Financial crises, past and present

Financial crises occur with surprising frequency—in every decade in the past century there has been at least one big shock to a major economy’s financial system. Judging from that history, the current upheaval will probably rank among the largest, and we face the prospect of a severe, painful recession. Yet comparing the current financial crisis with those of the 20th century may provide some comfort: the impact of past crises on the real economy was by no means uniform, and it depended, critically, on the way governments acted to recapitalize the banking system and to restore stability and confidence.
The boom that preceded the present crisis uniquely combined several leverage-driven bubbles: a residential-mortgage bubble, an associated one in the real-estate market, and a bubble in corporate earnings. At the time of writing, US financial institutions had taken total credit crisis–related write-offs of almost $1 trillion.1 McKinsey estimates that the total eventual credit losses in the United States are likely to be between $1.4 trillion to $2.2 trillion in a base case.2 The losses will be greater if another major asset area (such as credit default swaps) collapses or if a misguided policy response exacerbates the problems, as it did in Japan during the 1990s. This base case range of possible losses represents 10 to 15 percent of US GDP.
By historical standards, that is substantial. In the past century, it was exceeded only three times: during the banking crisis that inaugurated Japan’s “lost decade” in the early 1990s, the Asian financial crisis of the late ’90s, and the Great Depression. In the first two, the afflicted banking systems recorded total losses of 15 and 35 percent of GDP, respectively. Losses in the Great Depression were around 20 percent of GDP in 1929,3 but this occurred in a very different industry environment from today. Due to a combination of runs on deposits, high levels of bank leverage, progressive deleveraging of the economy, and limited ability of the Fed to intervene,4 this quickly became a protracted economic downturn in which more than 9,000 financial institutions either went into bankruptcy or sought governmental assistance, and the economy experienced massive deflation.
From a company standpoint, the critical issue is the impact such shocks and subsequent downturns can have on the availability of credit—and the impact of a credit shortage on the real economy and on consumer and corporate confidence. The downturn after the S&L crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, when bank write-offs equaled some 4 percent of GDP, lasted about two years. GDP ended up about 4 to 5 percent lower than it would have been given the pre-crisis trend line. This is in line with McKinsey’s current estimate that the present credit crisis will cut real GDP by around 3 to 7 percent from trend growth.5
If the US economy were to follow the same path as in the more severe crises, the total lost GDP could be two to three times greater than that estimate. After the bursting of Japan’s asset bubble, the country’s economy grew by less than half a percent a year in real terms for a decade, and GDP ended up around 18 percent lower than it would have given its pre-crisis trend line. In the countries hardest hit by the 1990s’ Asian financial crisis—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand—GDP shrank by an average of 8 percent in 1998 in local-currency terms. Since their currencies halved in value, on average, in US dollar terms the damage was catastrophic—bankrupting many companies and causing widespread social unrest. And during the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1933, 28 percent of real GDP was lost.
As of December 5, 2008, US unemployment stood at 6.7 percent.6 That is slightly above its level during the 2001–02 recession but still some way below the level associated with the oil shocks of the 1970s (8.5 percent) and the S&L crisis (nearly 10 percent). It is far short of unemployment during the Great Depression, which conservative estimates put at around 25 percent.
How long it takes an economy to emerge from a downturn depends heavily on what kind of cleanup and stimulus package governments employ—especially in repairing the banking system’s ability to provide credit efficiently and restoring confidence among companies and consumers. On average, countries have needed two years to emerge from past recessions after major banking crises7 and up to twice as long to return to trend growth.8 Only in two cases did a downturn last substantially longer: in Japan during the lost decade, as a result of counterproductive government policies, and in the Great Depression, when the government was far less able to mount a coordinated response than it is today.
Equity markets are the most visible and dramatic indicators as crises unfold. At the end of October 2008, the S&P 500 index had fallen by 46 percent from its peak a year before (October 9, 2007, to October 27, 2008). By late November 2008, the US equity market had given up almost all of its gains since the 2001–02 dot-com bust. Although nobody knows if the market has reached bottom, the fall so far isn’t unusual by historical standards. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell by 48 percent from peak to trough (December 29, 1989, to October 1, 1990) during the banking crisis, though the market has subsequently fallen still further; at the end of October 2008, it retained less than 20 percent of the peak value reached in 1999. During the Asian financial crisis, the equity markets of Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand fell by 65, 72, and 85 percent, respectively, in local-currency terms. In the United States, the S&P 500 index fell by 49 percent from March 24, 2000, to October 9, 2002, after the tech bubble burst.
There is, however, one important difference in the current crisis. In previous ones, market valuations, as measured by price-to-earnings (P/E), hit excessive levels before the crash.9 This time, corporate earnings, which were around 50 percent above their long-run trend line as a proportion of GDP, experienced a bubble as well. Before the onset of the credit crisis, US corporate earnings were substantially above their trend growth (exhibit).10 Both the numerator and the denominator of P/E ratios were inflated.


Ref: McKinsey