Joseph Stiglitz: Europe and US must resolve to do better over debt

For Europe and the United States, 2010 was a year of disappointment. It's been three years since the bubble broke, and more than two since the Lehman Brothers' collapse. In 2009, we were pulled back from the brink of depression, and 2010 was supposed to be the year of transition: as the economy got back on its feet, stimulus spending could smoothly be brought down.

Growth, it was thought, might slow slightly in 2011, but it would be a minor bump on the way to robust recovery. We could then look back at the Great Recession as a bad dream; the market economy - supported by prudent government action - would have shown its resilience.

In fact, 2010 was a nightmare. The crises in Ireland and Greece called into question the euro's viability and raised the prospect of a debt default. On both sides of the Atlantic, unemployment remained stubbornly high, at about10 per cent. Even though 10 per cent of US households with mortgages had already lost their homes, the pace of foreclosures appeared to be increasing - or would have, were it not for legal snafus that raised doubts about America's vaunted "rule of law".

Unfortunately, the New Year's resolutions made in Europe and America were the wrong ones. The response to the private-sector failures and profligacy that had caused the crisis was to demand public-sector austerity. The consequence will almost surely be a slower recovery.

There will also be a decline in competitiveness. While China has kept its economy going by making investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, Europe and America have been cutting back.

It has become fashionable among politicians to preach the virtues of pain and suffering, no doubt because those bearing the brunt of it are those with little voice - the poor and future generations.

To get the economy going, some people will have to bear some pain, but the increasingly skewed income distribution gives clear guidance to whom this should be: approximately a quarter of all income in the US now goes to the top 1 per cent, while most Americans' income is lower today than a dozen years ago. Europe and America have the same talented people, the same resources and the same capital that they had before the recession. They may have overvalued some assets; but they are still there. Private financial markets misallocated capital on a massive scale in the years before the crisis, and the waste resulting from underutilisation of resources has been even greater since the crisis began. How do we get these resources back to work?

Debt restructuring - writing down the debts of homeowners and, in some cases, governments - will be key. It will eventually happen.But delay is very costly.

Banks never wanted to admit to bad loans and now they don't want to recognise the losses, at least not until they can adequately recapitalise themselves through trading profits and the large spread between their high lending rates and rock-bottom borrowing costs.

The financial sector will press governments to ensure full repayment, even when it leads to massive social waste, huge unemployment, and high social distress - and even when it is a consequence of its own mistakes in lending. But there is life after debt restructuring.

No one would wish on any country the trauma that Argentina went through in 1999-2002. But since its debt restructuring and currency devaluation, Argentina has had years of extraordinarily rapid GDP growth, with the annual rate averaging nearly 9 per cent from 2003-7. By 2009, national income was twice what it was at the nadir of the crisis, in 2002, and more than 75 per cent above its pre-crisis peak.

Likewise, Argentina's poverty rate has fallen by some three-quarters from its crisis peak, and the country weathered the global financial crisis far better than the US did.

So this is my hope for the New Year: we stop paying attention to the so-called financial wizards who got us into this mess and start using common sense. If there is pain to be borne, the brunt of it should be felt by those responsible for the crisis, and those who benefited most from the bubble that preceded it.

• Joseph Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate in economics