Asia’s major economies were swept u

Asia’s major economies were swept up by the financial crisis, even though most of them suffered only indirect blows. Japan’s and China’s export-oriented industries suffered from consumer retrenchment in the U.S. and Europe. Compounding the damage, exporters could not find loans in the West to finance their sales. Japan hit the skids in the second quarter of 2008 with a 3.7% contraction at an annual rate, followed by 0.5% in the third quarter. Its all-important exports plunged 27% in November from 12 months earlier. The government announced a $250 billion package of fiscal stimulus in December on top of $50 billion earlier in the year. Unlike so many others, China’s economy continued to grow but not at the double-digit rates of recent years. Exports were actually lower in November than in the same month a year earlier, quite a change from October’s 19% increase. The government prepared a two-year $586 billion economic stimulus plan, and the central bank repeatedly cut interest rates.
The U.S., Europe, and Asia had this in common—car makers were at the head of the line of industries pleading for help. The U.S. Senate turned down $14 billion in emergency loans; the car companies got into this mess, senators argued, and it was up to them to get out of it. President Bush, rather than risk the demise of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, tapped the $700 billion financial sector bailout fund to provide $17 billion in loans—enough to keep the two companies afloat until safely after the Obama administration took over in early 2009. In addition, the Treasury invested in a $5 billion equity position with GMAC, GM’s financing company, and loaned it another $1 billion. In Europe, Audi, BMW, Daimler, GM, Peugeot, and Renault announced production cuts, but European government officials were reluctant to aid a particular industry for fear that others would soon be on their doorstep. Even in China, car sales growth turned negative. As elsewhere, the industry held out its tin cup, but the government left it empty.
The pressures of the financial crisis seemed to be forging more new alliances. Officials from Washington to Beijing coordinated interest rate cuts and fiscal stimulus packages. Top officials from China, Japan, and South Korea—longtime adversaries—met in China and promised a cooperative response to the crisis. Top-level representatives of the Group of 20 (G-20)—a combination of the world’s richest countries and some of its fastest-growing—met in Washington in November to lay the groundwork for global collaboration. The G-20’s deliberations were necessarily tentative in light of the U.S. presidential transition in progress.
By year’s end, all of the world’s major economies were in recession or struggling to stay out of one. In the final four months of 2008, the U.S. lost nearly two million jobs. The unemployment rate shot up to 7.2% in December from its recent low of 4.4% in March 2007, and it was almost certain to continue rising into 2009. Economic output shrank by 0.5% in the third quarter, and announced layoffs and severe cutbacks in consumer spending suggested that the fourth quarter saw a sharper contraction. It was doubtful that the worldwide economic picture would grow brighter anytime soon. Forecast after forecast showed lethargic global economic growth for at least 2009. “Virtually no country, developing or industrial, has escaped the impact of the widening crisis,” the World Bank reported in a typical year-end assessment. It forecast an increase in global economic output of just 0.9% in 2009, the most tepid growth rate since records became available in 1970.
Measured by its impact on global economic output, the recession that had engulfed the world by the end of 2008 figured to be sharper than any other since the Great Depression. The two periods of hard times had little else in common, however; the Depression started in the manufacturing sector, while the current crisis had its origins in the financial sector. Perhaps a more apt comparison could be found in the Panic of 1873. Then, as in 2008, a real estate boom (in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, rather than in the U.S.) went sour, loosing a cascade of misfortune. The ensuing collapse lasted four years.