Krugman's Analysis of the Debt Shock

The 2008 financial crisis and "Little Depression" that followed is discussed in this paper by Krugman:

If there is a single word that appears most frequently in discussions of the economic problems now afflicting both the US and Europe, that word is surely “debt.” Between 2000 and 2008, household debt rose from 96% of US personal income to 128%; meanwhile, in Britain it rose from 105% to 160%, and in Spain from 69% to 130%. Sharply rising debt, it’s widely argued, set the stage for the crisis, and the overhang of debt continues to act as a drag on recovery.

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We can then model a crisis like the one we now face as the result of a “deleveraging shock.” For whatever reason, there is a sudden downward revision of acceptable debt levels – a “Minsky moment.” This forces debtors to sharply reduce their spending. If the economy is to avoid a slump, other agents must be induced to spend more, say by a fall in interest rates. But if the deleveraging shock is severe enough, even a zero interest rate may not be low enough. So a large deleveraging shock can easily push the economy into a liquidity trap.

Fisher’s (1933) notion of debt deflation emerges immediately and naturally from this analysis. If debts are specified in nominal terms and a deleveraging shock leads to falling prices, the real burden of debt rises – and so does the forced decline in debtors’ spending, reinforcing the original shock. One implication of the Fisher debt effect is that in the aftermath of a deleveraging shock the aggregate demand curve is likely to be upward, not downward-sloping. That is, a lower price level will actually reduce demand for goods and services.

More broadly, large deleveraging shocks land the economy in a world of topsy-turvy, where many of the usual rules no longer apply. The traditional but long-neglected paradox of thrift – in which attempts to save more end up reducing aggregate savings – is joined by the “paradox of toil” – in which increased potential output reduces actual output, and the “paradox of flexibility” – in which a greater willingness of workers to accept wage cuts actually increases unemployment.

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In the current policy debate, debt is often invoked as a reason to dismiss calls for expansionary fiscal policy as a response to unemployment; you can’t solve a problem created by debt by running up even more debt, say the critics. Households borrowed too much, say many people; now you want the government to borrow even more?

What's wrong with that argument? It assumes, implicitly, that debt is debt – that it doesn't matter who owes the money. Yet that can't be right; if it were, debt wouldn't be a problem in the first place. After all, to a first approximation debt is money we owe to ourselves – yes, the US has debt to China etc., but that's not at the heart of the problem. Ignoring the foreign component, or looking at the world as a whole, the overall level of debt makes no difference to aggregate net worth – one person's liability is another person's asset.

It follows that the level of debt matters only because the distribution of that debt matters, because highly indebted players face different constraints from players with low debt. And this means that all debt isn't created equal – which is why borrowing by some actors now can help cure problems created by excess borrowing by other actors in the past.

... this analysis does suggest that the current conventional wisdom about what policymakers should be doing is almost completely wrong.

Sadly, the political leaders and the right wing economists aren't listening to somebody like Krugman. So the Little Depression will result in a "lost decade" for America just like it did for Japan. Tragic.