The most basic
financial impulse of all is to save for the future, because the future is so unpredictable.
The world is a dangerous place. Not many of us get through life without having
a little bad luck. Some of us end up having a lot. Often, it's just a matter of
being in the wrong place at the wrong time: like the Mississippi delta in the
last week of August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck not once but twice.
First there was the howling 140-milean-hour wind that blew many of the area's
wooden houses clean off their concrete foundations. Then, two hours later, came
the thirty-foot storm surge that breached three of the levees that protect New
Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, pouring millions of
gallons of water into the city. Wrong place, wrong time. Like the World Trade
Center on 11 September 2001. Or Baghdad on pretty much any day since the US
invasion of 2003.
The history of risk
management is one long struggle between our vain desire to be financially
secure - and the hard reality that there really is no such thing as 'the
future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will
never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.
In the case of
Katrina, nearly all the survivors lost property in the disaster, since nearly
three quarters of the city's total housing stock were damaged. There were no
fewer than 1.75 million property and casualty claims, with estimated insurance
losses in excess of $4.1 billion, making Katrina the costliest catastrophe in
modern American history.1 But Katrina not only submerged New Orleans.
It also laid bare the
defects of a system of insurance that divided responsibility between private
insurance companies, which offered protection against wind damage, and the
federal government, which offered protection against flooding, under a scheme
that had been introduced after Hurricane Betsy in I965. In the aftermath of the
2005 disaster, thousands of insurance company assessors fanned out along the
Louisiana and Mississippi coastline. According to many residents, their job was
not to help stricken policy holders but to avoid paying out to them by
asserting that the damage their properties had suffered was due to
flooding and not to wind. The insurance companies did not reckon with one
of their policy-holders, former US Navy pilot and celebrity lawyer Richard F.
Scruggs, the man once known as the King of Torts.
'Dickie' Scruggs
first hit the headlines in the 1980s, when he represented shipyard workers
whose lungs had been fatally damaged by exposure to asbestos, winning a $50
million settlement. But that was small change compared with what he later made
the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five
other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related
illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich
man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or
$22,500 for every hour his law firm worked. It was money he used to acquire a
waterfront house on Pascagoula's Beach Boulevard, a short commute (by private
jet, naturally) from his Oxford, Mississippi, offices. All that remained of
that house after Katrina was a concrete base plus a few ruined walls so badly
damaged that they had to be bulldozed. Although his insurance company (wisely)
paid out, Scruggs was dismayed to hear of the treatment of other
policy-holders. Among those he offered to represent was his brother-in-law
Trent Lott, the former Republican majority leader in the Senate, and his friend
Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor, both of whom had also lost homes to Katrina
and had received short shrift from their insurers.2 In a series of cases on
behalf of policy holders, Scruggs alleged that the insurers (principally State
Farm and All State) were trying to renege on their legal obligations.3 He and
his 'Scruggs Katrina Group' conducted detailed meteorological research to show
that nearly all the damage in places like Pascagoula was caused by the wind,
hours before the floodwaters struck. Scruggs was also approached by two
whistle-blowing insurance adjusters, who claimed the company they worked for
had altered reports in order to attribute damage to flooding rather than wind.
The insurance companies' record profits in 2005 and 2006 only whetted Scruggs's
appetite for redress." As he told me when we met in the wasteland where
his house used to stand: 'This [town] was home for fifty years; where I raised
my family; what I was proud of. It makes me somewhat emotional when I see
this.' By that time, State Farm had already settled 640 cases brought by
Scruggs on behalf of clients whose claims had initially been turned down,
paying out $80 million; and had agreed to review 36,000 other claims.4 It
seemed as if the insurers were retreating. Scruggs's campaign against them
collapsed in November 2007, however, when he, his son Zachary and three
associates were indicted on charges of trying to bribe a statecourt
judge in a case arising from a dispute over Katrina-related legal fees.
Scruggs now faces a prison sentence of up to five years.5
It may sound like
just another story of Southern moral laxity - or proof that those who live by
the tort, die by the tort. Yet, regardless of Scruggs's descent from good
fellow to bad felon, the fact remains that both State Farm and All State have
now declared a large part of the Gulf of Mexico coast a 'no insurance' zone.
Why risk renewing policies here, where natural disasters happen all too often
and where, after the disaster, companies have to contend with the likes of
Dickie Scruggs? The strong implication would seem to be that providing coverage
to the inhabitants of places like Pascagoula and Saint Bernard is no longer
something the private sector is prepared to do. Yet it is far from clear that
American legislators are ready to take on the liabilities implied by a further
extension of public insurance. Total non-insured damages arising from
hurricanes in 2005 are likely to end up costing the federal government at least
$109 billion in post-disaster assistance and $8 billion in tax relief, nearly
three times the estimated insurance losses.6 According to Naomi Klein, this is
symptomatic of a dysfunctional 'Disaster Capitalism Complex', which generates
private profits for some, but leaves taxpayers to foot the true costs of
catastrophe.? In the face of such ruinous bills, what is the right way to proceed?
When insurance fails, is the only alternative, in effect, to nationalize all
natural disasters - creating a huge. open-ended liability for governments?
Of course, life has
always been dangerous. There have always been hurricanes, just as there have always
been wars, plagues and famines. And disasters can be small private affairs as
well as big public ones. Every day, men and women fall ill or are injured and
suddenly can no longer work. We all get old and lose the strength to earn our
daily bread. An unlucky few are born unable to fend for themselves. And sooner
or later we all die, often leaving one or more dependants
behind us. The key point is that few of these calamities are random events. The
incidence of hurricanes has a certain regularity like the incidence of disease
and death. In every decade since the 1850s the United States has been struck by
between one and ten major hurricanes (defined as a storm with wind speeds above
110 mph and a storm surge above 8 feet). It is not yet clear that the present
decade will beat the record of the 1940s, which saw ten such hurricanes.8
Because there are data covering a century and a half, it is possible to attach
probabilities to the incidence and scale of hurricanes. The US Army Corps of
Engineers described Hurricane Katrina as a I-in-396 storm, meaning that there
is a 0.25 per cent chance of such a large hurricane striking the United States
in any given year.9 A rather different view was taken by the company Risk
Management Solutions, which judged a Katrina-sized hurricane to be a
once-in-forty-years event just a few weeks before the
storm struck. 10 These different assessments indicate that, like earthquakes
and wars, hurricanes may belong more in the realm of uncertainty than of risk
properly understood. Such probabilities can be calculated with greater
precision for most of the other risks that people face mainly because they are
more frequent, so statistical patterns are easier to discern. The average
American's lifetime risk of death from exposure to forces of nature, including
all kinds of natural disaster, has been estimated at 1 in 3,288. The equivalent
figure for death due to a fire in a building is 1 in 1,358. The odds of the
average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more
likely to commit suicide (1 in 11 9); more likely still to die in a fatal road
accident (1 in 78); and most likely of all to die of cancer (1 in 5).11
In pre-modern
agricultural societies, nearly everyone was at substantial risk from premature
death due to malnutrition or disease, to say nothing of war. People in those
days could do much less than later generations in the way of prophylaxis. They
relied much more on seeking to propitiate the gods or God who, they
conjectured, determined the incidence of famines, plagues and invasions. Only
slowly did men appreciate the significance of measurable regularities in the
weather, crop yields and infections. Only very belatedly - in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries - did they begin systematically to record rainfall,
harvests and mortality in a way that made probabilistic calculation possible.
Yet, even before they did so, they understood the wisdom of saving: putting
money aside for the proverbial (and in agricultural societies literal) extreme
rainy day. Most primitive societies at least attempt to hoard food and other
provisions to tide them over hard times. And our tribal species intuitively
grasped from the earliest times that it makes sense to pool resources, since
there is genuine safety in numbers. Appropriately, given our ancestors' chronic
vulnerability, the earliest forms of insurance were probably burial societies,
which set aside resources to guarantee a tribe member a decent interment. (Such
societies remain the only form of financial institution in some of the poorest
parts of East Africa.) Saving in advance of probable future adversity remains
the fundamental principle of insurance, whether it is against death, the
effects of old age, sickness or accident. The trick is knowing how much to save
and what to do with those savings to ensure that, unlike in New Orleans after
Katrina, there is enough money in the kitty to cover the costs of catastrophe
when it strikes.
Enter the Scottish
Ministers' Widows' Fund. It established a model not just for Scottish
clergymen, but for everyone who aspired to provide against premature death.
Within the next twenty years similar funds sprang up on the same model all over
the English-speaking world, including the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund of
Philadelphia (1761) and the English Equitable Company (1762), as well as the
United Incorporations of St Mary's Chapel (1768), which provided for the widows
of Scottish artisans. By 1815 the principle of insurance was so widespread that
it was adopted even for those men who lost their lives fighting against
Napoleon. A soldier's odds of being killed at Waterloo were roughly I in 4. But
if he was insured, he had the consolation of knowing, even as he expired on the
field of battle, that his wife and children would not be thrown out onto the
streets (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase 'take cover'). By the middle
of the nineteenth century, being insured was as much a badge of respectability
as going to Church on a Sunday. Even novelists, not generally renowned for
their financial prudence, could join. Sir Walter Scott took out a policy in
1826 to reassure his creditors that they would still get their money back in
the event of his death.( See A. N. Wilson, A Life of Walter Scott: The Laird of
Abbotsford, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp. 169-71). A fund that had originally been
intended to support the widows of a few hundred clergymen grew steadily to
become the general insurance and pension fund we know today as Scottish Widows.
Although it is now just another financial services provider, having been taken
over by Lloyds Bank in 1999, Scottish Widows is still seen as exemplifying the
benefits of Calvinist thrift, thanks in no small measure to one of the most
successful advertising campaigns in financial history.
But no matter how
many private funds like Scottish Widows were set up, there were always going to
be people beyond the reach of insurance, who were either too poor or too
feckless to save for that rainy day. Their lot was a painfully hard one:
dependence on private charity or the austere regime of the workhouse. At the
large Marylebone Workhouse on London's Northumberland Street, the 'poor being
lame impotent old and blind' numbered up to 1900 in hard times. When the
weather was bitter, work scarce and food dear, men and women 'casuals' would
submit to a prison-like regime. As the Illustrated London News described it in
1867:
They are washed with
plenty of hot and cold water and soap, and receive six ounces of bread and a
pint of gruel for supper; after which, their clothes being taken to be cleaned
and fumigated, they are furnished with warm woolen night-shirts and sent to
bed. Prayers are read by Scripture-readers; strict order and silence are
maintained all night in the dormitory ... The bed consists of a mattress stuffed
with coir, a flock pillow, and a pair of rugs. At six o'clock in the morning in
summer, and at seven in winter, they are aroused and ordered to work. The women
are set to clean the wards, or to pick oakum; the men to break stones, but none
are detained longer than four hours after their breakfast which is of the same
kind and quantity as their supper. Their clothes, disinfected and freed of
vermin, being restored to them in the morning, those who choose to mend their
ragged garments are supplied with needles, thread, and patches of cloth for
that purpose. If any are ill, the medical officer of the workhouse attends to
them; if too ill to travel, they are admitted into the infirmary.
The author of the
report concluded that 'the "Amateur Casual" would find nothing to
complain of ... A board of Good Samaritans could do no more.'12 By the later
nineteenth century, however, a feeling began to grow that life's losers
deserved better. The seeds began to be planted of a new approach to the problem
of risk - one that would ultimately grow into the welfare state. These state
systems of insurance were designed to exploit the ultimate economy of scale, by
covering literally every citizen from birth to death.
We tend to think of
the welfare state as a British invention. We also tend to think of it as a
socialist or at least liberal invention.
In fact, the first
system of compulsory state health insurance and old age pensions was introduced
not in Britain but in Germany, and it was an example the British took more than
twenty years to follow. Nor was it a creation of the Left; rather the opposite.
The aim of Otto von Bismarck's social insurance legislation, as he himself put
it in 1880, was 'to engender in the great mass of the unpropertied the
conservative state of mind that springs from the feeling of entitlement to a
pension.' In Bismarck's view, 'A man who has a pension for his old age is ...
much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect.' To the surprise of
his liberal opponents, Bismarck openly acknowledged that this was 'a
state-socialist idea! The generality must undertake to assist the
unpropertied.' But his motives were far from altruistic. 'Whoever embraces this
idea', he observed, 'will come to power.13 It was not until 1908 that Britain
followed the Bismarckian example, when the Liberal
Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George introduced a modest and
means-tested state pension for those over 70. A National Health Insurance Act
followed in 1911. Though a man of the Left, Lloyd George shared Bismarck's
insight that such measures were vote-winners in a system of rapidly widening
electoral franchises. The rich were outnumbered by the poor. When Lloyd George
raised direct taxes to pay for the state pension, he relished the label that
stuck to his 1909 budget: 'The People's Budget.'
If the welfare state
was conceived in politics, however, it grew to maturity in war. The First World
War expanded the scope of government activity in nearly every field. With
German submarines sending no less than 7,759,000 gross tons of merchant
shipping to the bottom of the ocean, there was clearly no way that war risk
could be covered by the private marine insurers. The standard Lloyd's policy
had in fact already been modified (in 1898) to exclude 'the consequences of hostilities
or warlike operations' (the so-called f.c.s. clause:
'free of capture and seizure'). But even those policies that had been altered
to remove that exclusion were cancelled when war broke out.14 The state stepped
in, virtually nationalizing merchant shipping in the case of the United
States,15 and (predictably) enabling insurance companies to claim that any
damage to ships between 1914 and 1918 was a consequence of the war.16 With the
coming of peace, politicians in Britain also hastened to cushion the effects of
demobilization on the labor market by introducing an Unemployment Insurance
Scheme in 1920.17 This process repeated itself during and after the Second
World War. The British version of social insurance was radically expanded under
the terms of the 1942 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social
Insurance and Allied Services, chaired by the economist William Beveridge,
which recommended a broad assault on 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and
Idleness' through a variety of state schemes. In a March 1943 broadcast,
Churchill summarized these as: 'national compulsory insurance for all classes
for all purposes from the cradle to the grave'; the abolition of unemployment
by government policies which would 'exercise a balancing influence upon
development which can be turned on or off as circumstances require'; 'a
broadening field for State ownership and enterprise'; more publicly provided
housing; reforms to public education and greatly expanded health and welfare
services.18
The arguments for
state insurance extended beyond mere social equity. First, state insurance
could step in where private insurers feared to tread. Second, universal and
sometimes compulsory membership removed the need for expensive advertising and
sales campaigns. Third, as one leading authority observed in the 1930s, 'the
larger numbers combined should form more stable averages for the statistical
experience'. 19 State insurance exploited economies of scale, in other words;
so why not make it as comprehensive as possible? The enthusiasm with which the
Beveridge Report was greeted not just in Britain but around the world helps
explain why the welfare state is still thought of as having 'Made in Britain'
stamped on it. However, the world's first welfare superpower, the country that
took the principle furthest and with the greatest success, was not Britain but
Japan. Nothing illustrates more clearly than the Japanese experience the
intimate links between the welfare state and the warfare state.
Disaster kept
striking Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. On 1 September 1923,
a huge earthquake (7.9 on the Richter scale) struck the Kanta
region, devastating the cities of Yokohama and Tokyo. More than 128,000 houses
completely collapsed, around the same number half-collapsed, 900 were swept
away by the sea and nearly 450,000 were burnt down in fires that broke out
almost immediately after the quake.20 The Japanese were insured; between 1879 and 1914
their insurance industry had grown from nothing into a vibrant sector of the
economy, offering cover against loss at sea, death, fire, conscription,
transport accident and burglary, to name just some of the thirteen distinct
forms of insurance sold by more than thirty companies. In the year of the
earthquake, for example, Japanese citizens had purchased ¥699,634,000 ($328
million) worth of new life insurance for 1923, with an average policy amount of
¥1,280 ($600).21 But the total losses caused by the earthquake were in the
region of $4-6 billion. Six years later the Great Depression struck, pushing
some rural areas to the brink of starvation (at this time 70 per cent of the
population was engaged in agriculture, of whom 70 per cent tilled an average of
just one and a half acres).22 In 1937 the country embarked on an expensive and
ultimately futile war of conquest in China. Then, in December 1941, Japan
went to war with the world's economic colossus, the United States, and
eventually paid the ultimate price at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Quite apart from
the nearly three million lives lost in Japan's doomed bid for empire, by the
end in 1945 the value of Japan's entire capital stock seemed to have been
reduced to zero by American bombers. In aggregate, according to the US
Strategic Bombing Survey, at least 40 per cent of the built-up areas of more
than sixty cities had been destroyed; 2.5 million homes had been lost, leaving
8.3 million people homeless.23 Practically the only city to survive intact (though
not wholly unscathed) was Kyoto, the former imperial capital - a city which
still embodies the ethos of pre-modern Japan, as it is one of the last places
where the traditional wooden townhouses known as machiya
can still be seen. One look at these long, thin structures, with their sliding
doors, paper screens, polished beams and straw mats, makes it clear why
Japanese cities were so vulnerable to fire.
In Japan, as in most
combatant countries, the lesson was clear: the world was just too dangerous a
place for private insurance markets to cope with. (Even in the United States,
the federal government took over 90 per cent of the risk for war damage through
the War Damage Corporation, one of the most profitable public sector entities
in history for the obvious reason that no war damage befell the mainland United
States. 25 With the best will in the world, individuals could not be expected
to insure themselves against the US Air Force. The answer adopted more or less
everywhere was for the government to take over, in effect to nationalize risk.
When the Japanese set out to devise a system of universal welfare in 1949,
their Advisory Council for Social Security acknowledged a debt to the British
example. In the eyes of Bunji Kondo, a convinced
believer in universal welfare coverage, it was time to have bebariji
no nihonhan: Beveridge for the Japanese.26 But they
took the idea even further than Beveridge had intended. The aim, as the report
of the Advisory Council put it, was to create a system in which measures are
taken for economic security for sickness, injury, childbirth, disability,
death, old age, unemployment, large families and other causes of impoverishment
through ... payment by governments ... [and] in which the needy will be
guaranteed the minimum standard of living by national assistance.27
From now on, the
welfare state would cover people against all the vagaries of modern life. If
they were born sick, the state would pay. If they could not afford education,
the state would pay. If they could not find work, the state would pay. If they
were too ill to work, the state would pay. When they retired, the state would
pay. And when they finally died, the state would pay their dependants.
This certainly chimed with one of the objectives of the post-war American
occupation: 'To replace a feudal economy by a welfare economy'.28 Yet it would
be wrong to assume (as a number of post-war commentators did) that Japan's
welfare state was 'imposed wholesale by an alien power'.29 In reality, the
Japanese set up their own welfare state - and they began to do so long before
the end of the Second World War. It was the mid twentieth-century state's
insatiable appetite for able-bodied young soldiers and workers, not social
altruism, that was the real driver. As the American political scientist Harold
D. Lasswell put it, Japan in the 1930s became a
garrison state.30 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a
'warfare-welfare state', offered social security in return for military
sacrifice.
There had been some
basic social insurance in Japan before the 1930s: factory accident insurance
and health insurance (introduced for factory workers in 1927). But this covered
less than two fifths of the industrial workforce.31 Significantly, the plan for
a Japanese Welfare Ministry (Koseisho) was approved
by Japan's lmperial government on 9 July 1937, just
two months after the Jutbreak of war with China.32
Its first step was to introduce a new system of universal health insurance to
supplement the existing programme for industrial
employees. Between the end of 1938 and the end of 1944, the number of citizens
covered by the scheme increased nearly a hundred-fold, from just over 500,000
to over 40 million. The aim was explicit: a healthier populace would ensure
healthier recruits to the Emperor's armed forces. The wartime slogan of 'all
people are soldiers' (kokumin kai hei)
was adapted to become 'all people should have insurance' (kokumin
kai hoken). And to ensure universal coverage, the
medical profession and pharmaceutical industry were essentially subordinated to
the state.33 The war years also saw the introduction of compulsory pension
schemes for seamen and workers, with the state covering 10 per cent of the
costs, while employers and employees each contributed 5.5 per cent of the
latter's wages. The first steps towards the large-scale provision of public
housing were also taken. So what happened after the war in Japan was in large
measure the extension of the warfare-welfare state. Now 'all people should have
pensions', kokumin kai nenkin.
Now there should be unemployment insurance, rather than the earlier
paternalistic practice of keeping workers on payrolls even in lean times. Small
wonder some Japanese tended to think of welfare in nationalistic terms, a kind
of peaceful mode of national aggrandisement. The 1950
report, with its British-style recommendations, was in fact rejected by the
government. Only in 1961, long after the end of American control, were most of
its recommendations adopted. By the late 1970s a Japanese politician, Nakagawa Yatsuhiro, could boast that Japan had become 'The Welfare
Super-Power' (fukushi chodaikoku),
precisely because its system was different from (and superior to) Western
models.34
There was in fact
nothing institutionally unique about Japan's system, of course. Most welfare
states aimed at universal, cradle-to-grave coverage. Yet the Japanese welfare
state seemed to be a miracle of effectiveness. In terms of life expectancy, the
country led the world. In education, too, it was ahead of the field. Around 90
per cent of the population had graduated from high school in the mid seventies, compared with just 35 per cent in England.36
Japan was also a much more equal society than any in the West, with the sole
exception of Sweden. And Japan had the largest state pension fund in the world,
so that every Japanese who retired could count on a generous bonus as well as a
regular income throughout his (generally rather numerous) years of well earned rest. The welfare superpower was also a miracle
of parsimony. In 1975 just 9 per cent of national income went on social
security, compared with 3l per cent in Sweden.37 The burden of tax and social
welfare was roughly half that in England. Run on this basis, the welfare state
seemed to make perfect sense. Japan had achieved security for all- the
elimination of risk - while at the same time its economy grew so rapidly that
by 1968 it was the second largest in the world. A year before, Herman Kahn had
predicted that Japan's per capita income would overtake America's by 2000.
Indeed, Nakagawa Yatsuhiro argued that, when fringe
benefits were taken into account, 'the actual income of the Japanese worker
[was already] at least three times more than that of the American'.35 Warfare
had failed to make Japan Top Nation, but welfare was succeeding. The key turned
out to be not a foreign empire, but a domestic safety net. 38
Yet there was a
catch, a fatal flaw in the design of the post warfare welfare state. The
welfare state might have worked smoothly enough in 1970s Japan. But the same
could not be said of its counterparts in the Western world. Despite their
superficial topographical and historical resemblances (archipelagos off
Eurasia, imperial pasts, buttoned-up behavior when sober) the Japanese and the
British had quite different cultures. Outwardly, their welfare systems might
seem similar: state pensions financed out of taxation on the old pay-as-you-go
model; standardized retirement ages; universal health insurance; unemployment
benefits; subsidies to farmers; quite heavily restricted labor markets. But
these institutions worked in quite different ways in the two countries. In
Japan egalitarianism was a prized goal of policy, while a culture of social
conformism encouraged compliance with the rules. English individualism, by
contrast, inclined people cynically to game the system. In Japan, firms and
families continued to play substantial supporting roles in the welfare system.
Employers offered supplementary benefits and were reluctant to fire workers. As
recently as the 1990s, two thirds of Japanese older than 64 lived with their
children.39 In Britain, by contrast, employers did not hesitate to slash
payrolls in hard times, while people were much more likely to leave elderly
parents to the tender mercies of the National Health Service. The welfare state
might have made Japan an economic superpower, but in the 1970s it appeared to
be having the opposite effect in Britain.
According to British
conservatives, what had started out as a system of national insurance had
degenerated into a system of state handouts and confiscatory taxation which
disastrously skewed economic incentives. Between 1930 and 1980, social
transfers in Britain had risen from just 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product
to 10 per cent in 1960, 13 per cent in 1970 and nearly 17 per cent in 1980,
more than 6 per cent higher than in Japan.40 Health care, social services and
social security were consuming three times more than defense as a share of
total managed government expenditure. Yet the results were dismal. Increased
expenditure on UK welfare had been accompanied by low growth and inflation
significantly above the developed world average. A particular problem was
chronically slow productivity growth (real GDP per person employed grew by just
2.8 per cent between 1960 and 1979, compared with 8.1 per cent in Japan),41
which in turn seemed closely related to the bloody-minded bargaining techniques
of British trade unions ('go slows' being a favorite alternative to outright
'downing tools'). Meanwhile, marginal tax rates in excess of 100 per cent on
higher incomes and capital gains discouraged traditional forms of saving and
investment. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives
without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of
serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who
slacked. The result was 'stagflation': stagnant growth plus high inflation.
Similar problems were afflicting the US economy, where expenditure on health,
Medicare, income security and social security had risen from 4 per cent of GDP
in 1959 to 9 per cent in 1975, outstripping defense spending for the first
time. In America, too, productivity was scarcely growing and stagflation was
rampant. What was to be done?
One man, and his
pupils, thought they knew the answer. Thanks in large measure to their
influence, one of the most pronounced economic trends of the past twenty-five
years has been for the Western welfare state to be dismantled, reintroducing
people with a sharp shock to the unpredictable monster they thought they had
escaped from: risk.
The Big Chill
In 1976 a diminutive
professor working at the University of Chicago won the Nobel Prize in
economics. Milton Friedman’s reputation as an economist rested in large measure
on his reinstatement of the idea that inflation was due to an excessive
increase in the supply of money. He co-wrote perhaps the single most important
book on US monetary policy of all time, firmly laying the blame for the Great
Depression on mistakes by the Federal Reserve.42 But the question that had come
to preoccupy him by the mid-seventies was: what had gone wrong with the welfare
state? In March 1975, Friedman flew from Chicago to Chile to
answer that question.
Only eighteen months
earlier, in September 1973, tanks had rolled through the capital Santiago to
overthrow the government of the Marxist President Salvador Allende, whose
attempt to turn Chile into a Communist state had ended in total economic chaos
and a call by the parliament for a military takeover. Air force jets bombed the
presidential Moneda Palace, watched from the balcony
of the nearby Carera Hotel by opponents of Allende
who celebrated with champagne. Inside the palace, the president himself fought
a hopeless rearguard action armed with an AK47 – a gift from Fidel Castro, the
man he had sought to emulate. As the tanks rumbled towards him, Allende
realized it was all over and, cornered in what was left of his quarters, shot
himself.
The coup epitomized a
world-wide crisis of the post-war welfare state and posed a stark choice between
rival economic systems. With output collapsing and inflation rampant, Chile’s
system of universal- benefits and state pensions was essentially bankrupt. For
Allende, the answer had been full blown Marxism, a complete Soviet-style
takeover of every aspect of economic life. The generals and their supporters
knew they were against that. But what were they actually for, since the status
quo was clearly unsustainable? Enter Milton Friedman. Amid his lectures and
seminars, he spent three quarters of an hour with the new president General
Pinochet and later wrote him an assessment of the Chilean economic situation,
urging him to reduce the government deficit that he had identified as the main
cause of the country’s sky-high inflation, then running at an annual rate of
900 per cent.43
A month after
Friedman’s visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped ‘at
any cost’. The regime cut government spending by 27 per cent and set fire to
bundles of banknotes. But Friedman was offering more than his patent monetarist
shock therapy. In a letter to Pinochet written after his return to Chicago, he
argued that ‘this problem’ of inflation arose ‘from trends toward socialism
that startedi0rty years ago, and reached their logical – and terrible climax in
the Allende regime’. As he later recalled, ‘The general line I was taking … was
that their present difficulties were due almost entirely to the forty-year
trend toward collectivism, socialism, and the welfare state .. .’44 And he
assured Pinochet: ‘The end of inflation will lead to a rapid expansion of the
capital market, which will greatly facilitate the transfer of enterprises and
activities still in the hands of the government to the private sector.’45
For tendering this
advice Friedman found himself denounced by the American press. After all, he
was acting as a consultant to a military dictator responsible for the
executions of more than two thousand real and suspected Communists and the
torture of nearly 30,000 more. As the New York Times asked: ‘ … if the pure
Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of
repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?’
Chicago’s role in the
new regime consisted of more than just one visit by Milton Friedman. Since the
1950s, there had been a regular stream of bright young Chilean economists
studying at Chicago on an exchange programme with the
Universidad Catholica in Santiago, and they went back convinced of the need to
balance the budget, tighten the money supply and liberalize trade.46 These were
the so-called Chicago Boys, Friedman’s foot soldiers: Jorge Cauas,
Pinochet’s finance minister and later economics ‘super minister’, Sergio de
Castro, his successor as finance minister, Miguel Kast, labor minister and
later central bank chief, and at least eight others who studied in Chicago and
went on to serve in government. Even before the fall of Allende, they had
devised a detailed programme of reforms known as El Ladrillo (The Brick) because of the thickness of the
manuscript. The most radical measures, however, would come from a Catholic
University student who had opted to study at Harvard, not Chicago. What he had
in mind was the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation.
Thatcher and – Friedman noted in 1988 that he had given much the same advice on
inflation to the Chinese government, yet found that he received no ‘avalanche
of protests for [his] having been willing to give advice to so evil a
government’, despite the fact that it ‘has been and still is more repressive
than the Chilean military junta’.
Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare
started in Chile.
For Jose Pifiera, just 24 when Pinochet seized power, the invitation
to return to Chile from Harvard posed an agonizing dilemma. He had no illusions
about the nature of Pinochet's regime. Yet he also believed there was an
opportunity to put into practice ideas that had been taking shape in his mind
ever since his arrival in New England. The key, as he saw it, was not just to
reduce inflation. It was also essential to foster that link between property
rights and political rights which had been at the heart of the successful North
American experiment with capitalist democracy. There was no surer way to do
this, Pifiera believed, than radically to overhaul
the welfare state, beginning with the pay-as-you-go system of funding state
pensions and other benefits. As he saw it:
What had begun as a
system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with
today's contributions being used to pay today's benefits, rather than to
accumulate a fund for future use. This 'pay-as-you-go' approach had replaced
the principle of thrift with the practice of entitlement ... [But this
approach] is rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. It
destroys, at the individual level, the link between contributions and benefits.
In other words, between effort and reward. Wherever that happens on a massive
scale and for a long period of time, the final result is disaster.47
Between 1979 and
1981, as minister of labour (and later minister of
mining), Pifiera created a radically new pension
system for Chile, offering every worker the chance to opt out of the state
pension system. Instead of paying a payroll tax, they would put an equivalent
amount (10 per cent of their wages) into an individual Personal Retirement
Account, to be managed by private and competing companies known as Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones (AFPs).48 On reaching retirement age, a
participant would withdraw his money and use it to buy an annuity; or, if he
preferred, he could keep working and contributing. In addition to a pension,
the scheme also included a disability and life insurance premium. The idea was
to give the Chilean worker a sense that the money being set aside was really
his own capital. In the words of Hernan Btichi (who
helped Pifiera draft the social security legislation
and went on to implement the reform of health care), 'Social programmes have to include some incentive for individual
effort and for persons gradually to be responsible for their own destiny. There
is nothing more pathetic than social programmes that
encourage social parasitism.'49
Pifiera gambled. He gave workers a choice: stick with the old
system of pay-as-you-go, or opt for the new Personal Retirement Accounts. He
cajoled, making regular television appearances to reassure workers that -
'Nobody will take away your grandmother's cheque' (from the old state system).
He held firm, sarcastically dismissing a proposal that the country's trade
unions, rather than individual workers, should be responsible for choosing
their members' AFPs. Finally, on 4 November 1980, the reform was approved,
coming into effect at Pifiera's mischievous
suggestion on 1 May, international Labour Day, the
following year. 50 The public response was enthusiastic. By I990 more than 70
per cent of workers had made the switch to the private system.51 Each one
received a shiny new book in which the contributions and investment returns
were recorded. By the end of 2006, around 7.7 million Chileans had a Personal
Retirement Account; 2.7 million were also covered by private health schemes,
under the so-called ISAPRE system, which allowed workers to opt out of the
state health insurance system in favor of a private provider. It may not sound
like it, but - along with the other Chicago-inspired reforms implemented under
Pinochet - this represented as big a revolution as anything the Marxist Allende
had planned back in 1973. Moreover, the reform had to be introduced at a time of
extreme economic instability, a consequence of the ill-judged decision to peg
the Chilean currency to the dollar in 1979, when the inflation dragon appeared
to have been slain. When US interest rates rose shortly afterwards, the
deflationary pressure plunged Chile into a recession that threatened to derail
the Chicago-Harvard express altogether. The economy contracted 13 per cent in
1982, seemingly vindicating the left-wing critics of Friedman's 'shock
treatment'. Only towards the end of 1985 could the crisis really be regarded as
over. By 1990 it was clear that the reform had been a success: welfare reforms
were responsible for fully half the decline of total government expenditure
from 34 per cent of GDP to 22 per cent.
Was it worth it? Was
it worth the huge moral gamble that the Chicago and Harvard boys made, of
getting into bed with a murderous, torturing military dictator? The answer
depends on whether or not you think these economic reforms helped pave the way
back to a sustainable democracy in Chile. In 1980, just seven years after the
coup, Pinochet conceded a new constitution that prescribed a ten-year
transition back to democracy. In 1990, having lost a referendum on his
leadership, he stepped down as president (though he remained in charge of the
army for a further eight years). Democracy was restored, and by that time the
economic miracle was under way that helped to ensure its survival. For the
pension reform not only created a new class of property owners, each with his
own retirement nest egg. It also gave the Chilean economy a massive shot in the
arm, since the effect was significantly to increase the savings rate (to 30 per
cent of GDP by 1989, the highest in Latin America). Initially, a cap was
imposed that prevented the AFPs from investing more than 6 per cent (later 12
per cent) of the new pension funds outside Chile.52
The effect of this
was to ensure that Chile's new source of savings was channeled into the
country's own economic development. For example the annual rate of return on
the Personal Retirement Accounts has been over 10 per cent, reflecting the
soaring performance of the Chilean stock market, which has risen by a factor of
18 since 1987.
There was a shadow
side to the system, to be sure. The administrative and fiscal costs of the
system are sometimes said to be too high.53 Since not everyone in the economy
has a regular full-time job, not everyone ends up participating in the system.
The self employed were not obliged to contribute to
Personal Retirement Accounts, and the casually employed do not contribute
either. That leaves a substantial proportion of the population with no pension
coverage at all, including many of the people living in La Victoria, once a
hotbed of popular resistance to the Pinochet regime - and still the kind of
place where Che Guevara's face is spray-painted on the walls. On the other
hand, the government stands ready to make up the difference for those whose
savings do not suffice to pay a minimum pension, provided they have done at
least twenty years of work. And there is also a Basic Solidarity pension for
those who do not qualify for this.54 Above all, the improvement in Chile's
economic performance since the Chicago Boys' reforms is very hard to argue
with. The growth rate in the fifteen years before Friedman's visit was 0.17 per
cent. In the fifteen years that followed, it was 3.28 per cent, nearly twenty
times higher. The poverty rate has declined dramatically to just 15 per cent,
compared with 40 per cent in the rest of Latin America.68 Santiago today is the
shining city of the Andes, easily the continent's most prosperous and
attractive city.
It is a sign of
Chile's success that the country's pension reforms have been imitated all
across the continent, and indeed around the world. Bolivia, El Salvador and
Mexico copied the Chilean scheme to the letter. Peru and Colombia introduced
private pensions as an alternative to the state system.56 Kazakhstan, too, has
followed the Chilean example. Even British MPs have beaten a path from
Westminster to Pifiera's door. The irony is that the
Chilean reform was far more radical than anything that has been attempted in
the United States, the heartland of free market economics. Yet welfare reform
is coming to North America, whether anyone wants it or not.
When Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans, it laid bare some realities about the American
system that many people had been doing their best to ignore. Yes, America had a
welfare state. No, it didn't work. The Reagan and Clinton administrations had
implemented what seemed like radical welfare reforms, reducing unemployment
benefits and the periods for which they could be claimed. But no amount of
reform could insulate the system from the ageing of the American population and
the spiraling cost of private health care.
The US has a unique
welfare system. Social Security provides a minimal state pension to all
retirees, while at the same time the Medicare system covers all the health
costs of the elderly and disabled. Income support and other health expenditures
push up the total cost of federal welfare programmes
to 11 per cent of GDP. Am1rican healthcare, however, is almost entirely
provided by the private sector. At its best it is state-of-the-art, but it is
very far from cheap. And, if you want treatment before you retire, you need a
private insurance policy - something an estimated 47 million Americans do not
have, since such policies tend to be available only to those in regular, formal
employment. The result is a welfare system which is not comprehensive, is much less
redistributive than European systems, but is still hugely expensive. Since 1993
Social Security has been more expensive than National Security. Public
expenditure on education is higher as a percentage of GDP (5.9 per cent) than
in Britain, Germany or Japan. Public health expenditures are equivalent to
around 7 per cent of GDP, the same as in Britain; but private health care
spending accounts for more (8.5 per cent, compared with a paltry 1.1 per cent
in Britain).57
Such a welfare system
is ill prepared to cope with a rapid increase in the number of claimants. But
that is precisely what Americans face as the members of the so-called 'Baby
Boomer' generation, born after the Second World War, begin to retire.58
According to the United Nations, between now and 2050 male life expectancy in
the United States is likely to rise from 75 to 80. Over the next forty years,
the share of the American population that is aged 65 or over is projected to
rise from 12 per cent to nearly 21 per cent. Unfortunately, many of the
soon-to-be-retired have made inadequate provision for life after work.
According to the 2006
Retirement Confidence Survey, six in ten American workers say they are saving
for retirement and just four in ten say they have actually calculated how much
they should be saving. Many of those without sufficient savings imagine that
they will compensate by working for longer. The average worker plans to work
until age 65. But it turns out that he or she actually ends up retiring at 62;
indeed, around four in ten American workers end up leaving the workforce
earlier than they planned.59 This has grave implications for the federal
budget, since those who make these miscalculations are likely to end up a
charge on taxpayers in one way or another. Today the average retiree receives
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits totalling
$21,000 a year. Multiply this by the current 36 million elderly and you see why
these programmes already consume such a large
proportion of federal tax revenues. And that proportion is bound to rise, not
only because the number of retirees is going up but also because the costs of
benefits like Medicare are out of control, rising at double the rate of
inflation. The 2003 extension of Medicare to cover prescription drugs only made
matters worse. According to one projection, by the aptly named Medicare Trustee
Thomas R. Saving, the cost of Medicare alone will absorb 24 per cent of all
federal income taxes by 2019. Current figures also imply that the federal
government has much larger unfunded liabilities than official data imply. The
Government Accountability Office's latest estimate of the implicit 'exposures'
arising from unfunded future Social Security and Medicare benefits is $34
trillion.60 That is nearly four times the size of the official federal debt.
Ironically, there's
only one country where the problem of an ageing population has more serious
economic implications than the United States. That country is Japan. So
successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life
expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined
with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more
than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65. According to Nakamae International Economic Research, the elderly
population will be equal to that of the working population by 2044-74 As a
result, Japan is now grappling with a profound structural crisis of its welfare
system, which was not designed to cope with what the Japanese call the
longevity society (ch6ju shakai).61 Despite raising
the retirement age, the government has not yet resolved the problems of the
state pension system. (Matters are not helped by the fact that many self employed people and students - not to mention some
eminent politicians - are failing to make their required social security
contributions.) Public health insurers, meanwhile, have been in deficit since
the early 1990s.62 japans’ welfare budget is now
equal to three quarters of tax revenues. Its debt exceeds one quadrillion yen,
around 170 per cent of GDP.63 Yet private sector institutions are in no better
shape. Life insurance companies have been struggling since the 1990 stock
market crash; three major insurers failed between 1997 and 2000. Pension funds
are in equally dire straits. As most countries in the developed world are
moving in the same direction, it gives a new meaning to that old 1980s pop song
about 'turning Japanese'. Assets at the world's largest pension funds (which
include the Japanese government's own fund, its Dutch counterpart and the
California Public Employees' fund) now exceed $10 trillion, having risen by 60
per cent between 2004 and 2007.64 But are their liabilities ultimately going to
grow so large that perhaps even these huge sums will not suffice?
Longer life is good
news for individuals, but it is bad news for the welfare state and the
politicians who have to persuade voters to reform it. The even worse news is
that, even as the world's Population is getting older, the world itself may be
getting more dangerous.65
What if international
terrorism strikes more frequently and/or lethally, as Al Qaeda continues its
quest for weapons of mass destruction? There is in fact good reason to fear
this. Given the relatively limited impact of the 2001 attacks, Al Qaeda has a
strong incentive to attempt a 'nuclear 9/11'.66 The organization's spokesmen do
not deny this; on the contrary, they openly boast of their ambition 'to kill 4
million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and
wound and cripple hundreds of thousands'.67 This cannot be dismissed as mere
rhetoric. According to Graham Allison, of Harvard University's Belfer Center, 'if the US and other governments just keep
doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city is
more likely than not by 2014'. In the view of Richard Garwin,
one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, there is already a '20 per cent per
year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities
included'. Another estimate, by Allison's colleague Matthew Bunn, puts the odds
of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period at 29 per cent.68
Even a small
12.S-kiloton nuclear device would kill up to 80,000 people if detonated in an
average American city; a 1.0 megaton hydrogen bomb could kill as many as 1.9
million. A successful biological attack using anthrax spores could be nearly as
lethal. 69
What if global
warming is increasing the incidence of natural disasters? Here, too, there are
some grounds for unease. According to the scientific experts on the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 'the frequency of heavy precipitation
events has increased over most areas' as a result of man-made global warming.
There is also 'observational evidence of an increase in intense tropical
cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970'. The rising sea levels
forecast by the IPCC would inevitably increase the flood damage caused by
storms like Katrina.70 Not all scientists accept the notion that hurricane
activity along the US Atlantic coast is on the increase (as claimed by Al Gore
in his film An Inconvenient Truth). But it would clearly be a mistake blithely
to assume that this is not the case, especially given the continued growth of residential
construction in vulnerable states. For governments that are already tottering
under the weight of ever-increasing welfare commitments, an increase in the
frequency or scale of catastrophes could be fiscally fatal. The insurance (and
reinsurance) losses arising from the 9/11 attacks were in the region of $30-58
billion, close to the insurance losses due to Katrina.71 In both cases, the US
federal government had to step in to help private insurers meet their
commitments, providing emergency federal terrorism insurance in the aftermath
of 9/11, and absorbing the bulk of the costs of emergency relief and
reconstruction along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, just as
happened during the world wars, the welfare state steps in when the insurers
are overwhelmed. But this has a perverse result in the case of natural
disasters. In effect, taxpayers in relatively safer parts of the country are
subsidizing those who choose to live in hurricane-prone regions. One possible
way of correcting this imbalance would be to create a federal reinsurance programme to cover mega-catastrophes. Rather than looking
to taxpayers to pick up the tab for big disasters, insurers would charge
differential premiums (higher for those closest to hurricane zones), laying off
the risk of another Katrina by reinsuring the risk through the government.72
But there is another way.
Insurance and welfare
are not the only way of buying protection against future shocks. The smart way
to do it is by being hedged. Everyone today has heard of hedge funds like
Kenneth C. Griffin's Chicago-based Citadel. As founder of the Citadel
Investment Group, now one of the twenty biggest hedge funds in the world,
Griffin currently manages around $16 billion in assets. Among them are many
so-called distressed assets, which Griffin picks up from failed companies like
Enron for knock-down prices. It would not be too much to say that Ken Griffin
loves risk. He lives and breathes uncertainty. Since he began trading
convertible bonds from his Harvard undergraduate dormitory, he has feasted on
'fat tails'. Citadel's main offshore fund has generated annual returns of 21
per cent since 1998.73 In 2007, when other financial institutions were losing
billions in the credit crunch, he personally made more than a billion dollars.
Among the artworks that decorate his penthouse apartment on North Michigan
Avenue is Jasper Johns's False Start, for which he
paid $80 million, and a cezanne which cost him $60
million. When Griffin got married, the wedding was at Versailles (the French
chateau, not the small Illinois town of the same name).74 Hedging is clearly a
good business in a risky world. But what exactly does it mean, and where did it
come from?
The origins of
hedging, appropriately enough, are agricultural. For a farmer planting a crop,
nothing is more crucial than the price it will fetch after it has been
harvested and taken to market. But that could be lower than he expects or
higher. A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a
merchant to buy his crop when it comes to market at a price agreed when the
seeds are being planted. If the market price on the day of delivery is lower
than expected, the farmer is protected; the merchant who sells him the contract
naturally hopes it will be higher, leaving him with a profit. As the American
prairies were ploughed and planted, and as canals and railways connected them
to the major cities of the industrial Northeast, they became the nation's
breadbasket. But supply and demand, and hence prices, fluctuated wildly.
Between January 1858 and May 1867, partly as a result of the Civil War, the
price of wheat soared from 55 cents to $2.88 per bushel, before plummeting back
to 77 cents in March 1870. The earliest forms of protection for farmers were
known as forward contracts, which were simply bilateral agreements between
seller and buyer. A true futures contract, however, is a standardized
instrument issued by a futures exchange and hence tradable. With the
development of a standard 'to arrive' futures contract, along with a set of
rules to enforce settlement and, finally, an effective clearinghouse, the first
true futures market was born. Its birthplace was the Windy City: Chicago. The
creation of a permanent futures exchange in 1874 - the Chicago Produce Exchange,
the ancestor of today's Chicago Mercantile Exchange - created a home for
'hedging' in the US commodity markets.75
A pure hedge
eliminates price risk entirely. It requires a speculator as a counter-party to
take on the risk. In practice, however, most hedgers tend to engage in some
measure of speculative activity, looking for ways to profit from future price
movements. Partly because of public unease about this - the feeling that
futures markets were little better than casinos - it was not until the 1970s
that futures could also be issued for currencies and interest rates; and not
until 1982 that futures contracts on the stock market became possible.
At Citadel, Griffin
has brought together mathematicians, physicists, engineers, investment analysts
and advanced computer technology. Some of what they do is truly the financial
equivalent of rocket science. But the underlying principles are simple. Because
they are all derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts
are forms of 'derivative'. Closely related, though distinct from futures, are
the financial contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a call
option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a
particular commodity or financial asset from the seller ('writer') of the
option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as
the strike price).
Clearly, the buyer of
a call option expects the price of the commodity or underlying instrument to
rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed strike price, the option
is 'in the money' - and so is the smart guy who bought it. A put option is just
the opposite: the buyer has the right, but not the obligation, to sell an
agreed quantity of something to the seller of the option. A third kind of
derivative is the swap, which is effectively a bet between two parties on, for
example, the future path of interest rates. A pure interest rate swap allows
two parties already receiving interest payments literally to swap them,
allowing someone receiving a variable rate of interest to exchange it for a
fixed rate, in case interest rates decline. A credit default swap, meanwhile,
offers protection against a company's defaulting on its bonds. Perhaps the most
intriguing kind of derivative, however, are the weather derivatives like
natural catastrophe bonds, which allow insurance companies and others to offset
the effects of extreme temperatures or natural disasters by selling the
so-called tail risk to hedge funds like Fermat Capital. In effect, the buyer of
a 'cat bond' is selling insurance; if the disaster specified in the bond
happens, the buyer has to payout an agreed sum or forfeit his principal. In
return, the seller pays ~n attractive rate of
interest. In 2006 the total notional value of weather-risk derivatives was
around $45 billion.
There was a time when
most such derivatives were standardized instruments produced by exchanges like
the Chicago Mercantile, which has pioneered the market for weather derivatives.
Now, however, the vast proportion are custom-made and sold 'over the-counter'
(OTC), often by banks which charge attractive commissions for their services.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total notional amounts
outstanding of OTC derivative contracts - arranged on an ad hoc basis between
two parties - reached a staggering $ 596 trillion in December 2007, with a
gross market value of just over $9.5 trillion." Though they have famously
been called financial weapons of mass destruction by more traditional investors
like Warren Buffett (who has, nonetheless, made use of them), the view in
Chicago is that the world's economic system has never been better protected
against the unexpected.
The fact nevertheless
remains that this financial revolution has effectively divided the world in
two: those who are (or can be) hedged, and those who are not (or cannot be).
You need money to be hedged. Hedge funds typically ask for a minimum six- or
seven-figure investment and charge a management fee of at least 2 per cent of
your money (Citadel charges four times that) and 20 per cent of the profits.
That means that most big corporations can afford to be hedged against
unexpected increases in interest rates, exchange rates or commodity prices. If
they want to, they can also hedge against future hurricanes or terrorist
attacks by selling cat bonds and other derivatives. By comparison, most
ordinary households cannot afford to hedge at all and would not know how to
even if they could. We lesser mortals still have to rely on the relatively
blunt and often expensive instrument of insurance policies to protect us
against life's nasty surprises; or hope for the welfare state to ride to the
rescue.
There is, of course,
a third and much simpler strategy: the old one of simply saving for that rainy
day. Or, rather, borrowing to buy assets whose future appreciation in value
will supposedly afford a cushion against calamity. For many families in recent
years, making provision for an uncertain future has taken the very simple form
of an investment (usually leveraged, that is debt-financed) in a house, the
value of which is supposed to keep increasing until the day the breadwinners
need to retire. If the pension plan falls short, never mind. If you run out of
health insurance, don't panic. There is always home, sweet home.
As an insurance
policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It
represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market.
Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar
is very far from being as safe as houses. And you do not need to live in New
Orleans to find that out the hard way.
1. Rawle O. King,
'Hurricane Katrina: Insurance Losses and National Capacities for Financing
Disaster Risks', Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, I January
2008, table 1.
2. Joseph B. Treaster, 'A Lawyer Like a Hurricane: Facing Off Against
Asbestos, Tobacco and Now Home Insurers', New York Times, 16 March 2007.
3. For details, see
Richard F. Scruggs, 'Hurricane Katrina: Issues and Observations', American
Enterprise Institute-Brookings Judicial Symposium, 'Insurance and Risk
Allocation in America: Economics, Law and Regulation', Georgetown Law Center,
20-22 September 2006.
4. Details from
http://www.usa.gov/CitizenrTopics/PublicSafety/Hurricane--Katrina_Recovery.shtml,
http://katrina.louisiana.gov/index. html and
http://www.ldi.state.la.us/HurricaneKatrina.htm.
5. Peter Lattman, 'Plaintiffs Laywer
Scruggs is Indicted on Bribery Charges', Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2007;
Ashby Jones and Paulo Prada, 'Richard Scruggs Pleads Guilty', ibid., IS March
2008.
6. King, 'Hurricane
Katrina', p. 4.
7. Naomi Klein, The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007).
8.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml.
9. John Schwartz,
'One Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans is Still at Risk', New York Times, 17
August 2007.
10. Michael Lewis,
'In Nature's Casino', New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007.
11. National Safety
Council, 'What are the Odds of Dying?': http://
www.nsc.org/lrs/statinf%dds.htm. For the cancer statistic, see the National
Cancer Institute, 'SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 19752004', table 1-17:
http://srab.cancer.gov.ldevcan/. The precise lifetime probability of dying from
cancer in the United States between 2002 and 2004 was 21.29 per cent, with a 95
per cent confidence interval.
12.
http://www.workhouses. org.uk/index.html? StMarylebone/
StMarylebone.shtml.
13. Lothar Gall,
Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, vol. II: 18791898, trans. J. A. Underwood
(London, 1986), p. 129.
14. H. G. Lay, Marine
Insurance: A Text Book of the History of Marine Insurance, including the
Functions of Lloyd's Register of Shipping (London, 1925), p. 137.
15. Richard Sicotte, 'Economic Crisis and Political Response: The
Political Economy of the Shipping Act of 1916', journal of Economic History,
59,4 (December 1999), pp. 861-84.
16. Anon.,
'Allocation of Risk between Marine and War Insurer', Yale Law journal, 51,4
(February 1942), p. 674; C, 'War Risks in Marine Insurance', Modern Law Review,
10, 2 (April 1947), pp.2II-14.
17. Alfred T.
Lauterbach, 'Economic Demobilization in Great Britain after the First World
War', Political Science Quarterly, 57, 3 (September 1942), pp. 376-93.
18. Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 2001), pp. 31f.
19. Richmond,
'Insurance Tendencies', p. 185.
20. Charles Davison,
'The Japanese Earthquake of I September', Geographical journal, 65, I (January
1925), pp. 42f.
21. Yoshimichi Miura, 'Insurance Tendencies in Japan', Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 161 (May 1932),
pp.215-19.
22. Herbert H. Gowen,
'Living Conditions in Japan', Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, 122 (November 1925), p. 163.
23. Kenneth Hewitt,
'Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places', Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 73 (1983), p. 263.
24. Anon., 'War
Damage Insurance', Yale Law Journal, sr, 7 (May
1942), pp. II 60-1. It made $210 million, having collected premiums from 8
million policies and paid out only a modest amount.
25. Kingo Tarnai, 'Development of
Social Security in Japan', in Misa Izuhara (ed.),
Comparing Social Policies: Exploring New Perspectives in Britain and Japan
(Bristol, 20°3), pp. 35-48. See also Gregory J. Kasza,
'War and Welfare Policy in Japan', Journal of Asian Studies, 6I, 2 (May 2002),
p. 428.
26. Recommendation of
the Council of Social Security System (I950).
27. W. Macmahon Ball, 'Reflections on Japan', Pacific Affairs, 2I,
I (March 1948), pp. 15f.
28. Beatrice G.
Reubens, 'Social Legislation in Japan', Far Eastern Survey, 18, 23 (I6 November
1949), p. 270.
29. Keith L. Nelson,
'The "Warfare State": History of a Concept', Pacific Historical
Review, 40,2 (May 197I), pp. 138f.
30. Kasza, 'War and Welfare Policy', pp. 418f.
31. Ibid., p. 423.
32. Ibid., p. 424.
33. Nakagawa Yatsuhiro, 'Japan, the Welfare Super-Power', Journal of
Japanese Studies, 5, I (Winter 1979), pp. 5-51.
33. Ibid., p. 21.
34. Ibid., p. 9.
35. Ibid., p. 18.
36. For comparative
studies, see Gregory J. Kasza, One World of Welfare:
Japan in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca, 2006) and Neil Gilbert and Ailee Moon, 'Analyzing Welfare Effort: An Appraisal of
Comparative Methods', Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 7,2 (Winter
1988), pp. 326-400.
37. Kasza, One JVorld of Welfare, p.
107.
38. Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic
Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004), vol. I, table 1.2.
39. Hiroto Tsukada, Economic
Globalization and the Citizens' Welfare State (Aldershot
/ Burlington / Singapore / Sydney, 2002), p. 96.
40. Milton Friedman
and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960
(Princeton, 1963).
41. Milton Friedman
and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago / London, 1998), p.
399.
42. Ibid., p. 400.
43. Ibid., p. 593.
44. Patricio Silva,
'Technocrats and Politics in Chile: From the Chicago Boys to the CEIPLAN
Monks', Journal of Latin American Studies, 23,2 (May 1991), pp. 385-410.
45. Bill Jamieson,
'25 Years On, Chile Has a Pensions Message for Britain', Sunday Business, 14
December 2006.
46. Rossana
Castiglioni, 'The Politics of Retrenchment: The Quandaries of Social Protection
under Military Rule in Chile, 1973-1990', Latin American Politics and Society,
43, 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 39ff.
47. Ibid., p. 55.
48. Jose Pifiera, 'Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social
Security in Chile', Cato Journal, 15, 2-3 (Fall / Winter 1995/96), PP 155-166.
49. Ibid., p. 40.
51. Teresita Ramos,
'Chile: The Latin American Tiger?', Harvard Business School Case 9-798-092 (21
March 1999), p. 6.
52. Laurence J.
Kotlikoff, 'Pension Reform as the Triumph of Form over Substance', Economists'
Voice (January 2008), pp. 1-5.
53. Armando
Barrientos, 'Pension Reform and Pension Coverage in Chile: Lessons for Other
Countries', Bulletin of Latin American Research, 15, 3 (1996), p. 312.
54. 'Destitute No
More', Economist, 16 August 2007.
55. Barrientos,
'Pension Reform', pp. 309f. See also Raul Madrid, 'The Politics and Economics of
Pension Privatization in Latin America', Latin American Research Review, 37, 2
(2002), pp. 159-82.
56. Comparative data
available from the World Bank's World Development Indicators database.
57. Laurence J.
Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know
about America's Economic Future (Cambridge, 2005). See also Peter G. Peterson,
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our
Future and What Americans Can Do about It (New York, 2005).
58. Ruth Helman,
Craig Copeland and Jack VanDerhei, 'Will More of Us
Be Working Forever? The 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey', Employee Benefit
Research Institute Issue Brief, 292 (April 2006).
59. Gene L. Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of the United States,
'Working to Improve Accountability in an Evolving Environment', address to the
2008 Maryland Association of CP As' Government and Not-for-profit Conference
(18 April 2008).
60. James Brooke, 'A
Tough Sell: Japanese Social Security', New York Times, 6 May 2004.
61. See Mutsuko Takahashi, The Emergence of Welfare Society in
Japan (Aldershot / Brookfield / Hong Kong / Singapore
/ Sydney, 1997), pp. 18 Sf. See also Kasza, One World
of Welfare, pp. 179-82.
62. Alex Kerr, Dogs
and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan (London, 2001), pp. 261-66.
63. Gavan McCormack,
Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (London, 2007), pp. 45-69.
64 Lisa Haines,
'World's Largest Pension Funds Top $10 Trillion', Financial News, S September
2007.
65. 'Living Dangerously',
Economist, 22 January 2004.
66. Philip Bobbitt,
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2008),
esp. pp. 98-179.
67. Suleiman abu Gheith, quoted in ibid., p.
119.
68. Graham Allison,
'Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy, Part I', Yale Global, 14 March 2008. Cf.
idem, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA,
2004).
69. Michael D. Intriligator and Abdullah Toukan, 'Terrorism and Weapons of
Mass Destruction', in Peter Kotana, Michael D. Intriligator and Johp P. Sullivan
(eds.), Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Clobal
Counter-terrorism Network (New York, 2006), table 4.IA .
70. See IPCC, Climate
Change 2007: Synthesis Report (Valencia, 2007).
71. Robert Looney,
'Economic Costs to the United States Stemming from the 9/11 Attacks', Center
for Contemporary Conflict Strategic Insight (S August 2002).
72. Robert E. Litan, 'Sharing and Reducing the Financial Risks of Future
Mega-Catastrophes', Brookings Issues in Economic Policy, 4 (March 2006).
73. William
Hutchings, 'Citadel Builds a Diverse Business', Financial News, 3 October 2007.
74. Marcia
Vickers, 'A Hedge Fund Superstar', Fortune, 3 April 2007.
75. Joseph
Santos, 'A History of Futures Trading in the United States', South Dakota
University MS, n.d.
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