A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises

by Ray Dalio

I saw fewer things happening over and over again, like an experienced doctor who sees each case of a certain type of disease unfolding as “another one of those.”

Credit is the giving of buying power. This buying power is granted in exchange for a promise to pay it back, which is debt. Clearly,

giving the ability to make purchases by providing credit is, in and of itself, a good thing, and not providing the power to buy and do good

things can be a bad thing. For example, if there is very little credit provided for development, then there is very little development, which is a bad thing. The problem with debt arises when there is an inability to pay it back. Said differently, the question of whether rapid credit/debt growth is a good or bad thing hinges on...

too little credit/debt growth can create as bad or worse economic problems as having too much, with the costs coming in the form of foregone opportunities.

because credit creates both spending power and debt, whether or not more credit is desirable depends on whether the borrowed money is used productively enough to generate sufficient income to service the debt.

downside risks of having a significant amount of debt depends a lot on the willingness and the ability of policy makers to spread out the losses arising from bad debts. I have seen this in all the cases I have lived through and studied. Whether policy makers can do this depends on two factors: 1) whether the debt is denominated in the currency that they control and 2) whether they have influence over how creditors and debtors behave with each other.

While policy makers generally try to get it right, more often than not they err on the side of being too loose with credit because the near-term rewards (faster growth) seem to justify it. It is also politically easier to allow easy credit (e.g., by providing guarantees, easing monetary policies) than to have tight credit. That is the main reason we see big debt cycles.

The pattern of borrowing, spending more than you make, and then having to spend less than you make very quickly resembles a cycle. This is as true for a national economy as it is for an individual. Borrowing money sets a mechanical, predictable series of events into motion.

Lending naturally creates self-reinforcing upward movements that eventually reverse to create self-reinforcing downward movements that must reverse in turn.

Economies whose growth is significantly supported by debt-financed building of fixed investments, real estate, and infrastructure are particularly susceptible to large cyclical swings because the fast rates of building those long-lived assets are not sustainable.

In

“bubbles,” the unrealistic expectations and reckless lending results in a critical mass of bad loans. At one stage or another, this becomes apparent to bankers and central bankers and the bubble begins to deflate. One classic warning sign that a bubble is coming is when an increasing amount of money is being borrowed to make debt service payments, which of course compounds the borrowers’ indebtedness.

The two main long-term problems that emerge from these kinds of debt cycles are:

In this study we examine ones that are extreme—i.e., all those in the last 100 years that produced declines in real GDP of more than 3 percent.

I want to reiterate that 1) when debts are denominated in foreign currencies rather than one’s own currency, it is much harder for a country’s policy makers to do the sorts of things that spread out the debt problems, and 2) the fact that debt crises can be well-managed does not mean that they are not extremely costly to some people.

There are four types of levers that policy makers can pull to bring debt and debt service levels down relative to the income and cash flow levels that are required to service them: Austerity (i.e., spending less) Debt defaults/restructurings The central bank “printing money” and making purchases (or providing guarantees) Transfers of money and credit from those who have more than they need to those who have less

Typically debt crises occur because debt and debt service costs rise faster than the incomes that are needed to service them, causing a deleveraging.

You will note how the interest payments remain flat or go down even when the debt goes up, so that the rise in debt service costs is not as great as the rise in debt. That is because the central bank (in this case, the Federal Reserve) lowers interest rates to keep the debt-financed expansion going until they can’t do it any more (because the interest rate hits 0 percent). When that happens, the deleveraging begins.

it just shows what is called debt, so it doesn’t reflect liabilities such as pension and health care obligations, which are much larger.

In developing the template, we will focus on the period leading up to the depression, the depression period itself, and the deleveraging period that follows the bottom of the depression. As there are two broad types of big debt crises—deflationary ones and inflationary ones (largely depending on whether a country has a lot of foreign currency debt or not)—we will examine them separately.

last century, the US has gone through a long-term debt crisis twice—once during the boom of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, and again during the boom of the early 2000s and the financial crisis starting in 2008.

In the short-term debt cycle, spending is constrained only by the willingness of lenders and borrowers to provide and receive credit. When credit is easily available, there’s an economic expansion. When credit isn’t easily available, there’s a recession. The availability of credit is controlled primarily by the central bank. The central bank is generally able to bring the economy out of a recession by easing rates to stimulate the cycle anew. But over time, each bottom and top of the cycle finishes with more economic activity than the previous cycle, and with more debt. Why? Because people push it—they have an inclination to borrow and spend more instead of paying back debt. It’s human nature. As a result, over long periods of time, debts rise faster than incomes. This creates the long-term debt cycle.

debts can’t continue to rise faster than the money and income that is necessary to service them forever, so they are headed toward a debt problem.

Unlike in recessions, when monetary policies can be eased by lowering interest rates and increasing liquidity, which in turn increase the capacities and incentives to lend, interest rates can’t be lowered in depressions. They are already at or near zero and liquidity/money can’t be increased by ordinary measures.

But before we begin, I want to clarify the differences between the two main types: deflationary and inflationary depressions.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians could generally not legally charge interest to other Christians. This is one reason why Jews played a large part in the development of trade, as they lent money for business ventures and financed voyages. But Jews were also the holders of the loans that debtors sometimes could not repay. Many historical instances of violence against Jews were driven by debt crises.

Debt burdens are low and balance sheets are healthy, so there is plenty of room for the private sector, government, and banks to lever up. Debt growth, economic growth, and inflation are neither too hot nor too cold. This is what is called the “Goldilocks” period.

This happens because lenders determine how much they can lend on the basis of the borrowers’ 1) projected income/cash flows to service the debt, 2) net worth/collateral (which rises as asset prices rise), and 3) their own capacities to lend. All of these rise together. Though this set of conditions is not sustainable because the debt growth rates are increasing faster than the incomes that will be required to service them, borrowers feel rich, so they spend more than they earn and buy assets at high prices with leverage.

A key reason the long-term debt cycle can be sustained for so long is that central banks progressively lower interest rates, which raises asset prices and, in turn, people’s wealth, because of the present value effect that lowering interest rates has on asset prices. This keeps debt service burdens from rising, and it lowers the monthly payment cost of items bought on credit. But this can’t go on forever.

As new speculators and lenders enter the market and confidence increases, credit standards fall. Banks lever up and new types of lending institutions that are largely unregulated develop (these non-bank lending institutions are referred to collectively as a “shadow banking” system). These shadow banking institutions are typically less under the blanket of government protections.

At such times, increases in debt-to-income ratios are very rapid. The above chart shows the archetypal path of debt as a percent of GDP for the deflationary deleveragings we averaged.

In the cases we studied, total debt-to-income levels averaged around 300 percent of GDP. To convey a few rough average numbers, below we show some key indications of what the archetypal bubble looks like:

In my opinion it’s very important for central banks to target debt growth with an eye toward keeping it at a sustainable level—i.e., at a level where the growth in income is likely to be large enough to service the debts regardless of what credit is used to buy. Central bankers sometimes say that it is too hard to spot bubbles and that it’s not their role to assess and control them—that it is their job to control inflation and growth.4 But what they control is money and credit, and when that money and credit goes into debts that can’t be paid back, that has huge implications for growth and inflation down the road.

typical monetary policies are not adequate to manage bubbles, because bubbles are occurring in some parts of the economy and not others.

the most defining characteristics of bubbles that can be measured are:

To anticipate a debt crisis well, one has to look at the specific debt-service abilities of the individual entities, which are lost in these averages.

Typically, these types of credit/debt problems start to emerge about half a year ahead of the peak in the economy, at first in its most vulnerable and frothy pockets. The riskiest debtors start to miss payments, lenders begin to worry, credit spreads start to tick up, and risky lending slows. Runs from risky assets to less risky assets pick up, contributing to a broadening of the contraction.

In the immediate postbubble period, the wealth effect of asset price movements has a bigger impact on economic growth rates than monetary policy does. People tend to underestimate the size of this effect.

In the early stages of a bubble bursting, when stock prices fall and earnings have not yet declined, people mistakenly judge the decline to be a buying opportunity and find stocks cheap in relation to both past earnings and expected earnings, failing to account for the amount of decline in earnings that is likely to result from what’s to come.

In normal recessions (when monetary policy is still effective), the imbalance between the amount of money and the need for it to service debt can be rectified by cutting interest rates enough to 1) produce a positive wealth effect, 2) stimulate economic activity, and 3) ease debt-service burdens. This can’t happen in depressions, because interest rates can’t be cut materially because they have either already reached close to 0 percent or, in cases where currency outflows and currency weaknesses are great, the floor on interest rates is higher because of credit or currency risk considerations. This is precisely the formula for a depression.

With investors unwilling to continue lending and borrowers scrambling to find cash to cover their debt payments, liquidity—i.e., the ability to sell investments for money—becomes a major concern. As an illustration, when you own a $100,000 debt instrument, you presume that you will be able to exchange it for $100,000 in cash and, in turn, exchange the cash for $100,000 worth of goods and services. However since the ratio of financial assets to money is high, when a large number of people rush to convert their financial assets into money and buy goods and services in bad times, the central bank either has to provide the liquidity that’s needed by printing more money or allow a lot of defaults.

The depression can come from, or cause, either solvency problems or cash-flow problems. Usually a lot of both types of problems exist during this phase.

As this implies, a big part of the deleveraging process is people discovering that much of what they thought of as their wealth was merely people’s promises to give them money.

The capitalist-investor class experiences a tremendous loss of “real” wealth during depressions because the value of their investment portfolios collapses (declines in equity prices are typically around 50 percent), their earned incomes fall, and they typically face higher tax rates. As a result, they become extremely defensive. Quite often, they are motivated to move their money out of the country (which contributes to currency weakness), dodge taxes, and seek safety in liquid, noncredit-dependent investments (e.g., low-risk government bonds, gold, or cash).

the policies that reduce debt burdens fall under four broad categories: 1) austerity, 2) debt defaults/restructurings, 3) debt monetization/money printing, and 4) wealth transfers

The key is to get the mix right, so that deflationary and depressive forces are balanced with inflationary and stimulative ones. Policy makers typically get the mix between austerity, money printing, and redistribution wrong initially.

policy makers justifiably believe that debt excesses will happen again if lenders and borrowers don’t suffer the downsides of their actions (which is called the “moral hazard” problem). For all these reasons, policy makers are usually reluctant and slow to provide government supports, and the debt contraction and the agony it produces increase quickly. But the longer they wait to apply stimulative remedies to the mix, the uglier the deleveraging becomes.

Eventually they choose to provide a lot of guarantees, print a lot of money, and monetize a lot of debt, which lifts the economy into a reflationary deleveraging. If they do these things and get the mix right quickly, the depression is much more likely to be relatively short-lived (like the short period of “depression” following the US crisis in 2008). If they don’t, the depression is usually prolonged (like the Great Depression in the 1930s, or Japan’s “lost decade” following its bubble in the late 1980s).

As the economy contracts, government revenues typically fall. At the same time, demands on the government increase. As a result, deficits typically increase. Seeking to be fiscally responsible, at this point governments tend to raise taxes. Both moves are big mistakes.