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From crisis to panic
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By ASIM ERDİLEK:


It is no longer just a global financial crisis waiting to be ended by government rescue plans of this sort and that sort, here and there. What we now have is a full-blown global financial panic, seemingly impervious to plans of any sort, which last week caused a brutal financial crash of historical proportions on Wall Street and other stock markets around the globe.

Wall Street alone suffered a shocking paper loss of $2.4 billion last week -- as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index -- bringing the carnage for the past year to $8.4 billion. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after falling for eight sessions straight, was down by a gut-wrenching 18 percent last week, bringing the loss from its record close a year ago to a dismal 40 percent. Several stock markets outside the US, such as the Japanese market, experienced even sharper percentage declines in their major indices. In several emerging market economies, such as Brazil, Iceland, Indonesia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine, trading of shares was halted as prices went into a freefall.

The fear of an economic catastrophe similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s has spread like a brushfire throughout the world, as governments of major industrial countries through the Group of Seven (G-7) are now struggling to do what each of them could not do individually in ending the crisis. The G-7 (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan) officials (finance ministers and central governors) meeting at the biannual International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank meetings in Washington, D.C., issued a vacuous one-page five-point communiqué, short on specifics -- most likely indicative of the disagreements among its members -- declaring that "the current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action" and vowing to take "decisive action and use all available tools" to end the downward spiraling crisis. The specific and bold actions by the G-7 governments could include the guarantee of all interbank lending, through a government backed clearing house to eliminate the counterparty risk between banks, as well as unlimited insurance of all bank deposits for a certain period. Ireland became the first country to adopt on its own by guaranteeing all Irish bank liabilities two weeks ago.

An even more dramatic and bold action would be massive government purchases of shares in stock markets to stop the crash from getting any worse, an option I mentioned in an earlier column (see "The global financial crisis enters a new phase" dated Feb. 25, 2008). The G-7 also voiced its strong support for the IMF's "critical" role in helping the countries hurt by the global financial crisis. Officials of the Group of Twenty (G-20), which consists of developing as well developed countries, including Turkey, were also expected to meet last Saturday to focus their efforts on crisis management.

The US Treasury reluctantly agreed late last Friday to acquire non-voting equity stakes, most likely preferred shares, in banks and other financial institutions, as authorized by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA), to help with their recapitalization, for the first time since the Great Depression. This was an idea advocated by many economists, who had stressed the need to recapitalize banks, as a better way to fight the crisis than buying their mortgage-related toxic securities. However, it is unclear when and how the Treasury, which is yet to start buying toxic assets under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), will start its equity purchases. Complicating all this is the fact that after next month's presidential and congressional elections, the newly elected president and Congress won't take power until January. Treasury Secretary Paulson's successor will be chosen by the new president but will have to be confirmed by the new Congress. Precious time could be lost in taking decisive actions until then.

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) broadened its lender-of-last-resort authority beyond financial institutions, by announcing its decision to buy unlimited amounts of the $1.6 trillion commercial paper (short-term debt), issued by all types of businesses to operate on a day-to-day basis. The Fed also doubled its term auction facility program under which it lends to banks for up to 85 days, to $300 billion. It announced that it would, if necessary, increase the program's size to $900 billion by the end of the year. Moreover, we witnessed last Wednesday unprecedented coordinated and synchronized short-term interest rate cuts of 0.5 percent by the Fed and four other major central banks. But those cuts, aimed at easing liquidity as well as preventing a deep and prolonged recession, did not impress the financial markets, which had been expecting much more radical actions by impotent governments groping for quick fixes to a systemic problem that requires a set of fundamental and global solutions.

The Fed is expected to cut its target federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks lend reserves to each other, currently at 1.5 percent) further, perhaps to as low as 0.5 percent, the comparable current rate in Japan, if not even 0 percent. An extraordinary intervention by the Fed could include it becoming a clearing house for the trading of exotic, highly complex securities, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit debt swaps, which have been traded over-the-counter, i.e., directly between financial institutions until the onset of the global financial crisis. Such an intervention would be aimed at guaranteeing the trading of those securities as in the trading of financial futures contracts on organized exchanges.

The IMF announced last week that it was ready to help countries hurt by the global financial crisis through its emergency finance mechanism, set up to bail out Mexico in 1995 and used to help several countries during the East Asian crisis in 1997. Although the Turkish government currently does not foresee a need for such IMF emergency assistance, under dire circumstances such help might come in handy, in the absence of a precautionary stand-by arrangement, which the Turkish government inexplicably failed to obtain after the expiration of the last stand-by arrangement in May. With its gaping current account deficit and two-thirds foreign ownership of the İstanbul Stock Exchange (İMKB), Turkey is among the emerging markets considered particularly vulnerable to the worsening global crisis. Iceland has already become the first casualty with its financial meltdown last week. The IMF also issued two reports, the Global Financial Stability and World Economic Outlook, last week, in which it warned of a sharp slowdown in the global economy and urged collective international action to tackle the underlying problems.

The global financial crisis, for which the US is ultimately responsible due its homegrown subprime mortgage mess, requires a well-coordinated global program under US leadership. The US has failed thus far in offering that leadership, being unable to get its own act together in dealing with the crisis because of an unpopular and ineffective lame-duck president, a sharply divided Congress afraid of acting decisively in fear of backlash by voters regardless of how it acts and a distracting presidential campaign focused on personalities instead of issues. Not only that but the US government also ignored the potential role the IMF could have played by dismissing it as an organization whose advice and support are fit for developing countries only. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who until last week had not seemed to realize that the US by itself could not solve the global crisis, finally admitted the need for global action through the G-7, supported by the IMF, in saying, "Never has it been more essential to find collective solutions to ensure stable and efficient financial markets and restore the health of the world economy." Better late than never, Mr. Secretary!


todayszaman

October 13, 2008 | 2:22 PM Comments  0 comments

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