DON'T PANIC - YET

SYNOPSIS: A worst case scenario, where the world collapses into total Depression.

Could the current craziness in world financial

markets translate into a global slump, maybe even a new Great

Depression? Of course it could. The story might go something like this:

Over the next few weeks, investors, made jittery by the debacle in

Russia, stage runs on the currencies of many third world countries. The

governments of these countries respond by raising interest rates to 30,

50, 70 percent -- stabilizing their currencies but pushing their

corporations into bankruptcy, provoking devastating bank runs and

plunging their economies into deep recession.

 

Meanwhile, Japanese lawmakers are unable to agree on a plan to rescue

the nation's dysfunctional banking system. The result is a sharp drop in

the yen, but Japan's central bank, declaring that a strong yen is

essential, defends the currency with higher interest rates, which sends

Japanese industry into a tailspin.

 

The direct effects of these developments on the United States and the

European Union are relatively small. But the dismal news undermines the

euphoria that had driven Western stock prices to hard-to-justify

heights. As stocks fall, so does the consumer spending that had offset

the drag from Asia's collapse.

 

Despite all this, the Federal Reserve and the Bundesbank are

reluctant to cut interest rates. The Fed believes that the stock crash

validates its earlier warnings that the market was driven by

''irrational exuberance'' and -- like the Bank of Japan in the early

1990's -- welcomes the bursting of the financial bubble. Meanwhile, the

Bundesbank -- which will hand over the monetary reins to the new

European Central Bank in only a few months -- wants its successor to

understand the importance of sound money and stable prices, and is

unwilling to blur that message with any hasty reflationary moves.

 

Within a year or two, of course, it becomes clear that everyone has

been far too cautious, and many countries start trying to boost spending

any way they can. But it is too late: self-fulfilling pessimism has

become so deeply embedded in the private sector that even zero interest

rates and large tax cuts are not enough to get the world economy moving

again.

 

I hope you don't regard this scenario as a literal prediction of what

is going to happen. For one thing, real crises never play out according

to the expected script. Anyway, this scenario, or any similar scenario,

is not all that persuasive. It requires not only that world financial

markets be governed by Murphy's Law -- that everything that could go

wrong does -- but also that all of the major policy makers play right

into Murphy's hands. The odds are that at least a few things will go

right, that Japan will pass ahalfway decent bank reform law, that the

markets will take a deep breath and realize that Brazil and Russia are,

after all, rather different places.

 

Even if financial markets do continue to tumble, Alan Greenspan and

his counterparts in other advanced countries have the tools they need to

prevent paper losses from turning into a slump in real output. Mr.

Greenspan turned a stock market crash into a real-economy non-event in

1987; he can do it again.

 

But will he? That's where I start to worry. The real risk to the

world economy comes not from bad fundamentals but from rigid ideologies

-- ideologies that might make policy makers fail to respond, or even

move the wrong way, if a global slump starts to develop.

 

One of those ideologies is the belief that a strong currency means a

strong economy, that stable prices insure prosperity. Notice that my

scenario had the Bank of Japan actually raising interest rates in a

recession in order to defend the yen, and the Bundesbank refusing to cut

rates because it doesn't want to encourage laxity in its successors.

 

Both actions would be deeply foolish. Alas, given the strong-yen

rhetoric of Japan and the stable-price rhetoric of Germany, both are

also quite plausible. In his classic book ''Golden Fetters,'' Barry

Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley,

showed that the spread of the Great Depression was, more than anything

else, caused by the dogged determination of many nations to remain on

the gold standard at all costs. Nobody is on the gold standard these

days, but the urge to defend monetary purity, never mind the real

economy, remains.

 

The other ideology might be summarized as ''blaming the victim.''

Just listen to what one now hears about Asia: that it shouldn't even

attempt a quick recovery through monetary and fiscal expansion, because

it will only delay the correction of deeper structural problems. This

admonition sounds like an eerie echo of the famous advice that Herbert

Hoover received from Andrew Mellon: ''Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks,

liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate . . . purge the rottenness

out of the system.''

 

It is easy to imagine that effective action against a slump might

come too little, too late, because the initial stages of that slump are

regarded not as danger signs but as just punishment for economic sins.

 

In the end, a global slump is quite an easy thing to prevent. The

only way it can happen is if the people who have the power to prevent it

fail to take the risk of such a slump seriously, and continue to cling

to ideologies inherited from a more benign era. If Mr. Greenspan and his

colleagues have an appropriate degree of nervousness -- if they

understand that while a replay of 1929 is unlikely, it is possible --

then everything will be more or less all right. The only thing we need

to fear is the lack of fear itself.