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Swedish lessons
A RECENT editorial in The Economist magazine, titled
Save the System, recalls the Swedish financial crisis of the 1990s as an
example of what to do in the current crisis: "In the 1990s Sweden moved
to recapitalise its banks quickly and recovered quickly..." In the
media’s praise of the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, we are told
he was inspired by the Swedish example. But what are the real lessons
from Sweden? Who paid the price for saving the banks?
Ministers of the Swedish right-wing government of
1991-1994, then hated by ordinary people, have been travelling around
Europe as heroes in recent weeks. For example, the then deputy finance
minister, Bo Lundgren, today director of the state debt agency, is
portrayed as an experienced bank-saver. The fact that Sweden today is
preparing a new state fund for banks in crisis should be enough to put
an end to this false propaganda.
The root of the 1990s crisis was neo-liberalism. A
huge devaluation in 1982 led to a sharp increase in Swedish exports and
profits. In 1985, the Social Democratic government capitulated to the
pressure from the capitalists. Capital flow and finance businesses were
deregulated (limits on loan amounts and interest rates were abolished).
In 1988, loans increased by 31%, a trend that continued until 1990. This
was based on property prices increasing by 25% a year.
In the late 1980s, Swedish speculators became the
equivalent of their Icelandic counterparts in the 2000s, ‘Vikings’
buying up property in central London and elsewhere. Behind the
speculators were the banks and finance companies. In 1990, the property
bubble started to deflate and, at the end of 1991, the bank crisis had
hit home.
The crisis then spread, with a hard landing for the
entire economy. GDP fell for three years in a row (1991-93), by 5% in
total. Between 1991 and 1995, one job in five in industry disappeared,
as did a third of construction jobs and hundreds of thousands of
public-sector jobs. In September 1992, 61 companies a day went bankrupt.
Between 1990 and 1993, unemployment increased from 1.7% to 8.2%.
In 1992, the crisis coincided with a currency crisis
in Europe. In defence of the Swedish currency, the krona, the central
bank, at one stage, briefly raised interest rates to 500%. When the
defence of the currency failed, the krona was devalued on 19 September.
The following day, the first in a series of ‘crisis packages’ was
presented. In a deal smelling of ‘national unity’ the right-wing
government, in alliance with the ‘opposition’ Social Democrats,
introduced cuts in pensions, the number of holidays, grants for asylum
seekers, state contributions to councils and the health service, etc.
Special taxes for workers, supposedly to cover costs for unemployment,
pensions, etc, were introduced. Huge tax cuts for the rich and companies
in 1990 had already weakened state revenue, which increased the pressure
for cuts.
The deep crisis was used by capitalists and
politicians to attack the entire welfare state. The Social Democratic
government of 1994 boasted of achieving a ‘world record in austerity’,
cutting 134bn krona from the public sector. Public-sector expenditure,
as a share of GDP, fell from close to 70%, to 50% in 2007. In 1990,
Sweden had the highest expenditure on health services as a share of GDP
among OECD countries. In 2007, it ranked 13th.
"Five hundred thousand public sector employees and
150,000 in the private sector met with full or part-time redundancies at
their workplaces... Twelve years later, we still feel the repercussions
of this shocking attempt to save the Swedish state from economic
collapse", an academic researcher wrote in 2005. In the period
1992-2000, over 1.8 million people in Sweden (40% of the workforce) were
unemployed for a period of time, half of them for two years or more.
For those still in work, conditions got worse. As a
result of 100,000 jobs cuts in health care, by the early part of this
decade there had been a sharp increase in the number of female
public-sector workers being forced to take long periods of sick leave.
In contrast, there was no shortage of capital to
stop a run on the banks and save them. The state issued a guarantee to
fulfil all obligations made by the banks. The banks’ loans from foreign
banks were replaced by the Swedish central bank borrowing 240bn krona
abroad. A state banking emergency was established by the right-wing
government in the autumn of 1992, also with the support of the Social
Democratic ‘opposition’. The first of its patients was the already
state-owned Nordbanken (now Nordea). In this case, the state bought
shares from the 30% of equities held by private owners, at outrageously
high prices. The following state reconstruction included the sacking of
1,200 of the bank’s staff. One private bank, Gota Bank, was nationalised
and merged with Nordbanken. The state also issued guarantees for
Sparbanken and Föreningsbanken, which later merged into Swedbank. The
crisis-ridden SEB (the bank of the Wallenberg finance family) narrowly
escaped state intervention through a drop in interest rates in 1993.
The state took responsibility for the banks’ bad
loans and deficits, while the profitable parts could be kept by the
banks. Later, some property was sold by the state. According to the
state bank crisis committee in 1996, the net cost to the state was
68.2bn Krona (€6.8bn) – in those days, about a tenth of one year’s state
budget. Some have argued that, by privatising Nordea later, the state
got back what it paid in the crisis. This analysis does not take into
account the selling-off of the wealth of the state which privatisation
involves. It also disregards the general weakening of the public sector
and the welfare system.
The state fiscal deficit and later, also, the
national debt were reduced at the cost of huge cuts. In the shock that
followed the crisis, several neo-liberal measures were introduced. A
‘pension reform’ lowered pensions drastically and linked them to the
stock market. The big state pension fund could now be used to buy shares
with 70% of its capital compared with 15% previously. Energy, local
transport, telecom and postal services were also deregulated.
These crisis policies also met with resistance and
provoked a strong radicalisation in society. There was widespread hatred
towards politicians and the ‘dictatorship of the market’, a phrase
coined in those days. In 1992, members of Rattvisepartiet Socialisterna
(CWI Sweden) in the unions pushed the trade union federation, LO, to
organise its first day of protest since 1928. Two hundred thousand
participated in demonstrations on 6 October. New organisations of the
unemployed organised protests. Rattvisepartiet Socialisterna doubled its
membership between August 1992 and December 1993, and had quadrupled it
by 1998. The Swedish crisis at this time, however, took place against a
completely different international situation than today. An upturn in
the economy, combined with the effect of the collapse of Stalinism and
capitalist globalisation, made it possible for the trade union
leadership to head off further radicalisation in the 1990s.
One key factor behind the recovery of the banks was
the huge state debt which was managed by the Swedish banks. The debt
increased by 500bn krona in five years. In 1994, 60% of the state debt
was owed to Swedish banks and big business.
Last year, Swedish banks made record profits – 86bn
krona. These seemingly stable banks, however, are now being hit by the
crisis. For example, Swedbank, praised for its profits last year, had
9bn krona of its capital ‘secured’ in Lehman Brothers. In the Baltic
states – now gone from double-digit growth to recession in one year –
Swedish banks have total dominance. Following the bailout negotiated in
the rest of the EU, the Swedish government now again launches a fund to
save banks.
Sweden’s two ‘recoveries’ in the 1980s and 1990s
were both based on huge devaluations and increased exports. Exports, as
a share of GDP, rose from 29.8% in 1990, to 51.3% in 2006. Another
reason for increased profits was low wage rises and a transfer of
capital from the public to the private sector. There was no quick
recovery for workers and the unemployed. In fact, when the crisis now
again hits Sweden, the remnants of the 1990s will make its impact even
worse.
Per-Ake Westerlund
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