This post is a guest contribution by Richard Berner* of Morgan Stanley.
America’s long-awaited fiscal train wreck is now underway. Depending on policy actions taken now and over the next few years, federal deficits will likely average as much as 6% of GDP through 2019, contributing to a jump in debt held by the public to as high as 82% of GDP by then – a doubling over the next decade. Worse, barring aggressive policy actions, deficits and debt will rise even more sharply thereafter as entitlement spending accelerates relative to GDP. Keeping entitlement promises would require unsustainable borrowing, taxes or both, severely testing the credibility of our policies and hurting our long-term ability to finance investment and sustain growth. And soaring debt will force up real interest rates, reducing capital and productivity and boosting debt service. Not only will those factors steadily lower our standard of living, but they will imperil economic and financial stability.
Sound familiar? Warning about these challenges has long been a staple for economists. Five years ago, for example, I summarized my concerns about our coming fiscal problems, along with the interplay among them and unexpected longevity, inadequate thrift and saving infrastructure, mediocre education outcomes, and inadequate energy policy (see America’s Long-Term Challenges, May 21 and May 24, 2004). I was merely the latest in a long line of alarmists; for example, Pete Peterson famously noted more than 20 years ago that “America has let its infrastructure crumble, its foreign markets decline, its productivity dwindle, its savings evaporate, and its budget and borrowing burgeon. And now the day of reckoning is at hand” (see “The Morning After,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1987). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has since 1997 – under directors from both sides of the aisle – carefully laid out ever-more depressing fiscal scenarios in its annual Long Term Budget Outlook, the latest of which appeared last week.
The problem, ironically, is that the day of reckoning hasn’t come. This has seriously undermined doomsayers’ credibility and, more importantly, it has made the electorate and elected officials complacent about the threat from unsustainable fiscal policies. Some even proclaimed that “deficits don’t matter.”
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Source: Morgan Stanley, July 06, 2009.
*Richard Berner is a Managing Director, Co-Head of Global Economics and Chief US Economist at Morgan Stanley. He co-directs the firm’s forecasting and analysis of the global economy and financial markets and co-heads the Firm’s Strategy Forum.
Before joining Morgan Stanley in 1999, Dick was Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at Mellon Bank, and a member of Mellon’s Senior Management Committee. He also served for seven years on the research staff of the Federal Reserve in Washington.
Dick is a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, and a member of the Executive Committee and a Director at large of the National Bureau of Economic Research.