Markets nosedive, recession spreads, world financial system shaken

September 18, 2008 – 5 min 28 sec

Markets in New York were rocked again on Wednesday as anxieties about the financial system ran high after the government’s bailout of insurer American International Group left investors with little confidence in many banking stocks. The Dow Jones industrial average nosedived about 450 points, down more than 800 points or 7 percent so far this week. The market was more unnerved than comforted by news that the Federal Reserve is giving a two-year, 85 billion dollar loan to AIG in exchange for a nearly 79.9 percent stake in the company, which lost billions in the risky business of insuring against bond defaults. With the markets rattled, waiting to see who the next victim could be, shares of two other major financial firms Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, sank 24 percent and 14 percent respectively

Doug Henwood is the founder and editor of the Left Business Observer. Henwood is also a contributing editor of The Nation and does a weekly program on WBAI radio, New York’s Pacifica outlet. His book, The State of the USA Atlas, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994; his Wall Street was published by Verso in 1997 (paperback, 1998) to great acclaim.

Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight

WSJ today…

The financial crisis that began 13 months ago has entered a new, far more serious phase.

Lingering hopes that the damage could be contained to a handful of financial institutions that made bad bets on mortgages have evaporated.

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“This has been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is no question about it,” said Mark Gertler, a New York University economist who worked with fellow academic Ben Bernanke, now the Federal Reserve chairman, to explain how financial turmoil can infect the overall economy. “But at the same time we have the policy mechanisms in place fighting it, which is something we didn’t have during the Great Depression.”

Spreading Disease

The U.S. financial system resembles a patient in intensive care. The body is trying to fight off a disease that is spreading, and as it does so, the body convulses, settles for a time and then convulses again. The illness seems to be overwhelming the self-healing tendencies of markets. The doctors in charge are resorting to ever-more invasive treatment, and are now experimenting with remedies that have never before been applied. Fed Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, walking into a hastily arranged meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday night to brief them on the government’s unprecedented rescue of AIG, looked like exhausted surgeons delivering grim news to the family.

Fed and Treasury officials have identified the disease. It’s called deleveraging, or the unwinding of debt. During the credit boom, financial institutions and American households took on too much debt. Between 2002 and 2006, household borrowing grew at an average annual rate of 11%, far outpacing overall economic growth. Borrowing by financial institutions grew by a 10% annualized rate. Now many of those borrowers can’t pay back the loans, a problem that is exacerbated by the collapse in housing prices. They need to reduce their dependence on borrowed money, a painful and drawn-out process that can choke off credit and economic growth.

At least three things need to happen to bring the deleveraging process to an end, and they’re hard to do at once. Financial institutions and others need to fess up to their mistakes by selling or writing down the value of distressed assets they bought with borrowed money. They need to pay off debt. Finally, they need to rebuild their capital cushions, which have been eroded by losses on those distressed assets.

But many of the distressed assets are hard to value and there are few if any buyers. Deleveraging also feeds on itself in a way that can create a downward spiral: Trying to sell assets pushes down the assets’ prices, which makes them harder to sell and leads firms to try to sell more assets. That, in turn, suppresses these firms’ share prices and makes it harder for them to sell new shares to raise capital. Mr. Bernanke, as an academic, dubbed this self-feeding loop a “financial accelerator.“