Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 42 Article 4 Issue 4 Summer 2011 2011 Is It Greek or déjà vu all over again?: Neoliberalism and Winners and Losers of International Debt Crises Tayab Mahmud Seattle University School of Law Follow this and additional works at: http://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Tayab Mahmud, Is It Greek or déjà vu all over again?: Neoliberalism and Winners and Losers of International Debt Crises, 42 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 629 (2011). Available at: http://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol42/iss4/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by LAW eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Loyola University Chicago Law Journal by an authorized administrator of LAW eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Is it Greek or deji&vu all over again?: Neoliberalism and Winners and Losers of International Debt Crises Tayyab Mahmud* The global financial meltdown and the Great Recession of 2007- 2009 have brought into sharp relief the uneven distribution of gain and pain during economic crises. The 2009-2010 debt crisis in Greece resulted in a windfall for financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, a rollback of welfare systems, and the impoverishment of the working classes. This outcome is consistent with the pattern that has emerged in the international debt crises of the last three decades, including the Latin American crisis during the 1980s and the Asian crisis during the 1990s. The recurrent internationaldebt crises of the last three decades and the resulting transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich are the products of the neoliberal restructuring of economies that aims to rollback the gains made by the working classes under the Keynesian welfare compromise and to establish the hegemony of finance capital. These neoliberalobjectives have been facilitatedby an extensive refashioning of the U.S. and internationalregulatory regimes resulting in financialization of the global economy and unbridled internationalmobility of finance capital. Global financial institutions channeled excess global liquidity in ways that created unsustainable international debts, which consistently resulted in international debt crises. These crises were then managed to further advance neoliberal prescriptionsfor globalfinance and nationaleconomies. The end result of this refashioning of regulatory regime is the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, further impoverishment of working classes, and * Professor of Law and Director, Center for Global Justice, Seattle University School of Law. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Class Crits Workshop at University at Buffalo Law School, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, LatCrit XV Conference in Denver, Loyola University of Chicago School of Law, University of Oregon School of Law, and Seton Hall Law School. I want to thank Robert Ashford, Jaswinder S. Brara, Timothy Canova, Angelin Chang, Larry Meacham, Steven Ramirez, Darren Rosenblum, and Steven R. Smith for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. Setareh Mahmoodi, Student Fellow at the Center for Global Justice, and research librarians at Seattle University School of Law provided invaluable assistance with this project as well. 629 630 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal [Vol. 42 enhanced power of finance capital. A collective moratorium on debt servicing by the Global South is a viable path towards a new global financial order that is sustainableand gives human beings priority over capital. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION. ................................. ..... 631 II. APPEASING THE BOND GODS: A MODERN GREEK TRAGEDY ........... 639 III. BRETTON WOODS SYSTEM AND ITS COLLAPSE ........ .......... 654 IV. NEOLIBERAL COUNTERREVOLUTION ...................... 661 A. The Idea, the Road-Tests, and the Launch ................ 661 B. Financialization and the Myth of Deregulation .... ..... 668 C. Scorecard of Neoliberal Re-regulation .............. 677 D. Transforming the IMF into the Global Enforcer of Neoliberalism .............................. 683 V. INTERNATIONAL DEBT CRISES AND ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION ............................... ..... 687 A. Latin America: From Petroleum to Tequila.. .......... 687 B. Asian Flu and the Second Opium War ............... 693 C. Argentina: The Darling of the IMF Defaults . .......... 704 VI. CONCLUSION ................................ ...... 710 2011] Is it Greek or d6ji vu all over again? 631 "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things." - Rahm Emanuel, Former White House Chief of Staff' "Bankers have a bad habit of making economic cycles worse. They are notorious for lending people umbrellas when the sun is shining and asking for them back when rain starts to fall." - The Economist2 "We live again in a two-superpower world. There is the U.S. and there is Moody's. The U.S. can destroy a country by leveling it with bombs; Moody's can destroy a country by downgrading its bonds." - Thomas Friedman3 I. INTRODUCTION The world is awash with money,4 but two-fifths of humanity remains without access to a bank account, much less a line of credit.5 While captains of finance capital bemoan an Asian "savings glut" 6 and "liquidity glut,"7 nearly three billion people struggle to survive on less 1. Jeff Zeleny, Obama Reviewing Bush's Use ofExecutive Powers, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 9, 2008, at A19 (quoting Rahm Emanuel in an interview regarding the crisis in the U.S. auto industry). 2. Joseph and the Amazing Technicalities, ECONOMIST, Apr. 26, 2008, at 18. 3. Thomas L. Friedman, Don't Mess with Moody's, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 22, 1995, at A19. 4. In April 2010, the global foreign exchange market had a daily turnover of USD 4 trillion. Global Foreign-ExchangeMarket, ECONOMIST (Sept. 2, 2010), http://www.economist.com/node/ 16945118?storyid=16945118&fsrc=rss (last visited Feb. 6, 2011). The total daily global financial transactions increased from USD 2.3 billion in 1983 to USD 130 billion in 2001. This USD 40 trillion annual turnover compares with USD 800 billion needed to support international trade and productive investment flows. See PETER DICKEN, GLOBAL SHIFT: RESHAPING THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC MAP IN THE 21ST CENTURY 32-82 (4th ed. 2003). In 2006, on the eve of the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, while the entire world output was USD 47 trillion, market capitalization was USD 51 trillion, total international banking assets were USD 29 trillion, and domestic and international bonds were USD 68 trillion. NIALL FERGUSON, THE ASCENT OF MONEY: A FINANCIAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD 4-5, 62 (2008). In December 2007, the face value of all over-the-counter derivatives was over USD 596 trillion, with a market value of USD 14.5 trillion. Id. at 228. Nearly 90 percent of international financial flows represent speculative and hedging behavior. L. Randall Wray, Monetary Theory and Policy for the Twenty-first Century, in POLITICAL ECONOMY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: CONTEMPORARY VIEWS ON THE TRENDS OF ECONOMICS 125, 139 (Charles J. Whalen ed., 1996). 5. FERGUSON, supra note 4, at 281. 6. Ben S. Bernanke, Governor, Fed. Reserve Bd., Homer Jones Lecture: The Global Savings Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit (St. Louis, Missouri, Apr. 14, 2005), available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/20050414/default.htm. 7. Alan Greenspan, The Fed Didn't Cause the Housing Bubble, WALL ST. J., Mar. 11, 2009, at 632 Loyola University Chicago Law Journal [Vol. 42 than two dollars a day.8 The global financial crisis of our era may be "a transformative moment in global economic history whose ultimate resolution will likely reshape politics and economics for at least a generation." 9 The magnitude of the crisis and the largest shrinking of world output since the Great Depression lend new urgency to Karl Polanyi's admonition: "Only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the human race."10 The International Labor Organization ("ILO") estimates that the downturn has cost over fifty million lost jobs worldwide,II while the United Nations ("UN") measures the share of the "working poor" in the labor force in developing countries to have increased to 64 percent.12 Up to eighty-four million people will remain poor or fall into extreme poverty due to the crisis. 13 The global losses in the financial sector alone exceed USD 3.4 trillion, 14 and the bill for public rescue of financial institutions worldwide is USD 20 trillion.15 The long-term total potential cost of the rescue of finance capital by U.S. taxpayers alone is estimated at USD 23.7 trillion--over 150 percent of U.S. gross domestic product ("GDP").16 Much more pain may be on its way. The average GDP Al5. 8. Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty, UNITED NATIONS MILLENNIUM PROJECT (2006), http:// www.unmillenniumproject.org/resources/fastfactse.htm (last visited Mar. 7, 2011). 9. CARMEN M. REINHART & KENNETH S. ROGOFF, THIS TIME Is DIFFERENT: EIGHT CENTURIES OF FINANCIAL FOLLY 208 (2009). 10. KARL POLANYI, THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF OUR TIME 18 (Beacon Press 2d ed. 2001) (1944). 11. Nelson D. Schwartz, Unemployment Surges Around the World, Threatening Stability, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 15, 2009, at Bl. 12. UNITED NATIONS DEP'T ECON. & SOC. AFFAIRS, WORLD ECONOMIC SITUATION AND PROSPECTS 2010, at v (2010) [hereinafter DESA 2010 REPORT], available at http://www.un.org/ en/development/desa/policy/wesp/wesp archive/20 1 Owesp.pdf. 13. Id. at vi. 14. INT'L MONETARY FUND [IMF], GLOBAL FINANCIAL STABILITY REPORT: NAVIGATING THE CHALLENGES AHEAD 5 (Oct. 2009), available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/gfsr/ 2009/02/pdf/text.pdf. 15. DESA 2010 REPORT, supra note 12, at xii-xiii. 16. SIMON JOHNSON & JAMES KWAK, 13 BANKERS, THE WALL STREET TAKEOVER AND THE NEXT FINANCIAL MELTDOWN 174 (2010) (quoting the Special Inspector of the Trouble Asset Relief Program).