WSJ By :Chris Oliver April 18, 2012, 10:50 p.m. EDT Capitalism is dead, credit new king, says Duncan
MarketWatch HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — The world needs to clue in to changes to its economic system, including the death of capitalism, according to noted financial author Richard Duncan, who warns that attempts to turn back the clock on our credit-driven economies could be cataclysmic What’s evolved is a new global economic paradigm that no longer follows the old script and won’t respond favorably to fiscal austerity, says Duncan, who believes the global economy has remained on the brink since the global crisis. “I think this represents a new economic system,” Duncan told Marketwatch in a telephone interview from his office in Bangkok. “The biggest impediment the world faces in overcoming this crisis is the broadly held misconception that we are operating in a capitalist system.” Recognizing that the world operates on a different set of rules from the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century is among the key arguments in Duncan’s 2012 book, “The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy.” While it might seem like an arcane economic question, Duncan said that, in fact, the stakes are huge. Global policy makers are running out of time to take advantage of opportunities offered up by the new system to help resolve the crisis, or otherwise face sliding into a corrosive period of economic contraction and rising geopolitical tensions, he said. “The danger is that this new economic paradigm will collapse through debt deflation,” Duncan said. Stuck with ‘creditism’ Duncan sees the global economy as having undergone a fundamental transformation during the past 43 years. Since changes in 1968 that freed the Federal Reserve from holding physical gold in reserve against dollars in circulation, total global credit has expanded 50 times, or from about $1 trillion to $50 trillion in 2007. Over that period, credit creation and consumption, or what Duncan calls “ creditism,” took hold as the growth dynamic behind the global economy, displacing capitalism, which he says relied upon sound money, hard work and capital accumulation. Attempts to break the global economy’s reliance on credit creation as a driver and reboot back to earlier ways won’t work, said Duncan, who sees “ sound money” policy recommendations as a recipe for disaster. Underscoring the system’s dependence upon credit is the fact that there were only nine occasions in the past five decades when total system credit in the U.S. grew less than 2% annually. However, each one of the slower credit-growth years was accompanied by a recession that ultimately was brought to an end by another round of massive credit creation, Duncan said. Duncan believes that true capitalism died in 1914, when nations across Europe abandoned gold-backed currencies, running up huge deficits in preparation for what would come to be known as the Great War. More recently, changes wrought by the global credit explosion can be seen in the behavior of U.S. Treasury debt, where rates at which the Federal government borrows have remained low, even as the national debt has doubled in just a few years. Duncan said that governments can now prop up their economies through government spending longer than would have been thought possible a few years ago, owing to the new dynamic. “I’m recommending making use of this new economic system. Borrow money at the government level at very low interest rates and then invest that money and change our world for the better.” Duncan said. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
