Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju
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COVID-19: Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju Commonalities in Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 Pandemic Temitope Laniran1 and Adeola Adenikinju2; 1Central Bank of Nigeria, 2Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law, University of Ibadan 1.0 Introduction The outbreak of Coronavirus in December 2019 which started from a small city called Wuhan in China has an epidemic and subsequently spread to become a global pandemic barely three months after, this pandemic also has an adverse effect on many countries economy and it has affected the economy globally. It has caused the closures of businesses, the stoppage of factory outputs, and the disruption to global manufacturing industries and their supply networks. The economic shock propagates downstream to customers through lack of supplies, and upstream to suppliers through lack of demand. The challenge faced by economies around the world now is mostly a struggle between lives and livelihoods. The pandemic has crushed hopes for stronger growth on the backdrop of previously expected output gains for the year 2020. The initial shock has continued to intensify through familiar channels from past severe downturns and crises. Financial markets are sharply repricing with the increase in uncertainty and the sudden materialization of extensive disruptions to economic activity. The flight to safe assets and rush to liquidity have put upward pressure on borrowing costs and credit has become more scarce, aggravating financial strains. This has led to a downward revision of global economic outlook for the year 2020. The International Monetary fund (IMF) expects the 2020 world growth to be below 2.9 per cent rate for 2019 and argues that the world might just witness the slowest economic growth pace since the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Trade wars pushed global growth last year to the lowest rates since 2009. Tensions between the USA and China as well as oil price tensions 1 Dr Laniran is with the Monetary Policy Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria. 2 Professor Adenikinju is Director, Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law, University of Ibadan, Ibadan 1 | P a g e CPEEL’s Covid-19 Discussion Papers Series COVID-19: Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju between oil giants Saudi Arabia and Russia among other major international economic issues led to very volatile global economic terrain for the year 2019. While the exact economic implication of the tensions is yet to fully manifest, the implications of an ongoing global pandemic only leave the globe in a more precarious state. Perhaps, there is no worse time than now for the global economy to be hit by a pandemic than after a very volatile 2019. A global recession is almost inevitable as countries begin to count their losses to the outbreak. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of how countries, global institutions as well as international figures have responded to the pandemic. It also seek to evaluate if there is a commonality in policy responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the looming 2020 economic crisis. The latter part of this work tend to highlight the following: The current state of the economy, global responses to the 2007-2009 global recession, the COVID- 19 pandemic, the looming and global recession, the commonalities of both global events and finally the concluding section which summarizes the paper 2.0 State of the Global Economy Global economic growth since the last recession about a decade ago has remained sluggish. The global economy has continued to struggle with its recovery from the global economic meltdown of 2007-2009. On one hand, it is possible to argue that since the great recession of 1930s, the world had not been hit with any economic challenge as momentous as that of 2007- 2009. The recovery, on the other hand, has not been very encouraging as global growth has been very slow and lingering as seen in figure 1: Figure 1: Global Growth 2000-2020 2 | P a g e CPEEL’s Covid-19 Discussion Papers Series COVID-19: Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju 10 8 6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 Advanced EMDEs Global Source: World Economic Outlook, 2020 By 2019 global growth was barely above 2 per cent. This growth was however, encumbered with a lot of economic bottlenecks that challenged future growth opportunities. A lot of developing economies are deeply indebted, continued trade wars between global economic powers and a commodity market crash has culminated in a struggling global economy. While most economic recessions are often preceded by a “Minsky moment” before the bubble bursts as witnessed in the 2007-2009 recession, the global economy is perhaps at the eve of another recession due to the pandemic that has almost completely shut down the globe. Global growth is mostly driven by the performance of the largest economies in a highly interconnected global economy. Most of the large economies have barely been able to sustain growth since the last recession, except a few such as China and recently the United States. The Chinese economy which was perhaps, the fastest growth experienced among the large economies grew at an annual range of 6 to 9 per cent between 2010 to 2019, compared to its pre-crisis period when its growth peaked at 14 per cent in 2007. However, the post-crisis growth was adequate to sustain the Chinese poverty alleviation campaign, and a growing middle-class. China’s post-crisis growth has been mostly driven by a 2009 stimulus programme of USD586 billion, one of the largest in economic history, which focused on public infrastructure investment in high-speed rail, airports and road upgrades and has also underpinned growth in economies dependent upon Chinese demand for their exports. Other members of the critically acclaimed emerging front-liners “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia and South Africa) barely grew above 1.5 per cent in recent times. In the case of South Africa, it is 3 | P a g e CPEEL’s Covid-19 Discussion Papers Series COVID-19: Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju witnessing its weakest economic growth since the global financial crisis. It slid into a 2nd recession in the space of two years by the last quarter of 2019, due to electricity cuts and drop in business confidence. A combination of these factors had adverse implications for output as well as a worsening effect for an already existing unemployment crisis. The non-performing economy and the resultant drop in revenue collection also had an impact on the fiscal ability of the South African government, putting it in its worst position since 1994. The US recovery has been mostly slow by historic standards, however, in 2018 an impressive growth of 2.9 per cent was witnessed. This was largely due to tax cuts, which dramatically stimulated corporate profits. While it is important that some level of growth has been recorded in the American economy, it is, however, more important to note that this has come at some costs. For example, the federal reserves have had to maintain a loose policy regime for a significant period. Furthermore, real average American wages in 2018 had the same purchasing power as 40 years ago, and corporate debt has reached a record level (45 per cent of GDP). The Eurozone has continued to struggle, growing by just 1.8 per cent in 2018. Germany marginally missed a recession in the last quarter of 2018, with zero growth recorded for the period. Italy returned to negative growth and the UK growth in 2018 was its weakest since 2012, and output fell by 0.4 per cent in December. Japan’s growth has been low but stable, given its rapidly ageing population which declined by more than 400,000 in 2018 alone. It is clear that while the global economy experienced has on the whole barely struggled to sustain growth since the last recession. In 2018 there was a significant slowdown globally which has continued to linger through 2019. The world has unfortunately been locked down by a new pandemic at a time the global economy is not very favourable. Policymakers are faced with really challenging times as governments have significantly lost fiscal space and room for manoeuvring owing to debt crises and monetary authorities having mostly maintained very low monetary policy rates since 2008. The lingering abysmal economic performance has mostly been channelled towards the quest for a new world order mostly in the advanced world. This is evident in the rise of the populist far-right and anti-globalisation /free-market ideologies. This has led to the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit. Other regions of the Eurozone such as Italy have witnessed protests that would almost inherently imply a collapse of the Eurozone, which indeed has been the least performing part of the world since the 2007-2009 recession. 4 | P a g e CPEEL’s Covid-19 Discussion Papers Series COVID-19: Policy Responses to Global Financial Crisis Laniran and Adenikinju These populist ideologies are mostly anti-free trade and support boundaries such as the famous “Trump wall” and Brexit. They are mostly nationalist in thinking and believe that the national interest of individual countries should supersede global agendas. They almost suggest that the continued underperformance of their domestic economy is a direct cost of prosperity elsewhere. 3.0 Responses to Global Recession 2007-2009 Before the global financial crisis, there was an almost uninterrupted upward trend in real estate prices, particularly in the United States and western economies. While what led to the boom remains a subject of debate, however, there appears to be a consensus on the role of financial innovation in the form of asset securitization, government policies to increase homeownership, global imbalances, expansionary monetary policy, and weak regulatory oversight played an important role (see for example, Keys et al., 2010; Obstfeld and Rogoff, 2009; and Taylor, 2009).