon even in far wealthier countries like the United States.

At this stage, it’s a moot point whether Greece is a poor country masquerading as a wealthy country or vice versa. The announced bailout requires that an ailing Greek economy borrow and repay even greater sums of money. If the old illusion was that Greece was a wealthy country, the new illusion is that Greece will, in short order, become wealthy enough to pay back ever-growing sums of debt.

Since the Greek economy accounts for only about 2 percent of the euro zone gross domestic product, in theory it could be made a permanent recipient of largess. Yet that’s hardly an appealing solution, both because Portugal, Spain and others might want the same deal and because Europe doesn’t have much social solidarity across national boundaries.

The United States has rich and poor regions, but the 50 states are forced to run balanced budgets, and there is greater mobility within the nation, based on a shared language and culture. Major national policies, like President Obama’s health care plan, are not judged primarily in terms of which states win and lose; in fact the largely opposed “red states” get a lot of the benefits through higher Medicaid subsidies.

Greece is not the only country that suddenly feels poorer. Britain faces budget deficits at about 12 percent of G.D.P., and Italy has a debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of 110 percent. In the United States, the housing and job markets are recovering only in fits and starts and we face significant future Medicare liabilities. This is the era of the rude economic awakening, and Greece is simply an extreme manifestation. The new European bailout plan is a denial of this truth rather than recognition of the new reality that a lot of countries, most of all Greece, aren’t as rich as we used to think.

Euro vs. Invasion of the Zombie Banks

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This article was originally published in The New York Times

Is a euro held in an Irish bank in Dublin, or in a Portuguese bank in Lisbon, as sound and secure as a euro in a German bank in Berlin? That apparently simple question holds the key to understanding why the euro zone may splinter and bring a new financial crisis.

In Ireland, there has been a “silent bank run” on financial institutions for much of the last year. In February, for instance, Irish private sector deposits dropped at an annual rate of 9.8 percent. That’s largely because some depositors doubt the commitment of the Irish government to the euro. They fear that they will wake up one morning to frozen bank accounts, followed by the conversion of their euro deposits into a lesser-valued new Irish currency. Pre-emptively, the depositors send their money outside Ireland, where it still represents safe euros or perhaps sterling, accessible by bank transfers and A.T.M. cards.

This flight of capital reflects a centuries-old economic principle known as Gresham’s Law, sometimes expressed casually as “bad money drives out good money.” In this context, if two assets — euros inside and outside Ireland — are not equal in value in the eyes of the marketplace, sooner or later the legally fixed price parity will fall apart.

If enough depositors fear frozen accounts, the banks will be emptied out, and they also will require additional government bailouts, on top of the bailouts for the bad real estate loans. The banks come to resemble empty shells, conduits for public aid but shrinking and unprofitable as businesses — and, to a large extent, that is already the case in Ireland. Portugal is moving in this same direction, toward being a land inhabited by zombie banks.

It’s the zombie banks that doom the current European bailout plans. On any single day, or even for a year or two, an economy can survive with zombie banks, but over time functional domestic banks are needed to allocate credit.

As it stands, European Union emergency facilities are marking time by lending more money to the fiscally troubled nations in the currency union. But these loans do not reverse the logic of Gresham’s Law. For instance on its longer-term notes, Portugal is already paying yields in the range of 8 to 10 percent, and yet the Portuguese economy is shrinking. The Portuguese are digging deeper into debt, and confidence in the banking system and the fortitude of the Portuguese government is dwindling.

At this late point there’s probably no way to escape the mess by cutting government spending in the troubled countries. This year Ireland has a budget deficit of more than 30 percent of G.D.P., whereas in Portugal it is 8.6 percent. Even the best economic reforms can take many years to pay off with concrete results, and with zombie banks a turnaround is even harder and perhaps impossible. Most important, immense government spending cuts are often unpopular and so investors wonder whether an ailing country’s political system will see it through. The confidence problem remains.

A second option is a giant write-down of current debts, combined with national bailouts to the creditor banks. For instance, taking this approach, the Merkel government in Germany might acknowledge the status quo isn’t working and speedily recapitalize the German banking system, while letting Ireland, Portugal and others off the hook for some of the money. It’s easy to see why this policy isn’t popular in Germany, and indeed, for years German politicians promised to their voters that such an outcome would never happen.

Another dramatic way out is for Ireland, Portugal or some other country to break from the euro and create a new and lesser-valued domestic currency, while also defaulting on some debts. Any such breakaway country would incur the wrath of the European Union and also might have trouble borrowing on international capital markets. There will be no easy exit path from the euro. Still, taking this approach, a resolution of some kind would be in place, no subsequent devaluation of bank deposits would be expected and the new lower-valued currency would improve growth. Also, the troubled countries already cannot borrow at workable interest rates.

There would be an associated problem, however: if any one euro zone country were to start exiting the euro, there would be bank runs on the other fiscally ailing countries. The richer European Union nations know this, and so they are toiling to keep everyone on board. But that conciliatory approach creates a new set of problems because any nation with an exit strategy suddenly has enormous leverage. Ireland or Portugal need only imply that without more aid it will be forced to leave the euro zone and bring down the proverbial house of cards. In both countries, aid agreements already are seen as a “work in progress,” and it’s not clear that the subsequent renegotiations have any end in sight, because an ailing country can always ask for a better deal the following year.

All of the ways forward look ugly but, sooner or later, some variation of at least one of them is likely. Unfortunately, they all share the property of lowering European bank values, whipsawing currencies, hurting business confidence and possibly ending the European Union as an effective institution for collective decisions. That’s all because the euro, in retrospect, appears to have been a misguided attempt to equalize the values for some very unequal assets, namely the bank deposits of strong countries and those of weak countries.

To track the risk of a new financial crisis, focus on whether the troubled euro zone economies are seeing bank runs and capital flight. Then comes a fundamental question about human nature, namely: Why do we so often postpone admitting that short-run patches simply aren’t going to work?

Fruitful Decade for Many in the World

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

It may not feel that way right now, but the last 10 years may go down in world history as a big success. That idea may be hard to accept in the United States. After all, it was the decade of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the financial crisis, all dramatic and painful events. But in economic terms, at least, the decade was a remarkably good one for many people around the globe.

The raging economic growth rates of China and India are well known, though their rise is part of a broader trend in the economic development of poorer countries. Ideals of prosperity, freedom and the rule of law have probably never been more resonant globally than they’ve been over the last 10 years, even if practice often falls short. And for all of the anticapitalistic rhetoric that has emerged from the financial crisis, national leaders around the world are embracing the commercialization of their economies.

Putting aside the United States, which ranks third, the four most populous countries are China, India, Indonesia and Brazil, accounting for more than 40 percent of the world’s people. And all four have made great strides. Indonesia had solid economic growth during the entire decade, mostly in the 5 to 6 percent annual range. That came after its very turbulent 1990s, marked by a disastrous financial crisis and plummeting standards of living.

Brazil also had a consistently good decade, with growth at times exceeding 5 percent a year. There is lots of talk that the country has finally turned the corner, and, within its borders, there is major worry that its currency is too strong — a problem that many other countries would envy.

Elsewhere in South America, Colombia and Peru have made enormous progress and Chile is on the verge of becoming a “developed” country; it will soon be joining the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

To be sure, in Africa, there is still enormous misery. Nonetheless, overall standards of living rose in a wide variety of countries there, with economic growth for the continent as a whole at more than 5 percent in most years. Many basic essentials, like water, sanitation, electricity and especially telephones, are more commonly available.

One lesson from all of this is that steady economic growth is an underreported news story — and to our own detriment. As human beings, we are prone to focus on very dramatic, visible events, such as confrontations with political enemies or the personal qualities of leaders, whether good or bad. We turn information about politics and economics into stories of good guys versus bad guys and identify progress with the triumph of the good guys. In the process, it’s easy to neglect the underlying forces that improve life in small, hard-to-observe ways, culminating in important changes.

In a given year, an extra percentage point of economic growth may not seem to matter much. But, over time, the difference between annual growth of 1 percent and 2 percent determines whether you can double your standard of living every 35 years or every 70 years. At 5 percent annual economic growth, living standards double about every 14 years.

Nonetheless, despite the positive news in much of the world, it’s questionable whether the decade as a whole has been good for Americans, economically speaking. Median wages have not risen much, if at all, and the costs of the financial crisis and irresponsible fiscal policies have become increasingly obvious. Those facts support a pessimistic interpretation.

Still, most economic models suggest that the fundamental source of growth is new ideas, which enable us to produce more from a given set of resources. To the extent that the rest of the world becomes wealthier, there’s more innovation, as my colleague and co-blogger Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, argued recently. China, for instance, is moving toward the research frontier in areas such as solar power, scientific instruments, engineering and nanoscience, all of which can benefit the United States. Unlike the situation of just a few decades ago, a genius born in Mumbai now stands a good chance of becoming a notable scientist, whether at home or abroad.

It might be pleasant to boast that America is — or should be — a world leader in every area, but the practical reality is that if some other country solves the problem of green energy, so much the better for us.

The subtler point is that a wealthier China, India, Brazil and Indonesia will lead to more customers for new innovations, thereby producing greater rewards for successful entrepreneurs, no matter where they live. There are so many improvements in cellphones these days because there are so many cellphone customers in so many countries.

To put it bluntly, if the United States takes one step back and the rest of the world takes two steps forward, even in purely selfish terms we should consider accepting the trade-off, if only for the longer run. Most of us gain from the wealth and creativity of other countries, even if we can’t always feel like the top dog.

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai, the premier of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, reportedly replied, “It is too soon to tell.”

That is also a fair response to the last 10 years, and it will be for some time to come. The point remains that if we look beneath the surface just a bit, the picture is a good deal rosier than we might otherwise think.

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