How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis- And why it matters today
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Since the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street has been the perpetual whipping boy for the ensuing recession that has rocked the global economy. In the United States, Manhattan bankers relied too heavily on subprime mortgages, the story goes, sparking the crisis — in bureaucratic jargon, what is dubbed a “regulatory oversight failure.” In Europe, the debt crisis — which struck again last week when the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s stripped France of its AAA rating — is often blamed on the fact that eurozone governments maintained outsized debt-to-GDP ratios, thereby breaking the rules laid down in the Stability and Growth Pact they signed when they joined the currency union.
U.S. President Barack Obama has laid the blame at the feet of Wall Street “fat-cat bankers,” and he finds himself in the company of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Even Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney criticized Wall Street for “leverag[ing] itself far beyond historic and prudent levels” in his 2010 book, blaming its “greed” for contributing to the crisis. The concept of runaway European profligacy, epitomized by 35-hour work weeks and gold-plated pension programs, is also firmly lodged in the popular imagination.
But these explanations for the twin crises in the United States and Europe simply ignore the facts. Subprime mortgages with exotic features accounted for less than 5 percent of new mortgages in the United States from 2000 to 2006. It is therefore highly unlikely that they were solely responsible for setting off the housing boom that ultimately went bust. The explanation offered for the crisis in the eurozone overlooks the fact that Spain and Ireland — two of the weak links in Europe today — were actually paragons of virtue in terms of the Stability Pact. Both countries boasted budget surpluses in the years leading up to the crisis, and both had debt-to-GDP ratios of roughly 30 percent, or only about half the level that was permitted under the Stability Pact.