South China Morning Post
Advertisement
Advertisement
A schoolboy surveys the damage in the wake of Typhoon Mangkhut on Tin Ping Road in Sheung Shui on Thursday. The intense preparation before the typhoon struck helped Hong Kong limit the damage caused by the storm. Photo: Sam Tsang
Opinion
Outside In
by David Dodwell
Outside In
by David Dodwell

What Typhoon Mangkhut could teach Donald Trump about the brewing global economic storm

David Dodwell says while Hong Kong’s long-term investment in infrastructure helped limit the damage to the city from the super typhoon, the global economy is less prepared for the inevitable coming crash

David Dodwell
David Dodwell
Why you can trust SCMP
There was something marvellously symmetrical about Typhoon Mangkhut striking exactly on the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis that followed the Lehman Brothers crash.
As I watched the awe-inspiring havoc caused by raw nature as winds tore out more than 15,000 trees, smashed windows and threw hundreds of boats onto rocks and beaches – my home overlooks a bay in which several boats were destroyed that day – I could imagine US regulators surveying financial markets back in September 2008 as the awesome scale of the crash became clear. The sense of powerlessness as the storm bore down must surely have been similar.
For a brief while, it put US President Donald Trump’s trade war and his “fire and fury” rhetoric into much-needed perspective.

But as I recalled the clear skies and fierce heat in Hong Kong for the two days before Mangkhut arrived, I was reminded of the calm that comes before storms and the beguiling and seemingly unstoppable present strength of US equity markets, now at all-time record levels.

I am concerned that it is this unsustainable bubble that has given Trump’s administration the facile confidence to engage in such a reckless assault on a global trading system that has driven growth and built wealth for most countries worldwide over the past seven decades – foremost among them the US.

How will Donald Trump’s escalated tariffs affect China’s GDP?
A trader works at the New York Stock Exchange on August 6. US equity markets have hit record highs in recent months. Photo: Xinhua
Why Typhoon Mangkhut was like a stock market crash
In the wake of Mangkhut, we still only have the most basic idea of what the cost will be. Insurers have talked about this being the most costly catastrophe ever to hit Hong Kong, with losses amounting to US$1 billion (HK$7.8 billion). Since so many insurance policies explicitly exclude “acts of god” such as typhoons, much of the cost will never be captured.

The cost of disruption at work is also unlikely to be measured. For a day, my route to work – Clear Water Bay Road up in Sai Kung – was blocked by hundreds of fallen trees. For most of this week, it has been a tree-strewn slalom for everyone crawling to work by bus or car. The cost of those lost hours will never be tallied.

While this powerfully illustrated our helplessness in the face of nature, it also reminded me of the remarkable cumulative success of our government in building such resilient infrastructure. Despite the unprecedented force of the storm, there was only limited loss of power and water supply. Compare this with the 1 million people who lived without power in the US last week as Hurricane Florence barrelled in from the Atlantic.

Watch: Streets littered with trees and debris in the wake of Typhoon Mangkhut

The contrast is clear. Hong Kong’s relative resilience, and likely rapid recovery, contrasts sharply with the dreadful failure to anticipate the 2008 crash, and the slew of emergency measures that had to be thrown into place in almost-panic circumstances – measures that together almost certainly sowed the seeds of the crash that many are saying may soon be repeated.

[Quantitative easing] policies have bloated our equity and property markets to quite unsustainable levels, making a crash almost inevitable

The decision to bail out the banks, whose frenzied Ponzi trading of collateralised debt instruments based on unsupported mortgages was the immediate cause of the crisis, rather than the families that lost their homes, has contributed directly to the widening inequality and to political disaffection that have so warped and endangered democracies across the Western world.

So too the quantitative easing policies that have pegged interest rates close to zero for the past decade. These policies have bloated our equity and property markets to quite unsustainable levels, making a crash almost inevitable as interest rates begin to rise back to “normal” levels, and contributing directly to the unprecedented widening of the divide between rich and poor. Quantitative easing has also helped thousands of established companies survive because they have been able to retain continuous access to cost-free debt.
One wonders whether such factors are not important reasons for the current angst over faltering growth rates across so many Western economies. Economists, led by those in the International Monetary Fund, are increasingly concerned that market concentration is rising, innovation and productivity are falling, while inequality is becoming more extreme.
A drone image of Mumbai, India, which shows the social inequality between the blue tarpaulin-covered shacks (left) and the luxury properties next to them. Photo: Johnny Miller
The Fed’s quantitative easing report card is mixed – except for the rich
All this seems a paradox. Most media are today obsessed with the scale and pace of “disruptive” change being driven by new internet technologies, in particular the emerging deployment of artificial intelligence. They are obsessed with innovative start-ups, and the “gig” economy that is giving unprecedented opportunities to such start-ups. They talk of fin-tech-driven innovations that are fundamentally changing the way we buy and trade.

Surely these changes should be stimulating innovation, not stifling it? Surely they should be driving growth among small companies, rather than coinciding with market concentration around a smaller number of massive, mainly IT-driven, companies?

As Diane Coyle at the University of Cambridge asked in a Financial Times column last month: “Set against the evidence, should we see the promise of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, graphene, cheap clean energy and other emerging technologies as mere hype? Some of these innovations must surely contribute to productivity and economic growth?”

Will rise of the robots cause ‘painful’ job loss? Big firms don’t think so
She is right that such radical disruptions take longer to begin to have the significant impacts than impatient techies would like. But, meanwhile, the weird world created by quantitative easing has distorted our economies and led over the past decade to a massive misallocation of capital, with much of it falling into the hands of enterprises that have little vested interest in the “disruptions” needed to stimulate change, growth and productivity.

This all seems to point to the likelihood that we sit in a calm before a storm. It suggests we have a new and potentially large crisis close ahead that few are preparing for.

If this is indeed a Mangkhut in the making, then I am concerned at our lack of preparation. Hong Kong’s long-term investment in strong infrastructure allowed us to weather Mangkhut and recover quickly and well. Is our global economy so well prepared?

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Calm before the storm
Post