By MICHAEL HUDSON
In the wake of the world crash populations are asking not only whether debts should be paid, but whether they can be paid! If they can’t be, then trying to pay will only shrink economics further, preventing them from becoming viable. This is what has led past structural adjustment programs to fail.
For the past decade Iceland has been a kind of controlled experiment, an extreme test case of neoliberal free-market ideology. What has been tested has been whether there is a limit to how far a population can be pushed into debt-dependency. Is there a limit, a point at which government will draw a line against by taking on public responsibility for private debts beyond any reasonable capacity to pay without drastically slashing public spending on education, health care and other basic services?
The problem for the post-Soviet economies such as Latvia is that independence in 1991 did not bring the hoped-for Western living standards. Like Iceland, these countries remain dependent on imports for their consumer goods and capital equipment. Their trade deficits have been financed by the global property bubble – borrowing in foreign currency against property that was free of debt at the time of independence. Now these assets are fully “loaned up,” the bubble has burst and payback time has arrived. No more credit is flowing to the Baltics from Swedish banks, to Hungary from Austrian banks, or to Iceland from Britain and the Netherlands. Unemployment is rising and governments are slashing healthcare and education budgets. The resulting economic shrinkage is leaving large swaths of real estate with negative equity.
Can Iceland and Latvia pay the foreign debts run up by a fairly narrow layer of their population? The European Union and International Monetary Fund have told them to replace private debts with public obligations, and to pay by raising taxes, slashing public spending and obliging citizens to deplete their savings.
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