“Over an early-morning coffee with the chief executive of an FTSE 100 business last week, talk turned to the outlook for 2013. Where I had expected some guarded optimism, instead I heard a chilling analysis.
The CEO said he had been reading a new paper from Boston Consulting Group headed “ Ending the era of Ponzi finance ”. The lessons he had taken from it were miserable.
The West was not going to find its way to the right economic path with a little tweaking at the edges, the CEO said. What is needed is a wholesale overhaul of the economic system to tackle record levels of public and private debt. Was anyone brave enough to do it, he wondered aloud.
I asked him to send me the report. He did.
The BCG study by Daniel Stelter which is doing the rounds of corporate C-suites does not pull its punches. In fact, its punches are really just a softening-up exercise for a barrage of kicks and painful blows aimed at anyone who thinks that kicking the can down the road is a suitable substitute for radical action.
At the heart of the analysis is the issue of debt. A report by the Bank of International Settlements, the study notes, found that the combined debts of the public and private sector in the 18 core members of the OECD rose from 160pc of GDP in 1980 to 321pc in 2010.
That debt was not used to fund growth – perfectly reasonable – but was used for consumption, speculation and, increasingly, to pay interest on the previous debt as liabilities were rolled over.
As soon as asset price rises – fuelled by high levels of leverage – levelled off, the model imploded.
The issue is brought into sharp focus by one salient fact. In the 1960s, for every additional dollar of debt taken on in America there was 59c of new GDP produced. By 2000-10, this figure had fallen to 18c. Even in America, that’s about a fifth of what you’ll need to buy a McDonald’s burger.
Coupled with the huge debt burden are oversized public sectors and shrinking workforces. The larger the part the Government plays in the economy, the lower the levels of growth….”
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