A SAVINGS GLUT BEHIND THE CREDIT CRUNCH

Atrios once wrote that the episode from This American Life about the credit crunch, was worth listening to and now the transcript is finally available. The episode is "The Giant Pool of Money" and was first broadcast on 5/9/2008. I had read in the Financial Times (I think) that one force behind this scam was an oversupply of worldwide savings and that may be correct. From the show:


Adam Davidson: Right. The global pool of money. That's where our story begins. Most people don’t think about it but there’s this huge pool of money out there, which is basically all the money the world is saving now. Insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the central bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for. All the world’s savings.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu: It's a lot of money. It's about 70 trillion.
Adam Davidson: That is the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want know how much money is in the world.

Adam Davidson: And, by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that 70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed-income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said. Let’s put 70 trillion dollars in perspective. Do this. Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world. Everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought. And all the rice sold in China and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea. All the money spent and earned in every country on earth in a year: that is LESS than 70 trillion, less than this global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg: Wow, that is a lot of money.

Adam Davidson: It is a lot of money. And that money comes with an army of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money: investment managers. This army is nervous because they don't want to lose any of that money and they also want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in. So, for most of modern history, they bought really, really safe, really boring investments: things called treasuries and municipal bonds. Boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed, something happened to that global pool of money.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu: This number doubled since 2000. In 2000 this was about 36 trillion dollars.

Adam Davidson: So, it took several hundred years for the world to get to 36 trillion. Then, in six years, to get another 36 trillion.
Ceyla Pazarbasioglu: Yeah. There has been a very sharp increase.

Adam Davidson: How's the world get twice as much money to invest? Lots of things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. Made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses-real math geniuses-looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this money. There's twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments. So, that global army of investment managers was hungrier and twitchier than ever before. They all wanted the same thing: a nice low-