Banking Crisis: International Dimensions
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House of Commons Treasury Committee Banking Crisis: International Dimensions Eleventh Report of Session 2008–09 Report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 14 July 2009 HC 615 Published on 24 July 2009 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £0.00 The Treasury Committee The Treasury Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of HM Treasury, HM Revenue & Customs and associated public bodies. Current membership Rt Hon John McFall MP (Labour, West Dunbartonshire) (Chairman) Nick Ainger MP (Labour, Carmarthen West & South Pembrokeshire) Mr Graham Brady MP (Conservative, Altrincham and Sale West) Mr Colin Breed MP (Liberal Democrat, South East Cornwall) Jim Cousins MP (Labour, Newcastle upon Tyne Central) Mr Michael Fallon MP (Conservative, Sevenoaks) (Chairman, Sub-Committee) Ms Sally Keeble MP (Labour, Northampton North) Mr Andrew Love MP (Labour, Edmonton) John Mann MP, (Labour, Bassetlaw) Mr James Plaskitt MP, (Labour, Warwick and Leamington) John Thurso MP (Liberal Democrat, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) Mr Mark Todd MP (Labour, South Derbyshire) Mr Andrew Tyrie MP (Conservative, Chichester) Sir Peter Viggers MP (Conservative, Gosport) The following member was also a member of the committee during the inquiry: Mr George Mudie MP (Labour, Leeds East) Powers The Committee is one of the departmental select committees, the powers of which are set out in House of Commons Standing Orders, principally in SO No. 152. These are available on the Internet via www.parliament.uk. Publications The Reports and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee (including press notices) are on the Internet at www.parliament.uk/treascom. A list of Reports of the Committee in the current Parliament is at the back of this volume. Committee staff The current staff of the Committee are Dr John Benger (Clerk), Sîan Woodward (Second Clerk and Clerk of the Sub-Committee), Adam Wales, Jon Young, Jay Sheth and Aliya Saied (Committee Specialists), Phil Jones (Senior Committee Assistant), Caroline McElwee (Committee Assistant), Gabrielle Henderson (Committee Support Assistant) and Laura Humble (Media Officer). Contacts All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerks of the Treasury Committee, House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 5769; the Committee’s email address is [email protected]. Banking Crisis: International Dimensions 1 Contents Page Banking Crisis: International Dimensions 3 Formal minutes 6 Witnesses 7 List of written evidence 7 Reports from the Treasury Committee during the current Parliament 8 Banking Crisis: International Dimensions 3 Banking Crisis: International Dimensions 1. Over the last eight months, the Treasury Committee has been engaged in a substantial inquiry into the banking crisis. To date, the Committee has taken evidence on 22 occasions since 3 November 2008, and has produced three Reports.1 Following on from that inquiry, we wanted to assess briefly some of the wider international repercussions of the crisis. 2. The recent financial and economic crisis has been truly international in nature—real world GDP is forecast to fall by 1.3% in 2009.2 We publish with this short Report evidence we have received on both the international regulatory framework, and on the international monetary system. A forthcoming report will tackle some of the international regulatory issues faced by the UK. Here we focus on a single aspect of the recent crisis, usually referred to by the term ‘global imbalances’. The Turner Review provides the following description of these imbalances: Oil exporting countries, Japan, China, and some other east Asian emerging developing nations have accumulated large current account surpluses, while large current account deficits have emerged in the USA, but also in the UK, in Ireland, Spain and some other countries.3 3. Throughout our inquiry into the banking crisis, we have heard evidence of the role played by these ‘global imbalances’ as a key factor in the present difficulties. The Governor of the Bank of England stated that “The ultimate cause of what we have been through in the last two years was the imbalances of the world economy and the inability to cope with the resulting capital flows”.4 In a co-authored paper, Dr Andrew Sentance, an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, outlined the extent of these imbalances: In 2007, total current account surpluses in non-OECD economies totalled $894bn, of which the surplus of China alone was $372bn—over 40% of the total. In the same year, the US current account deficit totalled $731bn. Spain ($125bn) and the UK ($105bn) were other notable deficit countries.5 The Turner Review highlighted how these deficits had developed: A key driver of those imbalances has been very high savings rates in countries like China; since these high savings exceed domestic investment, China and other countries must accumulate claims on the rest of the world. But since, in addition, 1 Treasury Committee, Fifth Report of Session 2008–09, Banking Crisis: The impact of the failure of the Icelandic banks, HC 402; Treasury Committee, Seventh Report of Session 2008–09, Banking Crisis: dealing with the failure of the UK banks, HC 416; Treasury Committee, Ninth Report of Session 2008–09, Banking Crisis: reforming corporate governance and pay in the City, HC 519 2 International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2009, Table A1 3 Financial Services Authority, The Turner Review, March 2009, p 11 4 Uncorrected transcript of oral evidence taken before the Treasury Select Committee on 24 June 2009, HC (2008-09) 767-ii, Q 111 5 Bank of England External MPC Unit, Discussion Paper No. 27, The global credit boom: challenges for macroeconomics and policy, Michael Hume and Andrew Sentance, June 2009 4 Banking Crisis: International Dimensions China and several other surplus countries are committed to fixed or significantly managed exchange rates, these rising claims take the form of central bank reserves.6 The Review then noted that these were “typically invested not in a wide array of equity, property or fixed income assets—but almost exclusively in apparently risk-free or close to risk-free government bonds or government-guaranteed bonds”.7 This then led to “a reduction in real risk-free rates of interest to historically low levels”.8 Professor Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics observed that this reduction in the worldwide real interest rate allowed the “US to continue on this low-interest, high-liquidity asset boom”.9 4. As the crisis continues, these imbalances may give way to an increase in saving in all countries, a potentially damaging outcome for the global economy. In a recent speech, Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, warned of the risks from both Asian and Western economies increasing their savings: Risks will, I should be clear, persist from the international environment and, in particular, the pattern of international saving. If the Asian economies were to continue to save at an extraordinary rate but the Western economies increase their saving, as over time we must in order to repair national and sectoral balance sheets, longer-term risk-free rates could again fall in order to bring about the counterpart expansion in investment. And, although it may seem far-fetched right now, that could give an upward impetus to asset prices over the medium-term. We would need to be careful not to mistake any such future developments for a miracle improvement in underlying economic and financial conditions. Indeed, internationally, we need to learn lessons about brewing risks from medium-term imbalances.10 Professor Buiter told us that “If you have a universal stimulus to domestic saving, private and public in the West without offsetting policies to reduce the saving investment surplus in the rest of the world, we are going to have a period of global stagnation—demand stagnation”.11 However, he thought that “both a desire and a possibility to tackle really excessively high savings rates” existed in China.12 5. In our July 2006 Report on Globalisation: The Role of the IMF, we concluded that “A disorderly unwinding of global imbalances poses a real risk to the UK economy” and urged the IMF to take “an active part in providing both independent analysis of, and potentially a solution to, the risks posed by a disorderly unwinding of global imbalances”.13 Progress in 6 Financial Services Authority, The Turner Review, March 2009, p 12 7 Ibid., p 12 8 Ibid., p 13 9 Q 70 10 Speech by Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor, Financial Stability, Bank of England, at the Association of British Insurers 2009 Biennial Conference, London, 9 June 2009, page 3 11 Q 75 12 Q 75 13 Treasury Committee, Ninth Report of Session 2005–06, Globalisation: the role of the IMF, para 9 Banking Crisis: International Dimensions 5 tackling global imbalances since then has been slow. However, the Governor of the Bank of England told us that now was the time to tackle these problems: the reason why I think this is the time to [reform the international monetary system] is that, now that the surplus countries, who very often have tended just to blame the deficit countries for racking up more debt, realise that they have a great deal at stake in the deficit countries not getting into deep trouble and, indeed, you simply cannot rely on the previous set of deficit countries expanding domestic demand, they will need to reign in domestic demand for a period. So this is something where it is not a zero sum game; we are all better off if we work together.14 He observed that “It is an enormous task, but the prize is also enormous”.15 There have also been several calls from other quarters for these imbalances to be tackled, such as those from the British Bankers’ Association, the Bretton Woods Project, and the TUC.16 6.