The long view: is the US economy an accident waiting to happen?
Be careful what you wish for. Having won re-election, President George W. Bush may face a very difficult second term in office.
Second terms have proved difficult in the past. Bill Clinton’s second administration saw him face impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan was dogged by the Iran-contra scandal, and Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the light of Watergate. The curse could strike Bush from one of several directions.
Terrorism is an obvious danger. Bush says that he has made America safer by his actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but an attack on the US mainland would undermine that case.
Another potential quagmire is foreign policy. Bush will clearly want to extract American troops from Iraq within the foreseeable future, but will he be able to leave a stable regime behind? If the aftermath is chaotic, with Sunni fighting Shia, and both fighting Kurds, the stability of the entire Middle East may be affected.
And the US may decide to do some destabilising of its own. It was interesting to see Republican strategist Jim Pinkerton saying on TV that he expected the US to take military action against Iran next year.
Such speculation may be ill-informed. Most people in the markets will be hoping that the Bush foreign policy is calmer in its second term than in its first. But clearly, if further action in the Middle East is planned, stock markets will be nervous. Investors will opt for the safe haven of Treasury bonds, whether they yield 4 per cent or 3 per cent.
Perhaps President Bush will be too busy with domestic policy to contemplate further adventures abroad. The US economy may be growing healthily with relatively low inflation and unemployment, but under the surface, problems are visible.
In my view, the US economy is an accident waiting to happen, says Stephen Roach, the Morgan Stanley economist. That’s the message to be taken from a record shortfall in national saving, a record current account deficit, record levels of household indebtedness, a record deficiency of personal saving and outsize government budget deficits. Never before has the US pushed the envelope to this degree on such a wide array of economic imbalances.
As Roach notes, very little of the election campaign was devoted to these issues, for understandable reasons. Almost any reduction of these imbalances will see Americans worse off, whether because they receive fewer benefits, or pay higher taxes or because the economy slows as savings rise and consumption is cut. That is one problem with the democratic process.
The first Bush administration was a mixed bag in terms of economic policy. Equity markets generally welcomed cuts in capital gains tax and on savings, and an expansionary fiscal policy helped cushion the blow after the bursting of the dotcom bubble.
But the thrust of the tax cuts was aimed at the better-off. This is understandable in one sense (they pay most of the taxes) but not in terms of stimulating the economy in the short term, since poorer people have a higher propensity to spend.
And the effect was to dissipate the good work done in cutting US government debt during the Clinton era. It was not that long ago that there was talk of eliminating all government debt within 10 years. Now there are deficits stretching out into the future, a problem that will only be made worse if the first term’s tax cuts are made permanent. All this comes at a time when the US’s underlying fiscal position is deteriorating because of the ageing of the baby-boomer generation.
With the Bush administration unlikely to restrain demand by raising taxes, it seems likely that the US current account deficit will rise unchecked. In the circumstances, it may well be that the dollar has to fall further, in part because even Asian central banks cannot absorb all the surplus dollars being created, in part because a falling dollar is the only way of keeping the deficit under control.
Financial markets certainly seem to take this view. It was expected that, after the US election, there might be a relief rally in the dollar. But the rebound was short-lived. On Thursday, the dollar dropped to its lowest trade-weighted level since 1996. Gold, which has recently acted as a hedge against the dollar, reached a 16-year high at more than $430 an ounce.
Unfortunately, it would take a very big fall in the dollar to make much of a dent in the trade deficit. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that a 22.5 per cent decline in the trade-weighted dollar would cut the deficit by just 1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
There is a chance, of course, that the deficit could continue to be funded at the current level. The US is lucky that the dollar is the global reserve currency. Asian central banks have been happy to use their foreign exchange reserves to buy Treasury bonds. This arrangement could last for several years but there is a risk that it could break down at some point in Bush’s second term.
Were it to do so, Treasury bond yields would move sharply higher, since private investors might demand higher rates to fund the full deficit. That will be a big risk for an economy in which debts are so high. According to Morgan Stanley’s Roach, over the past four years the expansion of household liabilities has been 65 per cent larger than the growth in US GDP.
The danger would be a sharp recession. The trade deficit would narrow, but that would not comfort the electors. In such circumstances, President Bush would have no-one else to blame, since the Republicans control both houses of Congress.
Lest this be seen as a party political point, the same problems would have faced Kerry if he had been elected, and he did not have a very convincing plan for dealing with them. From the market’s point of view, at least Kerry would have faced a Congress from the other party, which might have limited the scope for the ambitious spending plans of either side. But it is easy to imagine that Kerry would have ended up as a one-term president.
长线观点：美经济出意外?
许愿时可要小心。乔治?W?布什(George W. Bush)总统再次当选后，第二个任期可能困难重重。
历史证明，美国总统第二任内往往处境艰难。在第二个任期中，比尔?克林顿(Bill Clinton)因与莫尼卡?莱温斯基(Monica Lewinsky)的风流韵事而面临弹劾，罗纳德?里根(Ronald Reagan)被伊朗与尼加拉瓜反政府军丑闻所困扰，而理查德?尼克松(Richard Nixon)则在水门事件曝光后被迫下台。布什则在多个层面都可能被这一魔咒击中。
恐怖主义的危险性显而易见。布什说，他在伊拉克和阿富汗采取的行动增强了美国的安全保障，可一旦美国本土遭到袭击，布什将难以自圆其说。
另一个潜在的困境是外交政策。布什当然希望在可以预见的将来从伊拉克撤出美国军队，但他能否留下一个稳固的政权呢？假如逊尼派与什叶派之间以及他们与库尔德之间爆发冲突，造成局势混乱，那么整个中东地区的稳定都有可能受到影响。
另外，美国本身也可能采取破坏稳定的行动。耐人寻味的是，共和党策略师吉姆?平克顿(Jim Pinkerton)在电视上说，他预计明年美国将对伊朗采取军事行动。
这或许是不谙内情的揣测。大多数市场人士都希望，布什在第二任内的外交政策会比第一任时更冷静。但显而易见，如果他计划在中东采取进一步行动，股市将陷入恐慌。投资者将转而选择美国国债作为避风港，不论这些债券的收益率是4%还是3%。
也许布什总统将忙于为国内政策运筹帷幄，无暇顾及海外冒险行动。美国经济也许正在健康增长，通胀水平和失业率都保持在较低水平，但种种问题还是相当明显的。
在我看来，正如摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)的经济学家史蒂芬?罗奇(Stephen Roach)所言，美国经济随时会发生意外。这一观点的依据是：美国创纪录的国民储蓄不足、创纪录的经常帐户赤字、创纪录的家庭负债水平、创纪录的个人储蓄短缺以及庞大的政府预算赤字。美国正史无前例地出现如此既广泛又严重的经济失衡。
正如罗奇所指出，由于可以理解的原因，竞选活动很少针对这类问题。要缓解任何一个经济失衡问题，几乎都会使美国人的生活恶化，不管这是因为他们的福利减少或纳税增多，还是由于储蓄增加和消费减少造成经济减速。这是民主进程存在的问题之一。
第一届布什政府的经济政策是个大杂烩。股市对资本收益税和储蓄的减少基本持欢迎态度，而扩张型财政政策缓和了网络泡沫破灭的冲击。
但减税政策主要面向比较富裕的人群。从某种意义上说这是可以理解的(他们承担大部分税赋)，但从促进经济短期增长的角度出发却难以理解，因为越贫困才越需要支出。
减税举措也把克林顿时期削减政府债务的成就一扫而光。不久前，人们还在谈论要在10年内消除所有政府负债。现在，赤字却将长久存在，如果布什第一任内的减税政策固定下来，这一问题只会进一步加剧。而这一切的出现，正值美国的基本财政状况因婴儿潮一代老龄化而不断恶化。
鉴于布什政府不太可能通过增税来抑制需求，美国经常帐户赤字似乎可能会不受限制地增长。在此环境下，美元很可能得进一步贬值，这部分是因为即便是各亚洲国家的中央银行也无法吸纳所有新增的过剩美元，另外还因为美元贬值是控制赤字的唯一方法。
金融市场看来肯定持这种观点。曾有人预计，美国大选后，人们可能对美元重拾信心，但反弹却只是昙花一现。周四，美元的贸易加权汇率降至1996年以来的最低点。而每盎司金价则突破430美元，创16年来新高。最近黄金已成为对美元的避险工具。
不幸的是，美元需大幅贬值才能对贸易赤字产生有意义的影响。经合组织(OECD)估计，美元的贸易加权汇率须下挫22.5%，才能把赤字占国内生产总值(GDP)的比重减少1%。
当然，赤字仍有可能以现在的水平继续得到融通。美国的运气就在于美元是全球储备货币。亚洲各央行一直乐于用其外汇储备来购买美国国债。这种做法或许会持续几年，但在布什第二任内的某个时间，这种做法被放弃的风险同样存在。
假如真的出现这种情况，美国的国债收益率就会急剧增加，因为要私人投资者承担全部赤字，可能会需要提供更高的收益率。对于一个负债沉重的经济体来说，这将是巨大的风险。摩根士丹利的罗奇认为，过去4年来，美国家庭负债的膨胀比GDP的增长高出65%。
危险将是经济急剧衰退。贸易赤字固然会缩小，但这并不能使选民满意。在此情况下，由于共和党控制了国会参众两院，布什总统将找不到替罪羊。
为避免使本文的论点被认为带有党派政治色彩，假如克里(Kerry)当选，他也会遇到同样的问题，而且他也没有一个极具说服力的解决方案。从市场角度来看，克里至少会面对一个由另一党派控制的国会，这可能会限制任何一方提出雄心勃勃的支出计划。但不难想像，克里将无法连任。
