----- Original Message ----- From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: crl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 11:54 AM Subject: [CrashList] Ancient truths and the New Economy Is it too fanciful to compare the US downturn with the recession that hit Japan in the 1990s? Stephen Roach thinks not Published: January 31 2001 20:26GMT | Last Updated: January 31 2001 20:30GMT Is America the next Japan? Of course not, comes the glib reply. Yes, US technology stocks were overvalued. But its banking system is sound and its labour and product markets are flexible. Japan's are not. US property markets have not matched the excesses experienced by Japan in the late 1980s. Nor did corporate America indulge in the cross-holdings of equities that wreaked such havoc on Japanese business balance sheets. Japanese-style deflation could never happen in America. Or could it? While the US economy stands little chance of succumbing to the Japanese disease, it could well fall victim to a strain of its own. Few would give credence to such a possibility but therein lies the risk. Steeped in denial, most Americans treat the popping of the Nasdaq bubble as an isolated event. They remained convinced that this was solely a financial market problem, with little collateral damage to the real economy or the broader financial system. I have my doubts. The real-economy counterpart of the Nasdaq bubble is the unsustainable surge in spending on information technology. As I see it, Nasdaq hype represents an ever-deepening cultural acceptance of the permanence of an IT-led New Economy. Investment in IT averaged 13 per cent in the latter half of the 1990s before exploding to 23 per cent in 2000. Blind acceptance of every tantalising twist of the IT product cycle quickly became the norm in business circles. There was no rhyme or reason to IT budgeting. Need a new e-mail platform? How about an upgrade to flat-screen monitors? Got to have the latest bells and whistles on a new operating system or a third-generation personal digital assistant? Sure - why not? Dotcom mania was the froth on an exponential surge of IT appliances driven by largely unprofitable businesses. Excess IT capacity in the telecommunications industry, e-based media ventures and internet service providers added insult to injury. At the same time, most companies were reorganised around "e-business" strategies. Survival without a big corporate commitment to the IT culture was deemed inconceivable. Alas, it all went too far. America's binge on information technology outstripped any conceivable productivity payback. The overhang has now reached proportions resembling those hit at the peaks of other capital spending cycles. Total business fixed investment soared to a record 13.9 per cent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2000. That is the overhang I fear history will judge most unkindly. It speaks of a New Economy that has gone to excess, just like Old Economies of the past. And, just as earlier recessions eliminated capacity overhangs in the industrial economy, this recession could do the same for the excesses of the information age. That would bring America's once powerful IT growth dynamic to a screeching halt. History also warns that for every excess in the real economy, there is usually a counterpart in the financial system. The explosion of venture capital investment certainly played a role in driving the IT cycle to excess. According to Venture Economics, a trade association, venture capital funding averaged more than $65bn in 1999 and 2000 - more than double the previous record of $29bn in 1998. The excesses of debt financing are also unmistakable. High-yield telecoms debt hit $80bn in late 1999, double the amount outstanding just two years earlier. And new issues of investment-grade debt in the telecoms sector surged to $155bn in 2000, fully 85 per cent above the pace in 1998. The obvious and important question is this: what happens to this vast reservoir of debt when the excesses of its collateral - the installed IT base in the real economy - start to get eliminated? To me, the full extent of the IT fall-out could ultimately hinge on the stock market and its concomitant wealth effect. All it would take would be a mere flattening out of equity prices for the wealth effect - which has boosted real consumption growth by 1 percentage point annually over the past five years - to go to zero. With households unable to rely on rising stock prices to pay for their retirement, they would have to relearn the art of setting aside funds out of current wage income. To the extent that such a rethink prompts a significant normalisation of the personal saving rate - it currently stands at minus 0.8 per cent, versus a long-term average of 8.5 per cent before the most powerful phase of the bull market began in November 1994 - consumer demand could be sharply depressed for years to come. None of this was ever in the script of America's New Economy. Nor was Japan, widely proclaimed as the new global powerhouse in the late 1980s, ever supposed to disappear into economic oblivion. Yet history is littered with the carcasses of new eras. As the first recession of the information age begins to unfold, the lessons of Japan should not be taken lightly. The writer is chief economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from FT.com _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
