At ByDesign Financial Solutions, a debt-counseling service in Modesto, Calif., they’re working overtime these days. “Our call volume went up 97% in the past five weeks, which has left us scrambling,” says Martha Lucey, president of the nonprofit agency. “[The callers] are close to the max on their credit cards, and they just can’t figure out how to manage. We’ve seen credit-card companies decreasing lines of credit, and the [debtors] don’t have any room left. They just can’t juggle things like they used to.”
At Keller’s, a popular Modesto housewares store, the end of that profligacy is shockingly apparent to owners Cherie and Joyce Keller. Sales are evaporating, and they are worried about the Christmas shopping season. “It was sudden death — there were no people shopping,” says Joyce Keller. “It took the crash for people to understand that this wasn’t just a problem in California.”
Economic reality, in other words, is settling in across the nation. Every tumultuous period of financial boom and bust comes to be defined by a word or catchphrase. Tulipmania. The Great Depression. The dotcom bubble. The word that could define the financial times we are now living through — and the economic pain that has begun — is leverage.
Leverage was the mother’s milk of Wall Street — and of Main Street — for the past 20 years. Leverage meant debt, specifically the number of dollars you could borrow for every dollar of wealth you had. It meant borrowing other people’s money to invest in something you wanted to invest in, or to buy something you wanted to buy. On Wall Street, debt funded investments in pretty much everything a financial firm could bet on, including the toxic mortgage-backed securities that led the way into this crisis. On Main Street, it meant borrowing to buy a house or a condo — maybe two — then perhaps borrowing again off the increasing value of that property to pay for something else: a flat-screen TV, a new set of golf clubs, your daughter’s braces.
The debt binge was fueled by easy money and the belief that prices of assets — those of houses in particular — never went down; only interest rates did. That era is over. It will be replaced by what will be one of the more painful, and consequential, economic chapters in our history: the great deleveraging of America. On Wall Street, the largest financial institutions on the planet are reducing their debt and trying to build up capital, which once upon a time was the seed corn of their business, and now must be again. Retail banks like Wachovia and investment banks like Morgan Stanley have been so burned by their own reckless use of debt that only recently — and after unprecedented government intervention — have they been willing to once again make the most basic short-term loans to one another. The gradual thawing of the overnight-lending market, which seemed to begin on Monday, Oct. 20, was the first sign that Wall Street’s credit markets were, however haltingly, regaining some sense of equilibrium after the previous, harrowing month.
But the credit crunch is not anywhere near over. “It took 20 years for us to get into this situation — leveraged to the hilt — and it will take more than a couple of years to unwind it,” says Paul Ashworth, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. “And even when we get back to normal, that normal is not going to be the same. We won’t have this sort of freely available credit that we had before for households and businesses. It’s going to be a different reality — a more austere one — when we come out on the other end of this.”
The one exception, though, is Uncle Sam. Even before the financial crisis forced the government’s hand, the U.S. had again become addicted to deficit spending — relying on the kindness of strangers to finance its spendthrift ways. In September the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline deficit forecast for 2008 was $407 billion. Now, with the Treasury’s massive intervention in support of banks and financial markets and with a second economic-stimulus package a political certainty, the government deficit could soar next year to $1 trillion.
In the short term, that may be a necessary price to pay to pump life into the economy, but the effects of deleveraging on Wall Street and Main Street still threaten the steepest recession in the U.S. since the early 1980s, when unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1982. Here’s why that’s so, and how we can still emerge from this crisis a little bit wiser — and, eventually, a lot more solvent — for our trouble.
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