Lehman is a footnote in the great East-West globalisation crisis

The Telegraph ^ | 9/12/2009 | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

[bruinbirdman]

You can see why markets and governments both like to blame Lehman Brothers for the "Great Contraction". Such wishful thinking shields investors from the nasty reality that deeper forces are at work: it absolves officialdom from its own destructive role in fixing the price of credit too low for 20 years, luring us into debt.

As my colleague Jeremy Warner puts it, Lehman no more caused the economic convulsions of the last year than the assassination caused the First World War. There was the little matter of a rising Germany then, and rising China now. Both scrambled the international system, albeit in different ways.

The 48 hours that killed Lehman and AIG – and would have killed Merrill, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs within a week if Washington had not stepped in – merely brought to a head the inevitable exhaustion of global order in which the West chokes debt, and the East chokes on export capacity.

As of last week, the ABX index of sub-prime mortgage debt showed that AAA-rated securities from early 2007 were trading at 28 cents on the dollar – AA was at 4 cents, near all-time lows. No one can say that $2 trillion (£1.2 trillion) of sub-prime and Alt-A debt is still trading at panic levels, exaggerating losses. The dust has settled. What we can see is that creditors will never recoup their money.

The housing crash has tipped 15m US home owners into negative equity. A third of sub-prime mortgages are in default. Some 7.8pc of all loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration are in foreclosure or 90 days in arrears. This is why the US Treasury had to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the $5.3 trillion pillars of US housing. It is not a liquidity crisis. It is a bankruptcy