Over the next 25 years, the U.S. economy will reinvent itself by returning to its agricultural roots. The big banks will stagnate in size. Banking as a whole will contract. Superregionals are coming back.
Those are just some of the predictions for the year 2036 made by five daring and highly knowledgeable panelists during a 90-minute roundtable discussion with American Banker on Aug. 3.
Forecasting conditions a quarter century from now is a formidable challenge. None of the panelists — two ex-regulators, a former banker, an analyst and a historian — predicted the stock market crash that would occur a week later.
Undaunted, they also projected that the financial system will suffer a new crisis every seven years or so; identified a host of global threats; and — good news, branch managers — reaffirmed the viability of the branch despite the march of technology.
This year marks American Banker's 175th anniversary, and the topic of the panel was inspired by a feature we ran in 1986, asking bankers to envision their industry in 2011.
The discussion in August 2011 said as much about the recent past and our present fears as it did about the future.
In 2036, the panel agreed, the U.S. will still be an economic power, but how powerful relative to China, India, Brazil and other nations was a matter of debate.
"I still think that we will be the most powerful country in the world, but not to the same degree that we are today," said William R. Rhodes, president and chief executive of William R. Rhodes Global Advisors and a former senior vice chairman and international officer of Citigroup Inc.
Meredith Whitney, the CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, said the rise of other powers will provide the U.S. economy the spark it needs to reinvent itself. They will need an outside source of food to feed growing populations, she said.
"The U.S. has the opportunity to become the equivalent of the Saudi Arabia of food," said Whitney, an analyst who rose to prominence in 2007 by making what turned out to be a presciently bearish call on Citigroup shares.
Banks in recent decades had concentrated their growth on the East Coast and West Coast, overly exposing themselves to the collapse of the housing market in those areas, she said in our roundtable discussion. Banks that serve, say, the Midwest could have a leg up. "The growth will be in what I characterize as the emerging markets of the United States, which is the Rust Belt, the Green Belt, if you will."
With globalization will come even more competition for U.S. banks. "You follow your clients overseas. That's how we got to be international," said Rhodes, the author of a recent memoir called "Banker to the World."
"This is what the Japanese, the Indians, the Brazilians and others are starting to do. I think we're going to see a whole change in … the world banking system." Panelists generally agreed that financial crises would occur with some regularity, though some said it was hard to foresee one of the magnitude of the 2008 meltdown being repeated in the next 25 years.
"I would say financial crises have replaced the old recession cycle," said Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan College and the author of "Wall Street: a History" and other books. "Every seven years we would look for a recession after a boom. … I think now we're seeing financial crises."
Terry