韩升洙：金融危机十周年，我们学到了什么

12月13日，浙江大学国际联合商学院（筹）（International Business School，Zhejiang University, 简称“ZIBS”）顾问教授韩升洙博士受邀在中国人民大学举办的大金融思想沙龙“全球领袖”系列首期担任主讲嘉宾，发表题为“The 10th Anniversary of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008—What Did We Learn? （全球金融危机十周年，我们学到了什么）”的演讲。这是由中国人民大学国际货币研究所（IMI）与财政金融学院货币金融系共同发起设立的高层次学术沙龙，本期由ZIBS院长、IMI 联席所长贲圣林教授担任主持。

韩升洙博士在演讲中首先回顾了2008全球金融危机的导火索、演变过程以及产生的巨大影响，之后他历数了韩国在危机后的改革历程。同时，他援引IMF执行总裁克里斯蒂安·拉加德(Christian Largarde)的观点对金融危机前的传统宏观经济政策进行了总结，随后他系统详尽地分享了此次金融危机带给我们的四点经验教训。演讲的最后，韩升洙博士对未来全球经济的发展趋势进行了展望，并对政策制定提出了建设性的意见建议。

以下为英文演讲全文

The 10th Anniversary of the GlobalFinancial Crisis of 2008 

What Did We Learn?

Han Seung-soo

Mr.Chairman,

Distinguished Members of the IMI,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very pleased to visit the International Monetary Institute of Renmin University of China and meet with China’s leading financial experts here in Beijing. I greatly appreciate the important role that this Institute has played over the years in promoting and furthering the objectives of the international financial architecture. I am also grateful to IMI for inviting me as their Chief International Adviser. I do not know what role this post entails but I will do my best in trying to meet the demand of this important post.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis of2008. Therefore I would like to speak to you on the reflection of the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis and on the lessons that we learnt from it. 

When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, I was Prime Minister of Republic of Korea and was directly involved in dealing with the financial crisis. After 10 years, I am pleased to reflect that the series of measures that we, the leaders of the world, took together at the time were more or less to the right direction.

As you may recall, the financial crisis triggered by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in the United States in 2007 followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 produced devastating repercussions worldwide. We were grappling with the ripple effects of the so-called “once-in-a-century-credit tsunami”. Consumer confidence remained low while anxiety levels continued to behigh. The pervasiveness of "exotic instruments" and various toxic assets in the capital markets rendered solution murky and particularly, resulted in the popular distrust of the banking sector.

Strangely enough it was during this period when blockchain was given the life. In January 2009, in the midst of the international financial crisis, Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin software through blockchain, the distributed ledger technology. Embedded permanently in Nakamoto’s data was a brief line of text, “TheTimes 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” He referred to the London Times headline article about the British Government’s attempt toprop up its economy to deal with the global financial crisis. The statement reflected people’s deep distrust of the banking sector at the time.

Fortunately for the world, unlike during the great depression in the 1930s (and unlikenow!) when the “beggar-thy-neighbor policy” was the norm, government of major economies cooperated very closely at the time. Recognizing the importance of international cooperation in the globalized world, the global leaders agreed to form G-20 and held the G-20 Summit first in Washington, DC in November 2008, in London in April 2009 and in Pittsburg, USA in September 2009. By then, the G20 was fully established as the premier forum for the global economic governance. It was about this time that the International Monetary Institute of Renmin University of China was created.

There was no denying that the root cause of the global financial crisis of 2008 stemmed from the advanced countries and not from the emerging economies.Nonetheless, it impacted emerging market economies severely through various channels.  Korea suffered from the stigma of being a country that experienced the 1997 Asian financial crisis.At the time Korea was seen as the most vulnerable country in term of foreign currency liquidity. However, Korea was in a situation completely different from the financial crisis that Korea had to go through in 1997-98. Korea had enough foreign reserves and had a currency swap agreements with several countries including the United States.

As a member of the G20 Troika and the Chair of the G20 Summit in 2010, Korea took an active role in harnessing global cooperation and market stabilization. In January 2009, in the midst of the global financial crisis, Korea initiated the Green New Deal policy. This was an amalgam of a long-term policy of expanding growth potentiality through "green strategy" and a short-term policy ofcreating jobs and revitalizing economy through "new deal". In short, we aimed to create a low-carbon green economy while stimulating job creation.

This initiative was a combination of neo-classical, supply-side economic policy with Keynesian, demand-oriented policy prescriptions. The strategy was designed so that when Korea overcame the economic crisis, the new deal portion of the policy would be phased out, leaving only green growth as the major long-term economic goal to deal with. The result of this strategy was very successful and Korea was the only OECD member country that registered a positive growth rate during the first quarter of 2009. UNEP and HSBC both highly evaluated Korea’s strategy at the time.

In this connection, I would like to add that green growth was one of the most important economic policy objectives of my government and we worked strenuously to promote the green growth worldwide. When I was Chair of the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in 2009, I was able to garner the unanimous support of the participating minister-delegates to pass a resolution on “the Declaration of Green Growth” on 25 June 2009. Based on this declaration, the OECD had conducted two-year research and produced a monumental document on “Towards Green Growth” in 2011 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I now would like to more specifically deal with the lessons that we learnt from the global financial crisis of 2008. Before speaking about the lessons, I would like to highlight the conventional view on the macroeconomic policies before the global financial crisis. This was well summarized by Ms. Christian Largarde, Managing Director of the IMF in her recent blog on 5 September 2018 on the same topic. She summarized them as follows:

First, monetary policy has one target, inflation, and one instrument, the policy rate. So long as inflation is low and stable, monetary policy is seen as achievingits objectives.

Second, fiscal policy is more of a secondary instrument as a counter-cyclical policytool. Because of political constraints and implementation lag, it may be very difficult to rapidly deploy fiscal policy during a crisis.

Third, financial regulation does not belong to the core macroeconomic policy framework.

When the global financial crisis of 2008 hit, the recession was larger than expected. As extraordinary times often call for extraordinary measures, policy makers ofthe time had to think "outside the box".

Therefore, immediately after the crisis, policy makers of the advanced economies, mostly through the coordinated efforts through G20, managed to launch coordinated large fiscal stimulus along with unconventional monetary policies such as quantitative easing, and negative interest rate policies. These bold policy moves helped avoid a meltdown of the global economy. However they led to some unint ended consequences, which provide interesting lessons for the way forward.

I would like to focus my remarks on four important lessons policymakers have learned from the global financial crisis of 2008-09 in today’s context. However, the policies we took led to some unintended consequences, which provide interesting lessons for us to deal with the future problems. The key four lessons we learnt from the global financial crisis are as follows.

First,we learned that maintaining social cohesion is essential for the success of economic adjustment programs. As we all know, the recession associated with the global financial crisis was much deeper and the subsequent recovery was slower than anticipated. The severity of the shock and the slow recovery contributed to rising inequality and social tensions globally. As the gap between productivity and wage widened, the labor share continued to decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The young generation was hit harder with youth unemployment rates rising much faster than that of the rest of the working age population.

With slower-than-expected recovery and rising inequality, populist movements,including Brexit, migrant crisis, and trade tensions, to name a few, emerged. As a result, maintaining social cohesion has become a critical element for thee ventual success of reform programs. We are now very aware that the poorest and most vulnerable groups need to be protected against the short-term impact of fiscal consolidation or structural reforms. Indeed, a fiscal adjustment or reform measure that is perceived as being fundamentally unfair is difficult to maintain.

Second, we learned that understanding macro-financial linkages is important. A key gap in our knowledge before the global financial crisis was the lack of understanding of the nexus between macroeconomic and financial linkages. Before the crisis, policymakers usually focused on the inflation gap when measuring the output gap, with little attention to the financial cycle. This approach failed to capture the unsustainable output gaps in advanced economies before the global financial crisis. Outputs gaps would have been much larger if information on the financial cycle were incorporated.

Following the global financial crisis, policymakers have been paying much more attention to macro-financial linkages. However, this has unveiled trade offs for monetary policy, particularly when real and financial cycles diverge. For example, forcountries with excessive credit growth and positive credit gaps as well as slow economy captured by negative output gaps, easing monetary policy to close the output gap could lead to a further buildup of financial stability risks and fragilize the financial system.

Third, we learned the need to better assess the available fiscal space and understand the role of fiscal policy. Unlike before the global financial crisis, fiscal policy is now considered as an effective countercyclical policy tool, incomplement to monetary policy. The global fiscal stimulus was indeed needed during the crisis. Historically low real interest rate and the debate on the possibility of secular stagnation also pushed us to question whetherdebt-to-GDP ratio should be the single most important determinant of mediumterm debt sustainability. Policymakers started to wonder whether a government can raise spending or lower taxes without endangering market access and debt sustainability. In this context, they considered various aspects of fiscal sustainability such as gross financing needs, share of local currency borrowing, debt maturities, interest rate-growth differentials, etc.

Based on this new approach that takes a broader view at fiscal sustainability, growth-enhancing stimulus, especially in the form of targeted investments that expand aggregate supply, may be desirable in many contexts. There may also belarger benefits to undertaking coordinated fiscal action across countries. 

But we have to remember also that fiscal expansion is not a panacea and its impact at the time of crisis depends heavily on the existence of fiscal space, It implies the importance of maintaining sound fiscal policies and building buffers in normal times. This is because monetary and fiscal policy can be used more aggressively when policy space isample. Hence, financial distress tends to be less persistent when there is policy space. These findings imply that fiscal space should be built in normal times and used aggressively during periods of acute financial distress.

The last, but not the least, we learned the critical role of structural reforms.No one argues against the importance of structural reforms in boosting growth and jobs in the long run. However, recent studies, including the one by the IMF(World Economic Outlook; Too Slow for Too Long, April 2016) found that the effectiveness of structural reforms in the short run varies by types of structural reforms and the timing of implementation in business cycles.

In general, product market reforms such as enhancing competition generally support growth in the short term, and this effect does not depend markedly on the ove rall economic condition or the business cycle. In contrast, the impact of labor market reforms depends on the overall economic condition. For example, reducing excessive unemployment benefit and easing employment protection such as more flexibility in hiring and firing of workers would support growth in good times, but can weaken aggregate demand and hurt growth in bad times. On the other hand, increased public spending on active labor market policies such as training has larger growth effects under weak macroeconomic conditions, in part because they usually entail some degree of fiscal stimulus.

What then are the implications of these lessons looking ahead?

After almost a decade of subdued growth, the global economy finally showed long waited and broad-based recovery since last year and activity has gained further momentum until early this year. There are signs, however, that the synchronized global recovery is starting to fade, and risks to global economic outlook are now tilted to the downside, reflecting increased financial market volatility, rising trade tensions, and higher oil prices.

Policymakers should take actions to raise both medium-term growth and resilience to negative shocks. Multilateral cooperation remains vital to preserve the expansion and toavoid a zero-sum game or lose-lose equilibria. Policymakers should embrace comprehensive policies to sustain growth while strengthening fiscal buffers.Structural and fiscal reforms should continue as these can boost productivity, resilience, and equity.

Thank you！

韩升洙博士个人简介

한승수(韓昇洙)

韩升洙1936年12月28日江源道春川出生

政治生涯（部分）

◑ 2001年-2002年，56任联合国大会主席

◑ 2008年-2009年，任39届韩国国务总理

◑ 2009年起，任国际金融论坛（IFF）联合主席

◑ 2014年，任平昌冬季奥运会委员长

学术经历（部分）

◑ 哈佛大学经济学教授

◑ 英国剑桥大学教授

◑ 首尔延世大学国际研究研究生院杰出访问教授

◑ 联合王国约克大学名誉教授

◑  浙江大学国际联合商学院（筹）（ZIBS）顾问教授

RECOMMEND推荐阅读