Those responsible for managing the 2008 recovery found the idea of secular stagnation attractive, because it explained their failures to achieve a quick, robust recovery. So, as the economy languished, a concept born during the Great Depression of the 1930s was revived.
.. The fallout from the financial crisis was more severe, and massive redistribution of income and wealth toward the top had weakened aggregate demand. The economy was experiencing a transition from manufacturing to services, and market economies don’t manage such transitions well on their own... but it did little to ensure that the banks actually do what they are supposed to do, focusing more, for example, on lending to small and medium-size enterprises... it was clear that there was a risk that those who were so badly treated would turn to a demagogue... A fiscal stimulus as large as that of December 2017 and January 2018 (and which the economy didn’t really need at the time) would have been all the more powerful a decade earlier when unemployment was so high... the challenge was – and remains – political, not economic: there is nothing that inherently prevents our economy from being run in a way that ensures full employment and shared prosperity. Secular stagnation was just an excuse for flawed economic policies.
Greeted as the First Great Millennial Author, and Wary of the Attention
Her mass-market success is clearly still a little disorienting. “Light and sparkling is the phrase that has been used,” she said. “I can’t complain if people think it’s sparkling, but then there’s a sense that wasn’t what I set out to do.”
.. She found her tribe as a competitive debater — at 22, she was the top debater in Europe — and settled into what she would later describe as “an analytic way of living.”
.. They are battered, as well, by economic conditions. The 2008 financial crash, and its catastrophic effect on Ireland’s young people, hangs like an invisible backdrop to all of Ms. Rooney’s fiction. Her own friends, after receiving prestigious degrees, took retail jobs, or went on welfare, scrambling to pay exorbitant Dublin rents.
“In my parents’ generation, or even before that, people who are in their 30s or 40s, you’d go to college and it was easier to get a job in one of the big law firms, and you’ll be set up — you’ll be able to get a mortgage,” said Ms. Rooney’s partner, John Prasifka, 25, a high school math teacher. “Our generation is seeing that’s not worked out for us.”
Earlier generations may have naturally shed their leftist beliefs as they lofted into the middle class, he added. But with their cohort, he said, it is difficult to see that happening.
.. For 10 years, Ms. Rooney has delighted in Twitter, trafficking in cerebral self-mockery (“♫ getting into lengthy Facebook wars about Greek debt / using words like “creditors” and “Eurogroup” in my actual free time / why ♫”); earnest declarations (“the Irish state has always been organized on the unpaid labor of women”); and too-cool-for-school banter (“this New Statesman piece from last year is so bad I laughed until I literally wept.”) Ms. Rooney even gave her character Frances, in “Conversation With Friends,” a “Twitter voice,” which she described as “a tone of casual self-revelation that deprives others of the ability to criticize.”
.. During an interview in Dublin, she worried aloud that novelists are over-glamorized, and said newspapers should write more profiles of nurses or bus drivers.
Moynihan Grows Into Role as BofA Chief
Mr. Moynihan, 58 years old, got the top role after CEO Kenneth Lewis unexpectedly announced his retirement in fall 2009. During that period, Bank of America faced major financial problems following acquisitions of Countrywide Financial Corp. and Merrill Lynch & Co. To stay afloat, the bank had to take $45 billion from the government.
.. After Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election, bank stocks broadly jumped. Bank of America shares surged 74% between then and the end of 2017.
.. For the full year of 2017, the bank posted a $21.1 billion profit, excluding an adjustment from the tax cut, roughly matching the bank’s all-time profit record from 2006.
.. The bank issued millions of new shares during the crisis, however, so its per-share earnings remain far below where they were precrisis. Likewise its shares, unlike those of competitors such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co., remain below precrisis levels.
.. “Bank of America has done a sensational job under Brian Moynihan,” Mr. Buffett said
The Turning Point of 2008
At first glance, the Georgian war ten years ago this month and the global financial crisis that erupted the following month seem unrelated. But this is to neglect the deeper currents driving the confrontation in the Caucasus.
The absorption of post-communist Europe into the West was not simply a matter of velvet revolutions. What Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, called “new Europe” – the post-communist NATO allies and European Union members – depended on hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. The loans came from the same European banks that helped fuel the US real-estate boom and inflate the even bigger housing bubbles in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain. The most extreme real-estate inflation in the world between 2005 and 2007 was on NATO’s Eastern frontier in the Baltics.
.. But it was not only the Soviet Union’s former satellites that benefited from the debt-fueled global boom. The authority and power of Putin’s regime, too, was (largely) a function of globalization – specifically, the huge surge in oil prices. In 2008, it seemed that Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, benefiting from unprecedented growth in emerging-markets demand, led by China, might soon become the world’s largest corporation.
.. The EU insists on the innocence of its model of integration. The goal is peace, stability, and the rule of law, not geopolitical advantage, its senior representatives guilelessly maintain. Whether or not they truly believe it, the EU’s new post-communist members saw it differently. For them, NATO and EU membership were part of an anti-Russian package, just as they had been for West European countries in the 1950s.
.. Although Ukraine, too, applied for NATO membership in 2008, it did not provoke Russian intervention. But the war in Georgia split the Ukrainian political class three ways, between those who favored alignment with the West, those who favored Russia, and those who preferred a policy of balance. These tensions were further exacerbated by the impact of the financial crisis.
No part of the world economy was hit harder by that crisis than the former Soviet sphere. When global lending imploded, the most fragile borrowers were cut off first. Followed closely by a collapse in commodity prices, it dealt a devastating shock to the “transition economies.”
.. As one of the world’s largest oil and gas exporters, Russia was one of the worst affected. But after the humiliation of the financial crises of the late 1990s, Putin had seen to it that Russia was armed with substantial dollar reserves – the third largest after China and Japan. Reserves of $600 billion enabled Russia to ride out the storm of 2008 without external help.
The same was not true of its former satellites. Their currencies plunged. Interest rates soared. Inflows of foreign capital stopped. Some found themselves turning to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help.
In fact, the impact of the 2008 crisis split Central and Eastern Europe. The political leadership of the Baltic states toughed it out, accepting savage austerity to continue on their path toward euro membership. In Hungary, the governing parties were discredited, opening the door to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s illiberal regime.
.. But no country in the region was strategically more important, more fragile politically, or worse hit economically than Ukraine. In a matter of weeks, Ukraine was dealt a devastating one-two punch by the war in Georgia and the financial crisis. This opened the door to the successful presidential candidacy of pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych in 2010
and set in train desperate financial negotiations with the IMF, the EU, and Russia, culminating in the crisis of 2013. Given current talk of trade wars, it bears recalling that it was an argument over Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU that led to Yanukovych’s overthrow and an undeclared war with Russia.
.. The events of August and September 2008 taught two painful and deeply disconcerting lessons. First, capitalism is prone to disasters. Second, global growth did not necessarily strengthen the unipolar order. Truly comprehensive global growth breeds multipolarity, which, in the absence of an overarching diplomatic and geopolitical settlement, is a recipe for conflict.
Today all eyes are on Asia, the rise of China, and its growing influence across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. But Putin’s Russia continues to be a spoiler. So we should not forget the Georgian crisis of August 2008, when it first became obvious how dangerous the new global economic dispensation might become.