Blog do Desemprego Zero

Por Cesar Benjamin

Fonte: Folha de S.Paulo, 21.3.2009.

QUANTO MAIS volátil se torna a riqueza, mais ela necessita de uma retaguarda segura. A especulação não poderia ter ido tão longe se o sistema internacional não contasse com o lastro dos títulos do Tesouro americano. Por outro lado, esses títulos não seriam tão importantes se as demais expressões da riqueza não tivessem assumido formas tão inseguras. Denominados em dólar, eles garantem o papel especial da moeda americana no mundo, como moeda de reserva. Assim, globalização financeira e hegemonia dos Estados Unidos tornaram-se faces de um mesmo processo, combinando, como sempre, riqueza e poder.

Mas a financeirização promoveu transformações estruturais na própria economia americana, crescentemente dominada por um novo tipo de gestão de negócios, a gestão de ativos líquidos. Movimentando-se com desenvoltura no espaço dos mercados de capitais, manejando portfólios muito diversificados, os gestores dessas grandes massas de recursos alteraram o modo como a economia funciona, capturando e abandonando empresas, sucessivamente, conforme as expectativas de rentabilidade no curto prazo. O impacto disso sobre a crise atual é tremendo.

Os acionistas controladores -frequentemente detendo uma quantidade ínfima de ações, por causa da pulverização- deixaram de ter vínculos de longo prazo com as empresas que controlavam, introduzindo óbvias deformações nos processos decisórios. As empresas passaram a ter estruturas de comando sempre transitórias, submetidas à tirania dos balanços trimestrais. Projetos de longa maturação passaram a ser sistematicamente adiados.

O conceito de eficiência desvinculou-se de qualquer visão sistêmica e passou a se confundir com os benefícios que essa forma de gestão trazia para os próprios gestores, cuja remuneração era definida pelo preço das ações negociadas em Bolsa. Esse pífio indicador foi transformado em fetiche. Leia o resto do artigo »

By PAUL KRUGMAN

(…) it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.

The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans – all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization – that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely – turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization – and the business of finance – can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

Por Martin Wolf

Fonte: Valor Econômico (25/03/2009)

Se o plano funcionar, pode convencer o americano comum de que seu governo está distribuindo privilégios para Wall Street…

Estou cada vez mais preocupado. Nunca esperei muito dos europeus ou dos japoneses. Mas esperava, de fato, que os EUA, sob o comando de um novo presidente popular, fossem mais decisivos do que vêm sendo. Em vez disso, o Congresso deixa-se cair num frenesi populista e o governo fica só esperando pelo melhor.

Caso alguém ainda duvide dos perigos, basta apenas ler as análises mais recentes do Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI). Projetam contrações entre 0,5% e 1% na produção mundial de 2009, e entre 3% e 3,5% na dos países com economias mais avançadas. Sem dúvida, é a pior crise econômica no mundo desde a década de 30.

É preciso avaliar os planos de estímulo à demanda e resgate de sistemas bancários levando em conta este pano de fundo lúgubre. De forma inevitável, o foco está nos EUA, epicentro da crise e maior economia mundial. O que emergiu no país foi uma hostilidade explosiva ao setor financeiro. O Congresso discute uma tributação retrospectiva penal dos bônus não apenas da imensa seguradora AIG, mas de todos os receptores de dinheiro do governo sob o programa governamental de recuperação de ativos problemáticos (Tarp, na sigla em inglês). E o procurador-geral do Estado de Nova York, Andrew Cuomo, defende identificar pelo nome os que receberem bônus nas empresas socorridas. Isto, claro, é um convite a um linchamento. Leia o resto do artigo »

by Robert Shilller

A critical aspect of animal spirits is trust, an emotional state that dismisses doubts about others. In talking about animal spirits, Keynes sought to convey the message that swings in confidence are not always logical. The business cycle is in good part driven by animal spirits. There are good times when people have substantial trust and associated feelings that contribute to an environment of confidence. They make decisions spontaneously. They believe instinctively that they will be successful, and they suspend their suspicions. As long as large groups of people remain trusting, peoples somewhat rash, impulsive decision-making is not discovered. Unfortunately, we have just passed through a period in which confidence was blind. It was not based on rational evidence.  

The more complex the transaction the more trust is needed to sustain the transaction. So what must we do to revive our animal spirits and economic growth? The Treasury and the Federal Reserve not only need a fiscal target, they also need a credit target. The banks, whose managers are suffering from the same flagging animal spirits as the rest of the economy, will not expand their credit much just because they are more solvent.

Leia mais…

Robert Shiller is professor of economics at Yale University. His new book, with George Akerlof, “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism”, is published by Princeton.

by Paul Davidson, Editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics

The last line of the original manuscript of my book JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES [Palgrave , London and New York 2007] was written in July 2006. In that line I noted that when, not if, the next Great Depression hits the global economy Keynes’s General Theory analysis will be rediscovered by economists. As this is being written in October 2008 it appears that this time has come.

WHAT CAUSED THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 2008?

The Winter of 2007-2008 will prove to be the winter of discontent and the beginning of the end in the classical theory of the efficiency of global financial markets. For more than three decades mainstream economists had preached, and politicians had swallowed, the myth of the efficiency of such free markets.

Those who do not study the lessons of history are bound to repeat its errors. Economists forgot the events of the Great Depression and the collapse of unfettered financial markets that followed the “Roaring Twenties” prosperity. For history has repeated itself with the growth of deregulated markets and the prosperity of the 1990s ending up in 2008 with the Greatest Recession since the Great Depression.

Leia mais…

O Centro Internacional Celso Furtado de Políticas para o Desenvolvimento organizou dias 6 e 7 de Novembro de 2008 na sua sede no edifício do BNDES,  Rio de Janeiro, o Simpósio Internacional Perspectivas do Desenvolvimento para o Século XXI  com a participação de alguns dos mais eminentes acadêmicos e economistas na área de desenvolvimento econômico.

Originários de diferentes regiões do globo – Índia, Rússia, China, Europa, América do Norte e do Sul – os participantes confrontaram diferentes pontos de vista sobre o desenvolvimento, num mundo onde as fronteiras entre centro e periferia perdem relevância.

Leia os textos do Simpósio internacional de 2008…

Saiu no New York Times:

“The zombie ideas have won. The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system – that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved. Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard”.

A fantasmagoria ideológica dos neoliberais venceu? O plano de Geithner, Secretário do Tesouro, parte da premissa de que não há nada de errado com o sistema financeiro norte-americano, apenas o equivalente a uma corrida aos bancos essencialmente saudáveis.

While the world talks about new ways to save struggling banks, there are a handful of economists who think some banks shouldn’t be saved at all. American economist James Galbraith told Manager Magazin that it might make more sense to break them up and start over.

Manager Magazin: Professor Galbraith, you suggest that banks that suffer from bad assets should simply be declared insolvent, instead of rescuing them with taxpayers’ money. Why?

James Galbraith: We need a correct assessment of the degree of losses suffered by a bank which is functionally insolvent. But as long as the old management is in place, there are no incentives to cooperate in the evaluation you need to make. That’s the first problem.

The second problem is: When a bank is insolvent, the incentives for normal banking practice disappear. They become perverse. The incumbent management has good reason to gamble excessively and to make capital losses. This is because it appears that the regulators could soon close down the bank.

Beyond that, if the situation for the bank is truly hopeless or if the management is truly corrupt, then the incentive is to loot the institution, to take as much money out of it — e.g. in the shape of bonuses and dividends — before the true state of the books is discovered.

Manager Magazin: Is this something we are witnessing right now?

Galbraith: Certainly those incentives are in place. In a situation when a bank has suffered losses sufficient to impair its capital, you need to have regulatory supervision in place.

This does not mean that you necessarily close the bank. The way it usually works in the USA is that a bank is closed on Friday and re-opened on Monday under a new name, with a new leadership and with a team of examiners who are going through the books, trying to sort the good business loans and personal loans from those which are hopeless. Then you isolate the hopeless stuff, you force a write down of the equity and the subordinated debts of the people who put in risk capital — so they have to take their losses as they should. And then you break up the bank into pieces which have a better prospect to gain viability soon. That’s a process of re-organization and re-capitalization. Leia o resto do artigo »