FT's Martin Wolf has a column attacking everyone's new favorite saying: green shoots.
Unlike Bernanke or Larry Summers or any of the other folks to use the term, Wolf doesn't see 'em.
Is the worst behind us? In a word, No. The rate of economic decline is decelerating. But it is too soon even to be sure of a turnround, let alone of a return to rapid growth. Yet more remote is elimination of excess capacity. Most remote of all is an end to deleveraging. Complacency is perilous. These are still early days.
As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development noted in its recent Interim Economic Outlook, "the world economy is in the midst of its deepest and most synchronised recession in our lifetimes, caused by a global financial crisis and deepened by a collapse in world trade". In the OECD area as a whole, output is forecast to contract by 4.3 per cent this year and 0.1 per cent in 2010, with unemployment rising to 9.9 per cent of the labour force next year. By the end of 2010, the "output gap" - a measure of excess capacity - is forecast to be 8 per cent, twice as large as in the recession of the early 1980s.
What's particularly compelling about his argument is his case that policy makers still haven't really figured out the nut of the problem:
What I find most disturbing of all is the reluctance to admit the nature of the challenge. In its policy advice, even the OECD seems to believe this is largely a financial crisis and one that may be overcome in quite short order. Even the latter looks ever more implausible: in its latest Global Financial Stability Report, the International Monetary Fund now estimates overall losses in the financial sector at $4,100bn (€3,200bn, £2,800bn). The next estimate will presumably be higher.
Above all, the financial crisis is itself a symptom of a balance-sheet disorder. That, in turn, is partly the consequence of structural current account imbalances. Thus, neither short-term macroeconomic stimulus nor restructuring of balance sheets of financial institutions will generate sustained and healthy global growth.
This is why it's so myopic to just think that getting capitol ratios back to health or spurring more bank lending will do the trick. There's so much that the recession has exposed to have been deeply rotten that the narrow view of the problem just doesn't work.
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