U.S. May Find Painful Parallels in 1990s Nordic Banking Bailout

By Simon Kennedy

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) -- If Henry Paulson and Ben S. Bernanke want to know what happens when central banks and governments bail out financial institutions, they should be ``learning Swedish.''

That's the suggestion of Charles Dumas, a director at Lombard Street Research in London. He says the effort by Finland, Sweden and Norway to save troubled banks in the early 1990s is the closest parallel to the market-rescue plan being engineered by the U.S. Treasury secretary and Federal Reserve chairman.

The Nordic effort -- similar in speed and scope to what the U.S. is planning now, though smaller in size -- did manage to end the financial crisis. At the same time, it failed to slow surging unemployment or bring a quick end to recessions in all three countries.

``In the long term, there were benefits, but it took half a decade before they began to show in the economy,'' said Esko Ollila, a member of the Bank of Finland board from 1983 to 2000.

With the U.S. financial markets in tumult, Paulson is seeking to implement a $700 billion plan that will allow the U.S. to purchase illiquid assets such as mortgage-related securities from banks. Last week, the government and Fed pledged to insure money-market funds, seized control of New York-based insurer American International Group Inc. and intervened in the markets for commercial paper and short-term debt for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other agencies.

Surging Economies

At the end of the 1980s, the economies of Sweden, Finland and Norway had surged after deregulation and low interest rates encouraged banks to lend more. Finnish house prices jumped 80 percent in real terms, and its stock market soared 164 percent in five years, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The byproduct was a mounting debt burden. As policy makers sought to slow inflation and protect their fixed exchange rates, banks found their balance sheets decimated by nonperforming loans amounting to 10 percent of the region's gross domestic product.

The response to the subsequent financial crisis was one of ``rapidity and vigor,'' said then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 1999 speech. Sweden guaranteed bank obligations against losses and established a $14 billion restructuring fund to provide failing banks with capital in return for equity. In addition to taking over Nordbanken AB, the government created a ``bad bank'' that bought troubled assets at a discount, while leaving financial institutions to manage their more-liquid holdings.


Merging Banks

Norway's government took similar steps by insuring savings and seizing control of the country's three biggest banks. Finland merged more than 40 banks, including Skopbank Ltd., into a government-run entity and moved nonperforming assets to management companies run by its central bank.

While the interventions ``were sweeping and ultimately a success,'' they didn't bring immediate relief to the three countries' economies, as banks cut back on lending and companies and consumers spent less, said Lauri Uotila, chief economist at Sampo Bank, a unit of Danske Bank A/S in Helsinki.

The Finnish and Swedish economies contracted in 1991, 1992 and 1993. Norges Bank calculates that during the early 1990s, output fell 12.3 percent in Finland, 5.8 percent in Sweden and 4.1 percent in Norway. Unemployment didn't peak in Finland until May 1994, when the rate reached 19.9 percent, having fallen as low as 2.1 percent in 1990. Sweden's jobless rate averaged 9.9 percent in 1997, up from 1.6 percent in 1990.

`Aggressive Measures'

``The aggressive measures implemented by the Scandinavian governments were not enough to prevent deep recessions,'' said Nicola Mai, an economist at JPMorgan in London.

Mai says the Fed and U.S. government were quicker to ease fiscal policy and cut interest rates as the crisis took hold, something Norway, Finland and Sweden weren't able to do because they had to maintain currency pegs.

By acting quickly, the U.S. may still avoid repeating Japan's ``lost decade'' of deflation after policy makers in the world's second-largest economy dithered in addressing a banking crisis.

When Japan's stock- and property-market bubbles burst in the early 1990s, lenders were left with trillions of yen in bad loans on their books. It wasn't until 1999 -- two years after the collapse of Yamaichi Securities Co. -- that policy makers found the political will to use taxpayers' money to begin bailing out the banking system.

Bad Debts

It took two more years for then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to demand that banks accelerate the disclosure of bad debts and their disposal of illiquid loans.

``In Japan, procrastination unnecessarily increased overall costs in terms of asset-price declines, damage to the fiscal position and lost economic growth,'' said Richard Jerram, chief economist at Macquarie Securities Ltd. in Tokyo. ``The U.S. seems to be responding with unusual speed and aggression.''

Still, David Rosenberg, North American economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York, predicts that the U.S., like Scandinavia, probably won't see an immediate economic rebound.

``Even with effective government solution, the process of extinguishing the bad debts via government intervention was painful,'' Rosenberg said. ``We're into a new chapter indeed, but it's very tough to say at this point that the book is finished.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy in Paris at Skennedy4@bloomberg.net