An Age of Transition: US, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism
Dr. Minqi Li, Assistant Professor
Department of Economics, University of Utah
1645 E. Campus Center Dr., Salt Lake City, UT 84112
E-mail: ; Phone: 801-581-7697
Since the global economic crisis of 2001-2002, the global capitalist economy has enjoyed a period of relative tranquility and grown at a relatively rapid pace. During this period of global economic expansion, there have been several important economic and political developments. First, the US—the declining hegemonic power but still the leading driving force of the global capitalist economy—has been characterized by growing internal and external financial imbalances. The US economy has experienced a period of debt-financed, consumption-led “expansion” with stagnant wages and employment, and has been running large and rising current account deficits (current account deficit is a broad measure of trade deficit). Secondly, China has become a major player in the global capitalist economy and has been playing an increasingly important role in sustaining global economic growth. Thirdly, global capitalist accumulation is imposing growing pressure on the world’s natural resources and environment. There is increasingly convincing evidence that the global oil production will reach the peak and start to decline in a few years. Fourthly, the US imperialist adventure in the Middle East has suffered a devastating defeat and there has been growing resistance to neoliberalism and the US imperialism throughout the world.
As the US housing bubble bursts and the dollar’s dominance over the global financial system becomes increasingly precarious, the US economy is now going into recession and the global capitalist economy is entering into a new period of instability and stagnation. The coming years are likely to see a major realignment of the various global political and economic forces and will set the stage for a new upsurge of the global class struggle.
Neoliberalism and the Global Imbalances
Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has become the dominant economic ideology of global capitalism. Under the neoliberal policies and institutions (such as monetarism, privatization, deregulation, labor market “reform,” and trade and financial liberalization), inequalities in income and wealth distribution surged and in many parts of the world, people suffered devastating declines in living standards. As financial capital flows between countries in search for speculative gains, one after another national economy was destroyed. Under the pressure of financial capitalists and their institutional representatives (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department), many national governments were committed to the so-called “responsible” fiscal and monetary policies, often leading to disastrous economic and social consequences.
By the 1990s, these contradictions of neoliberalism had led to increasingly more violent financial crises. From 1995 to 2002, the global economy was struck successively by the Mexican crisis, the Asian crisis, the Russian and Brazilian crisis, and the Argentine and Turkish crisis. The Japanese economy had struggled with deflation and stagnation since the burst of the assets bubble in 1990. There was a serious danger that the entire global capitalist economy could fall into a vicious circle of financial breakdowns and sink into depression. In this context, the US current account deficits have played an indispensable stabilizing role.
In the 1990s, the US experienced the greatest stock market bubble in history. Despite stagnating real wages and family incomes, household consumption expanded rapidly as household debt surged. In the 2001 recession, fearing that the US could fall into a persistent, Japanese-style stagnation, the Federal Reserve drastically cut the policy interest rate and kept the real policy interest rate at below zero for several years. As a result, the stock market remains highly overvalued by historical standards and the excessive supply of money and credit capital has in turn fueled a major housing bubble.
Fueled by one assets bubble after another, the US economy has been able to maintain relatively rapid expansion of domestic demand. As the rest of the world suffers from insufficient internal demand, the US imports of goods and services have tended to grow more rapidly than the exports. As a result, the US has been running large and rising current account deficits, which reached more than 800 billion dollars or 6 percent of GDP by 2006.
The US current account deficits directly generate effective demand for the rest of the world economy, allowing many economies such as the Asian economies and oil and commodities exporters to pursue export-led economic growth. But perhaps more importantly, the US current account deficits represent the US spending in excess of income and have to be financed by borrowings from the rest of the world. The US deficits thus create assets for the rest of the world.
The central banks of Asian economies and oil exporters have become the major financiers of the US current account deficits. From 1996 to 2006, the total foreign exchange reserves of the low- and middle-income countries surged from 527 billion dollars to 2.7 trillion dollars and their share in the world GDP more than tripled from 1.7 percent to 5.6 percent. Rising foreign exchange reserves have reduced the risk of massive capital flight and financial crisis, allowing these countries to have some space to pursue expansionary macroeconomic policies. China, in particular, has played a crucial role in financing the US current account deficits and has accumulated the world’s largest foreign exchange reserve currently standing at about 1.6 trillion dollars.
Figure 1, presents the world economic growth rates from 1961 to 2006, with the world GDP measured in constant 2000 US dollars. In the “golden age” of the 1960s, the global economy expanded rapidly with annual growth rates fluctuating between 4 percent and 7 percent. Since the 1970s, the global economy has been struggling with sluggish growth with growth rates mostly fluctuating between 2 percent and 4 percent. In four occasions, during 1974-1975, 1980-82, 1991-1993, and 2001-2002, the global economy was in deep crisis (the global economy is generally considered to be in recession when world economic growth rate falls below 2 percent a year). Since 2003, the global economy has enjoyed some relative stability and has grown at about 4 percent a year. However, with the US economy now going into recession, this short-lived relative stability is about to come to an end.
[Figure 1 is about here]
The US Economic Expansion since 2001
Table 1 presents selected economic indicators of the US economy. The US economic recovery after the recession in 2001 was very weak. Since 2001, the average annual growth rate has been only 2.4 percent, compared to 4 percent in the 1960s and 3.3 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Both employment and worker’s real wage have been stagnant. Measured in 1982 dollars, the US private sector workers’ real hourly wage in 2006 was 8.2 dollars, about eighty cents lower than in 1972. Since 2000, real median family income has been falling.
[Table 1 is about here]
However, corporate profits have surged. Corporate profits as a share of GDP rose from 5.8 percent in 2001 to 9.8 percent in 2006. The stock price to earnings ratios remain excessively high, suggesting that the stock market bubble has not yet been fully deflated. The stock market boom in the late 1990s led to pervasive over investment. In the early 2000s, the industrial capacity utilization rates were at the lowest levels since the 1960s. With substantial excess production capacity, private investment has been sluggish despite the dramatic improvement in corporate profitability.
The US economic growth since 2001 has been led by the expansion of household consumption, which now accounts for 70 percent of GDP. As the majority of the households suffer from falling or stagnant real incomes, the expansion of consumption has been financed by the explosive growth of household debt. The US household debt soared from about 90 percent of the personal sector disposable income to 103 percent in 2000, and to 140 percent in 2006. By 2007, the household debt services (interest and principal payments on debt) had risen to 14 percent of the disposable income, the highest on historical record. In the meantime, the household saving rate (the ratio of household saving relative to disposable income) has fallen from the historical average of near 10 percent to virtually zero now.
The debt-financed consumption was clearly unsustainable. Neither the household debt nor the debt service burden can rise indefinitely relative to the household income. With the burst of the housing bubble, the households will have to increase their saving rates and reduce the debt burden. If the household saving rate were to return to its historical average level, it would lead to a huge reduction of household spending. With the majority of the US household suffering from falling or stagnating real incomes, it is difficult to see how consumption can grow rapidly in the coming years. If consumption stagnates, then given the overwhelming weight of consumption in the US economy, it is highly likely that the US economy will fall into a deep recession followed by persistent stagnation.
Will the Federal Reserve be able to come to the rescue and create yet another massive assets bubble? Terrified by the turmoil of the global stock markets, the Federal Reserve has already made some panic-like moves to cut policy interest rate drastically. However, with both the stock market and the housing market quite overvalued, one can hardly identify another major assets bubble to create. Moreover, with the household debt level so high and household saving rate already so low, low interest rate can do very little to stimulate household consumption.
More realistically, with the household consumption stagnating or contracting, the US government could attempt to make up the shortfalls with more public spending and an increase in fiscal deficit. If the household saving rate rises towards its historical average, then the US government will have to run a very large fiscal deficit, on the order of 6 percent of GDP or more. Given the current political environment in the US, it is not clear whether an effective fiscal policy of a sufficiently large magnitude can be developed and implemented.
If the current, or more likely, the next US administration does have the nerve to use very aggressive expansionary policies to jump-start the US economy, then the US is likely to continue running very large current account deficits. With a current account deficit of 6 percent of GDP, theoretically, the US net foreign debt could keep rising up to 120 percent of GDP.[1] This would clearly be impossible. Long before this theoretical limit is reached, the US will have growing difficulty to have its current account deficits financed. The currently relatively orderly decline of the US dollar will then develop into a crash. The dollar will lose its status as the world’s main reserve currency and the US will experience its own shock therapy.
One way or the other, the US will not be able to run large and rising current account deficits any longer. Given the crucial role of the US current account deficits in stabilizing the global capitalist economy, if the US economy falls into persistent stagnation and the US current account deficit has to be corrected, which of the other large economies can replace the US to lead the expansion of the global capitalist economy?
China and Global Capitalism
Figure 2 compares the contribution to world economic growth by the world’s big economies (measured by the ratio of national economic growth to global economic growth). The US contribution has fallen from about 40 percent in the late 1990s to the current about 30 percent, and the Euro-zone contribution has fallen from about 20 percent to about 10 percent. By comparison, China’s contribution has risen to about 15 percent and the “BRIC” group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China combined) now contributes more than 20 percent of the world economic growth.
[Figure 2 is about here]
As the Euro-zone lacks growth momentum and Brazil, Russia, and India remain relatively small to play decisive roles in the global economy, China seems to be the only plausible candidate to replace the US to become the leading driving force of the global capitalist economy. Can China lead global capitalism into another period of stability and rapid growth?
After Deng Xiaoping’s notorious “Southern Tour” in 1992, the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership was officially committed to the goal of “socialist market economy,” which, in the Chinese context, is nothing but an euphemism for capitalism. In the 1990s, most of the state and collectively owned enterprises in China were privatized. Tens of millions of state and collective sector workers were laid off. The remaining state sector workers had lost their traditional socialist rights symbolized by the “iron rice bowl” (a package of economic and social rights that include job security, medical care, child care, pensions, and subsidized housing) and were reduced to wage workers exploited by domestic and foreign capitalists. In the rural areas, with the dismantling of the people’s communes, public medical care and education systems have collapsed. More than a hundred million have become migrant workers, forming the world’s largest reserve army of cheap labor force.
Table 2 compares the Chinese workers’ wage rate with the workers’ wage rates in selected countries. An average worker’s wage rate in China is about one-twentieth of that in the US, one-sixteenth of that in South Korea, one-quarter of that in Eastern Europe, and one-half of that in Mexico or Brazil. The Chinese wage rate now seems to be higher than those in the neighboring Southeast Asian countries. But the Chinese wage rate could be overstated as the official wage statistics only cover the workers in the urban formal sector and do not include the migrant workers.