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The Truth About Bailouts
Peter Schiff
Nov 24, 2008
As the Federal bailout bonanza prepares to spread beyond the mortgage and
financial sectors to fill Detroit's depleted coffers, few economic or policy
analysts have spared a thought for the destitution of the U.S. government
itself. Put simply, our government doesn't have enough spare cash to bail
out a lemonade stand let alone a bloated and failing industry that is losing
tens of billions of dollars per month. Washington can only offer funds that
it has borrowed from abroad or printed. Unfortunately, the nation is in
the grips of a delusion that money derived from these sources has the power
to heal. But history has clearly shown that borrowed or printed money only
has the power to destroy.
The argument that energizes the pro-Detroit camp is that the government
should extend the same courtesy to the rank and file auto workers that it
lavished upon the fat cats of Wall Street. While two wrongs certainly do
not make a right, the fact remains that the Wall Street firms are still
floundering despite the bailouts. What's worse, the money spent was either
printed or borrowed from abroad. Both options are destructive to America.
When it comes to bailouts, the real discussions are not centered in Washington
but rather in Beijing, Tokyo, and Riyadh. With no money of our own, our
ability to bailout our own citizens is completely dependent on the world's
willingness to foot the bill. While I am sure that Bush and Paulson are
doing their best to convince the world that open ended financing of the
United States is in the global interest, my guess is that, unlike Congress,
our foreign creditors will see through the self-serving nature of our plea.
Like any bailout, our foreign creditors should consider the moral hazard
of rewarding bad behavior, and the old investment adage of not throwing
good money after bad. By continuing to "lend" us money, the world is merely
delaying the necessary rebalancing of our upside down economy. By continuing
to subsidize our reckless and outsized consumption, the world merely delays
the inevitable re-balancing and exacerbates the underlying problem at the
root of the current global financial crisis.
If Washington bails out General Motors, the funds will never be recovered.
GM will simply burn through the bailout money and then be back for more.
Talk of designing a new fleet of "green" cars that will pave the way to
profitability by spurring a new buying spree is simply delusional. Given
the staggering "legacy" costs of health care and pensions for millions of
current and former workers, Detroit cannot produce cars profitably. Unless
these costs are seriously brought down, and there is very little chance that
they will be, Detroit will remain a bottomless money pit.
Similarly. any money that the world lends to America to finance more consumption
will never be repaid. We will simply blow through it, and be back, hat in
hand, begging for more. As we painfully learned in the housing bust, lending
people money that they cannot pay back makes no sense. This applies equally
to foreign central banks lending to America as it does to commercial banks
lending to homeowners.
So for the same reasons that Washington should not bail out General Motors,
the world should not bailout America. Like GM, our economy is in desperate
need of a restructuring. Spending must be replaced with savings, and consumption
with production. The service sector must shrink and manufacturing must expand
to fill the void. The dollar must fall, wages in America must be brought
down to a competitive level, and hopefully government spending and burdensome
regulation can be reduced.
This transformation will not be fun, but it is necessary. Our standard of
living must decline to reflect years of reckless consumption and the disintegration of our industrial base. Only by swallowing this tough medicine now will our sick economy ever recover. By accepting a lower standard of living today,
we will eventually be rewarded with a higher one tomorrow.