In his most recent post, Michael Pettis explains the problem of investment misallocations and too much debt, simply yet brilliantly (his point is about China, but it applies equally everywhere else):
“There may be good reasons for this. If a loan has been made to fund a project whose economic value is less than the economic cost of the investment, economists should treat it as a bad loan whose negative present value must be written down. However if the lending bank believes that the government implicitly or explicitly backs the loan, the bank does not need to write it down.
But while the bad loan might not represent a loss to the bank, it does represent a loss to the country, and the amount of that loss should be deducted before the country’s GDP is calculated. If Chinese banks have not correctly written down the bad debt, however, past GDP growth must be overstated by an amount equal to all the bad loans that have not been written down – a fairly large number that may amount to as much as 20-30% of GDP.
But the failure to recognize the loss does not mean that the loss does not exist. The losses implicit in the bad loans must (and will) be written down over the future, either explicitly, in which case they will result in a direct deduction to GDP growth, or implicitly, in which case they will require implicit and hidden transfers from one part of the economy or another (usually the household sector) to cover the gap between the “real” cost of capital and the nominal (subsidized) cost of capital. This transfer must reduce future growth.
The point here is that if credit is a problem in China – something no one doubts – it must be a problem because of wasted investment that has yet to be recognized, otherwise it would have resulted in negative GDP growth today. Failure to recognize the investment losses will, of course, artificially boost GDP growth today, but it must also artificially reduce GDP growth tomorrow as the recognition of those losses is simply postponed, not eliminated. The failure of many economists to recognize that wasted investment has a cost – even as they recognize that investment has been wasted – has caused them both to misunderstand the relationship between wealth creation and GDP and to understate the future impact of this overstated GDP.
Debt matters, and the only time it can be safely ignored is when debt levels are so low, and the borrower is so credible, that it creates no financial distress costs and has a negligible impact on demand.”
