The view that high public debt is bad for growth, popularized by Reinhart and Rogoff, has failed to find much empirical support in academic research. A paper by Lof and Malinen presents evidence that over the past 55 years lower growth has typically preceded higher debt but higher debt has not usually preceded lower growth.
A Bank of Italy paper illustrates and explains the rise in European banks’ sovereign debt holding since the great financial crisis. It also reiterates structural causes for bank-sovereign feedback loops. One would conclude that this nexus remains an important factor for market dynamics and monetary policy.
Academic work suggests that public debt above 90% of GDP is a drag for GDP growth. This would apply to the developed world today. However, a new IMF paper based on a broad panel of countries going back to 1875 qualifies this rule. It suggests that high debt does not per se reduce growth. Only if debt levels are both elevated and rising, growth tends to suffer. On its own high debt does often entail greater output volatility, however.
The IMF, like other institutions, estimates that China’s fiscal position is much weaker than suggested by headline statistics. A new paper sees the augmented fiscal debt at around to 45% of GDP and the augmented fiscal deficit at close to 10% of GDP. Financial stability risks arise from dependence on a favorable ratio of growth to real interest rates, the reliance of local budgets on real estate sales, and the refinancing of local government financing vehicles’ debt.
The central government debt ratio in the advanced economies has reached a 200-year high watermark. Other levels of government debt, unfunded pension and health care liabilities, and a huge external debt stocks add to scale and complexity of the problem. A historical analysis of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff suggests that developed countries, like emerging markets, are prone to taking recourse to aggressive financial repression and even debt restructuring.
An empirical IMF paper suggests that public debt reduction can support medium-term growth, if it is focused on cuts in non-investment spending. Such benign fiscal consolidation is less likely, however, when the private sector is credit constrained and fails to benefit from lower public borrowing, as has been the case after the 2008 financial crisis. In this case more balanced and gradual fiscal adjustment may be required to mitigate the negative growth effect.
A Nomura research report suggests that China’s local government financing vehicles now pose a major risk for the economy. Their debt stock has surged close to 40% of GDP over the past three years. Profitability is poor, liquidity risks are high, and solvency hinges on government support.
James Hamilton from the University of California has published some scary numbers on growth and size of U.S. federal government liabilities that are not included in the official debt statistics. Their main constitutents are underfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, loan guaranties, and the federal deposit insurance. According to the Hamilton’s research ‘the total dollar value of notional off-balance-sheet commitments came to USD70 trillion as of 2012, or 6 times the size of the reported on-balance-sheet debt’.
Most investors take for granted that a government with access to monetary financing cannot be driven to default. However, a new paper by Corsetti and Dedola challenges this belief. Monetary financing incurs costs and, hence, preference for default and self-fulfilling confidence crises are possible. Necessary conditions to rule out self-fulfilling crises include credible caps on government borrowing rates, the ability of the central bank to issue default-free, interest-bearing, and non-inflationary “reserves” (rather than cash), and full coverage of central bank losses by the state budget.
According to Nomura’s Zhiwei Zhang and Wendy Chen, “China is displaying the same three symptoms that Japan, the US and parts of Europe all showed before suffering financial crises: a rapid build-up of leverage, elevated property prices and a decline in potential growth…the most vulnerable areas are local government financing vehicles, property developers, trust companies and credit guarantee companies.”
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