The Economists' Roundtable

Just a wonderful, wonderful exchange between prominent economists:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22756

Nouriel Roubini:

[F]iscal policy cannot resolve problems of credit, and it is not without cost. Over the next few years it's going to add about $9 trillion to the US public debt. Niall Ferguson said it's the end of the age of leverage. It's not really. There is not deleveraging. We have all the liabilities of the household sector, of the banks and financial institutions, of the corporate sectors; and now we've decided to socialize these bad debts and to put them on the balance sheet of the government. That's why the public debt is rising. Instead, when you have an excessive debt problem, you have to convert such debt into equity. That's what you do with corporate restructuring—it converts unsecured debt into equity. That's what you should do with the banks: induce the unsecured creditors to convert their claims into equity. You could do the same thing with the housing market. But we're not doing the debt-into-equity conversion. What we're doing is piling public debt on top of private debt to socialize the losses; and at some point the back of some governments' balance sheet is going to break, and if that happens, it's going to be a disaster.

He makes so much sense, it's almost painful to listen.