Washington Post Book Reviews - THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF VALUE: The Globalization Cycle

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THE CREATION AND DESTRUCTION OF VALUE: The Globalization Cycle

Harold James
Harvard Univ
ISBN 978-0-674-03584-3
325 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Greg Ip

The Dow's recent vault back to 10,000 inspired a sense of relief far more than any urge for celebration. We have been through a dreadful recession but at least, the market tells us, we have avoided a depression.

Or have we? This week marks the 80th anniversary of the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In recent months, the Dow has eerily mimicked those dark days when the index leapt from its 1929 lows to rally 40 percent into 1930. It was a false dawn: The worst of the Depression was still to come.

A popular refrain during our modern-day financial crisis is that we have forgotten the lessons of economic history. BUT Americans are not ignorant of the past: Many are obsessed with it. Countless investors scrutinize stock charts and bet on history repeating itself. However, few win this way. Our problem is not ignorance of history but an inability to know which bits are most relevant to the present.

The dilemma is especially relevant now. The actions of Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, have been influenced by his deep research into how the Fed worsened the Great Depression. Christina Romer, chairman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has used her research on fiscal policy errors in the 1930s to defend the size and duration of this year's stimulus plan.

Their arguments are reassuring, but they'd be a lot more reassuring if equally eminent historians didn't contradict them. Anna Schwartz, co-author with Milton Friedman of one of the most influential works of economic history, says Bernanke wrongly acted as if the banks' problems today are the same as they were in the 1930s. Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University says Obama's stimulus tries to boost consumer spending when John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s advocated stimulus as a depression cure, emphasized investment.

Two new books by academics illustrate both the benefits and the limitations of economic history. In "The Creation and Destruction of Value," Harold James notes that just as investors today see every stock plunge through the prism of 1929, that event 80 years ago was itself repeatedly compared to prior crashes. Though the 1929 crash began on a Thursday, it was often remembered as Black Friday because contemporaries conflated it with the Black Friday crash of 1869. It's not clear that the comparisons helped: They may have only deepened the panic.

We often think of the Depression as one event, but James notes it contained two distinct crises with different implications. The crash of 1929 was an instance of market irrationality that the Fed could contain with conventional tools. By contrast, the banking crisis of 1931 was rooted in the fundamental frailty of central Europe's monetary systems, and thus far harder to fix.

Economists today often argue that if their predecessors only knew what we know now, the Depression would never have happened. But what have we learned? Many recent actions echo what was done more than 70 years ago. The massive bailout of the U.S. financial industry is similar in relative size to what the Austrian government did in 1931 when it suffered a major bank collapse that rippled around the world. Just as Americans dislike the U.S. government action, Austrians hated their bailout.

James, an historian at Princeton University, sees the globalization cycle as the way markets advance across political, economic and social frontiers. Small crises strengthen globalization because they demonstrate the ability of existing institutions and economic giants to restore stability. Large crises weaken globalization by turning the international financial system into a channel for chaos rather than stability, eroding the incentive for individual countries to participate. James is clearly a pessimist on the future of globalization. Yet he is frustratingly ambiguous about whether we are in a 1930s spiral of nationalism, protectionism and isolationism.

Rather than immerse themselves in history's narrative details, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff have instead sought to quantify it. "This Time Is Different" catalogs every debt, banking and currency crisis the authors could find back to the 1300s, in hopes of identifying elements common to all.

Almost continuously since 1800 some part of the world has been in a banking crisis and some country somewhere has failed to repay its debt -- in other words, has been in default.

Given their frequency, why do crises always come as a surprise? Reinhart and Rogoff, professors of economics at the University of Maryland and Harvard University, respectively, say investors and governments "delude themselves" into thinking they are smarter than their forebears. This thinking guarantees new "bouts of euphoria that usually end in tears."

The United States certainly bears that out. Before 2007, it displayed typical pre-crisis symptoms: an influx of foreign savings and a real estate bubble. When that bubble burst, it dragged the banking system down with it. We are now into the next phase: Bailouts and recession have produced an explosion in government debt. Reinhart and Rogoff warn that if the United States were an emerging market, it would soon either default, or its inflation and interest rates would soar and the dollar crash. That's not their prediction, but they darkly warn that if deficits aren't brought down, the United States could "revert to form."

The research that went into this book has established Reinhart and Rogoff as leading authorities on crises, routinely cited by policymakers, academics and journalists (including me). Every policymaker should own "This Time is Different," and open it for a bracing blast of sobriety when things seem to be going well.

However, it is not an easy read. It is dense with numbers, facts, definitions and academic citations. I also found myself longing for more narrative chronicling the mistaken reasoning that prevailed prior to previous crises. Investors and policymakers are not idiots: They honestly think they have learned from the past. But like military officers, they often end up preparing for the last war -- they dwell on the safety of banks when risk is proliferating in the shadowy financial firms that aren't regulated like banks.

It's tempting to conclude from these books that since human beings can't avoid the mistakes of history, it's pointless to try. That would be the wrong lesson. In fact, it is always different this time, in some way. America 2009 is not Austria 1931. Policymakers today will make mistakes, but they will be different mistakes. The more history they know, the smaller those mistakes should be.

Greg Ip is U.S. economics editor at The Economist. His e-mail is gregip(at symbol)economist.com.

Copyright 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

This news arrived on: 10/23/2009

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