More on debt

In my previous posts I have frequently discussed government debt and the dangers it causes, but with fairly vague notions of where it becomes dangerous.  Looking further into this I have sketched out a basic outline for myself, and it follows.

1.  To steal from Adam Smith, there is an awful lot of ruin in a nation.   A country can absorb a tremendous amount of debt and spending without a collapse, and even in some cases with continued growth.  Greece hit 100% debt to gdp levels in 1994, but didn't have (perhaps thanks to some fraud) major issues until the world started shaking in 2008, and I discussed Japan as an example in my most recent post.   This is not to say that these countries were trouble free, only that the high debt loads looked more like a hindrance than a potentially fatal flaw.

2.  High debt levels can exist for long periods of time, and so are "slow moving" crisis in that sense, but the end is very fast.  The indicators that a country is approaching a crisis appear to likewise be slow moving for long stretches.

One rule of thumb that looks solid is a lack of improvement in debt to gdp levels during good times.  Greece had decent growth from 1994 through 2008, but debt to GDP levels stuck at between 98% and 110% of GDP during that time.  Think of it this way, if you left college with $50,000 in unsecured debt and started out making $50,000 a year and 10 years later you were making $100,000 a year but your unsecured (ie no mortgages) debt had also increased to $100,000 that would be a pretty bad sign for your finances, right?  What are the odds you are going to on net be paying down debt in the future if you can't even maintain a level of debt while doubling your income?  What are the odds you would be able to handle a major life crisis if your baseline is increasing debt?  Japan also had some significant warning signs during the 80s.  Their debt to GDP levels rose from 50% in 1980 to 70% in 1992 despite GDP tripling in that time.  

This is very worrying for the near future as the US has been following this pattern.  Debt to GDP was fairly stable at around 60% for the 90s and 2000s until 2008, during a period of relatively strong growth and then saw a large burst during and immediately following the crisis.  While the expansion has slowed it has not reversed with a return to full employment, debt to GDP was higher in 2017 than any year prior to 2016.  

This is a pattern not isolated to the US, I looked at 19 countries (why not 20?  because that would have been more) including most of the top 20 world economies in terms of GDP and 16 of the 19 had increased their debt to GDP levels from 2008 to 2017 and 14 of them from 2012 to 2017.  10 countries had increased debt by 20 percent of GDP or more and 5 by 30 percent or more since 2008.

This is also not a series of small economies along with the US, 6 countries from that sample now have debt to GDP ratios of 85% or more and they are the UK, Canada, France, the US, Italy and Japan.  

Concepts From Japan

Government debt to GDP is a tricky subject to discuss these days, largely because Japan with its extreme, and growing, debt loads kind of broke a lot of people's (including mine) intuitions about debt.  The lunatic fringe of economics (MMT) likes to nod toward Japan as an example of how debt doesn't matter as long as you can print your own currency, but they don't want to nod to much as it brings up the obvious questions about their growth and how, just perhaps, avoiding collapse isn't a good enough metric on its own.  Monetarists were really excited about Japan for about a quarter or two when they promised really hard to raise inflation, and managed to do it (with a large tax increase) for brief period, and Keynesians had to repeat the adage of "they didn't stimulate enough" so many times even they appear tired of it. 

Japan is a great example of one major impact of high debt loads, you get boxed in on one path, or boxed out of others.  The old debt concept that since a government liability is someone else's asset they must cancel out only works on the balance sheet.  With a debt to GDP ratio of 250% these days and government spending at around 40% of GDP interest rates of 16% would engulf the entire budget.  This is an extreme and ultimately meaningless example in a lot of ways, interest rates are no where near 16%, Japan doesn't roll over its bonds annually, etc.  The idea is not to note THE point where their government would 100% go bankrupt, but to note how much lower the point is now than it was 10, 20 and 25 years ago.  In 2008 debt to GDP was around 190%, and a (potential) budget of 40% of GDP meant that Japan could not pay more than a 21% interest rate, and in 1996/97 when it was 100% it was a 40% rate, and their pre debt explosion levels it would have been between 55 and 60%. 

In less than 30 years Japan has gone from definite ruin at levels rarely seen (only under hyperinflation) only under to levels seen in the 1970s into the early 1980s in many countries.   It is of course unlikely that they would stave off ruin until these levels were hit, interest rates of even 5 percent now across all of their debt would be very difficult to handle and would mean effectively shifting about 10% of GDP worth of spending away from current programs to interest payments, which would have a lot of impact across the economy. 

So does high debt cause low growth or does low growth cause the high debt?  The obvious answer is yes.  Both occur.  Once high debt is in place it is very difficult to get high growth, even if you have long dated bonds where the government will have years of cushion to reduce debt levels before the payments become a problem the bondholders will be taking real losses.  If those bonds are held by citizens and corporations then those losses should be a real drag on the economy.  If interest rates tracked growth perfectly (they don't, but its a starting point) then debt levels 100% of GDP would mean functionally all increases in growth would be offset by decreases in wealth held by the public.  The reverse, perversely, might be true as well.  Declining growth would mean declining interest rates, which would push the value of debt up as long as it wasn't perceived to increase the likelihood of default. 

Why do I say perversely above?  Aren't these stabilizing forces?  I don't think that they are, I see them as channeling forces, as the economy can't handle anything outside the norm well, be it growth or contraction, and so the potential pathway of the economy narrows effectively removing the dynamic segments of the markets. 

Some countries have managed to reduce large debt loads while breaking out of a potential channel, the US after WW2 is one good example, but if you look at what it took overall it is daunting.  Federal spending was slashed by 40% in year 1 after the war, then another 40% in year 2 and another 10% in year 3, the economy was effectively heavily liberalized as inhibiting regulations (price controls and the like) were removed and perpetual destruction of capital in the form of war losses were cut out, and the Federal Reserve did its bit to, keeping rates low for years after the war (and possibly causing the stagflation of the 70s along the way... possibly).

Greece is a good (as in terrible) example of how badly this type of channeling can go, the government got to a point where outside funding was necessary very early on which allowed the scenario where those outside forces could dictate Greek policy.  Now the Greeks weren't doing a bang up job managing themselves but this functionally cut out some of the possible routes out of the crisis.  A dedicated public servant pitching a plan to restore economic growth had a double hurdle to overcome, convincing both the public of his plan and external lenders.  There is a general truism here, the fewer options you have the more likely that all of them are going to be bad.