Introduction: the global financial crisis

Abstract

If you have ten dollars, see me in the morning. If you've got six, can I lend you four? Groucho Marx in The Cocoanuts (1929) … to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I am saying is, yes, I found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is, but I've been very distressed by that fact. Alan Greenspan at a Congressional Hearing on the Financial Crisis in October 2008 There cannot now be a shadow of a doubt that ‘the flaw’ in his ideology—admitted by Alan Greenspan in response to a question by Henry A. Waxman, Chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whether he felt ‘that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?’—is both significant and permanent. The current financial and economic crisis that has forced the likes of Greenspan to question the coherence of dominant conceptual frameworks is unprecedented in global reach and systemic gravity. Some basic figures speak for themselves: According to McKinsey's Mapping Global Financial Markets (October 2008), global financial assets rose from US$12 trillion in 1980 to US$196 trillion in 2007. The International Monetary Fund's Global Financial Stability Report (IMF, 2009a) estimate for the latter figure is considerably higher, at US$241 trillion.1 Global cross-border capital flows more than doubled between 2002 and 2007, with foreign investors holding one in four debt securities and one in five equities. While in 2000 only 11 countries had financial assets of more than 350% of gross domestic product (GDP), 25 countries had deepened their financial markets to the same extent by 2007. As early as 1990, money managers had increased their control of US corporate equities from 8% in 1950 to 60% (Porter, 1992, p. 6; Whalen, 2002, p. 402). Similarly, pension funds had extended their share of total business equities from less than 1% to just short of 39%, and their fraction of corporate debt from 13% to 50% (Ghilarducci, 1992, p. 117; Whalen, 2002, p. 402). In the period from 1986 to 2006, the US financial sector as a whole increased its share of corporate profits from 10% to 30%, while its outstanding debts grew from 20% of GDP in 1980 to 116% in 2007 (FED, 2009). According to Gillian Tett from the Financial Times, outstanding credit defaults swaps (CDS) today amount to no less than US$60 trillion, with the risk embodied after discounting mutually off-setting contracts still as high as US$14 trillion (Tett, 2009, p. 264).