sexta-feira, julho 31, 2009

475) Brasil: descontrole fiscal

Gastança e má-fé
Editorial O Estado de S. Paulo, 31 de julho de 2009

Quem conhece a situação fiscal tem todos os motivos para se preocupar com a gastança do governo, especialmente com o inchaço da folha de pessoal e com a elevação das despesas permanentes. Todos esses fatos estão inscritos nos quadros do Tesouro e o resultado fiscal do primeiro semestre só não foi pior graças ao desempenho das estatais e dos Estados e municípios. Mas o ministro do Planejamento, Paulo Bernardo, em vez de lamentar o desmanche das finanças federais, prefere investir contra os analistas, pondo em dúvida a sua honestidade. O ministro do Planejamento já foi um reduto da sensatez no primeiro escalão do governo petista, onde predomina a fantasia, mas deve ter-se arrependido. Ao atribuir má-fé a quem aponta incertezas sobre a condução da política fiscal, ele simplesmente compromete a própria imagem.

O Brasil tem uma previsibilidade muito grande para as empresas que querem investir. Acho lamentável que essa molecada fique divulgando essas informações, disse o ministro. E foi além. Segundo ele, especuladores criaram esse quadro de incerteza em 2002 para prejudicar o presidente Lula (de fato, candidato Lula) e não conseguiram, mas o País foi muito prejudicado. O ministro não hesitou, nesse discurso, em atropelar a história, alterando fatos bem conhecidos. Quem atemorizou os mercados em 2002 não foram especuladores nem jogadores de má-fé. O PT havia alimentado o temor de um calote, se chegasse ao governo. Algumas de suas figuras mais conhecidas haviam apoiado um plebiscito sobre a dívida pública. Outros haviam defendido a renegociação da dívida. O ministro Paulo Bernardo não deve fazer questão de um debate público sobre o assunto. O debate envolveria a divulgação de constrangedores textos e declarações de seus companheiros de partido. O candidato Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva não divulgou sua Carta aos Brasileiros para desfazer boatos sem a mínima base, mas para assumir compromissos contrários à pregação habitual do PT. Quem nega ou finge desconhecer esses fatos não pode acusar ninguém de má-fé.

Segundo o ministro, as avaliações correntes no mercado já refletem, por antecipação, o quadro eleitoral de 2010. Ele só está certo quanto a um ponto. As preocupações quanto à política orçamentária estão ligadas à campanha eleitoral. Mas quem abriu a campanha muito antes da hora foi o presidente Lula, empenhado em comandar a sucessão. Os efeitos desse empenho são evidentes no aumento dos gastos salariais, na iniciativa de um aumento do Bolsa-Família e na proposta quase cômica de elaboração de um segundo Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC 2) embora o primeiro continue emperrado, com um saldo muito baixo de realizações até agora.

O governo cumprirá este ano, segundo o ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega, a meta fiscal. Mas, se o fizer, não merecerá nenhum crédito por isso. A meta foi simplesmente rebaixada e aquela prometida para 2010 não envolverá nenhum esforço adicional. De fato, será inferior ao padrão observado até recentemente.

Os ministros não esperam, com certeza, convencer o público mais informado. Mas insistem no seu discurso duplo, falando em boa gestão financeira e defendendo logo depois a gastança improdutiva. Se o desempenho fiscal piorou muito neste semestre, não foi só por causa da crise e da concessão de incentivos a alguns setores. Foi também porque o governo federal não se dispôs a compensar a perda de receita e a concessão de incentivos com a contenção do custeio. Ao contrário: as despesas com a folha salarial cresceram bem mais que a arrecadação e foram o principal fator de aumento dos desembolsos. A elevação dos investimentos pesou muito menos. Esse item pouco representa no orçamento e nem as verbas autorizadas são gastas pelo Tesouro, porque falta competência para tocar os projetos.

Os ministros confiam - este é o ponto nem sempre confessado - na recuperação da economia e na consequente elevação da receita fiscal para acertar as contas do governo. É só isso. Não há motivo para se esperar da administração federal nenhum esforço de austeridade. Se a gastança eleitoreira continuar, a estabilidade dos preços voltará a depender da intervenção do Banco Central. Quando isso ocorrer, o aumento dos juros será mais uma vez criticado por integrantes do governo, em mais uma evidente demonstração de má-fé.

474) A Nova Classe (ou, aristocracia operaria, mas muito pouco operaria)

A nova classe
Merval Pereira
O Globo, 31.07.2009

A tomada de poder no Conselho Deliberativo do Fundo de Amparo ao Trabalhador (Codefat) — que administra os R$ 158 bilhões de patrimônio do Fundo do Amparo ao Trabalhador (FAT) —, promovida pelo ministro do Trabalho, Carlos Lupi, é apenas mais um dos muitos movimentos que vêm sendo feitos para ampliar o poder dos sindicalistas no governo.

Para evitar que representantes dos empresários assumissem o controle do Conselho no próximo período, que abarca anos eleitorais, o ministro Lupi, oriundo do Sindicato dos Jornaleiros, ajudou a criar uma confederação empresarial, a Confederação Nacional de Serviços, entidade reconhecida oficialmente apenas em dezembro passado, e que tem sua representatividade contestada pelas federações da área.

O novo presidente, Luigi Nese, foi eleito com o voto dos representantes do governo e dos trabalhadores, mas não teve o apoio das confederações que teoricamente representa, as dos empresários, que abandonaram a entidade em protesto.

Não se tratava apenas de tomar conta desse que é um dos maiores caixas oficiais, mas também de impedir que um representante da Confederação Nacional da Agricultura, presidida pela senadora do DEM Kátia Abreu, estivesse à frente do Codefat em 2010.

O governo Lula vem ampliando sistematicamente o poder dos sindicatos, como mostram pesquisas como as do Centro de Pesquisas e Documentação (CPDoc) da Fundação Getulio Vargas do Rio, realizadas pela cientista política Maria Celina d’Araujo.

Uma, sobre a composição dos ministérios durante a Nova República, mostra que, até o governo Lula, apenas 11,5% dos ministros tinham algum vínculo com sindicatos de trabalhadores, e só 5,8% participaram de centrais sindicais.

No governo Lula, já houve momento em que 27% de seus ministros eram vinculados a sindicatos de trabalhadores.

Outra pesquisa, sobre os ocupantes dos cargos de Direção e Assessoramento (DAS 5 e 6) e de Natureza Especial (NES) no governo federal, na administração pública direta, revela que 45% dos indicados são ligados à vida sindical.

A "legalização" das centrais sindicais no ano passado ficou conhecida como "pelegalização", pois a lei sancionada pelo presidente Lula excluiu uma emenda do deputado do PPS Augusto Carvalho, que tornava opcional a contribuição sindical compulsória equivalente a um dia de trabalho, e vetou a fiscalização do Tr i b u n a l d e C o n t a s d a União "em nome da autonomia sindical".

Uma desculpa esfarrapada que não resiste a uma análise, pois a liberdade sindical não existe enquanto o governo não acabar com a exigência da unicidade sindical, e a fiscalização precisa ser feita porque, oriundo do imposto compulsório, o dinheiro é público, porque recolhido com base em um poder que só o Estado tem. Essa “autonomia? vale cerca de R$ 100 milhões anuais para as centrais sindicais.

A legalização das centrais sindicais, aliás, foi o que deu motivos para o início do plano de assumir o controle do Codefat. Alegando que as centrais tinham que ter representação no Conselho, Lupi aumentou duas vagas em cada grupo de representação.

Só que as novas vagas dos empresários foram preenchidas por confederações criadas com o incentivo do Ministério do Trabalho.

Essa verdadeira "república sindicalista" foi sendo moldada à medida que decisões ampliaram o espaço de atuação e revitalizaram as finanças do sistema sindical brasileiro.

No governo Lula, uma medida em especial reforçou o poder de fogo das centrais sindicais: a autorização para que empréstimos fossem dados com desconto na folha de pagamento, com a intermediação dos sindicatos, o famoso crédito consignado.

O exemplo mais gritante do sindicalista da "nova classe", na definição do sociólogo Francisco de Oliveira, fundador e hoje dissidente do PT, é aquele que atua no controle dos fundos de pensão.

Entre os maiores, se destaca o Previ do Banco do Brasil, que tem participação em 70 empresas e direito a indicar nada menos que 285 conselheiros, com patrimônio de mais de R$ 100 bilhões.

Quem o preside desde o início do governo Lula é o ex-trotskista Sérgio Rosa, oriundo da Confederação Nacional dos Bancários, cujo perfil de gestor implacável de resultados e poucos sorrisos a revista "Piauí" destrincha na próxima edição.

A reportagem de Consuelo Diegues revela detalhes das relações de amizade de Rosa com membros do governo Lula oriundos do sindicalismo bancário e do movimento trotskista, como os ex-ministros Luiz Gushiken e Ricardo Berzoini (hoje presidente do PT), que o indicaram para dirigir a Previ.

Os bastidores das negociações nebulosas envolvendo o banqueiro Daniel Dantas, que culminaram com a fusão das telefônicas Brasil Telecom e Telemar na nova Oi, controlada pelos empresários Carlos Jereissati e Sérgio Andrade, revelam as disputas internas de poder no governo Lula.

De um lado, o então todopoderoso chefe do Gabinete Civil José Dirceu garantindo ao banqueiro Daniel Dantas que o governo não se envolveria na disputa dos fundos de pensão com o Opportunity na gestão da Brasil Telecom.

De outro, Luiz Gushiken, também poderoso na época, usando a Previ para tirar o banqueiro Daniel Dantas do controle da telefônica.

E, entre uma negociação e outra, operações da Polícia Federal completamente descontroladas e indícios de que o governo pressionou os fundos de pensão para que não tentassem comprar a nova supertelefônica Oi, deixando o controle acionário com os empresários.

quinta-feira, julho 30, 2009

473) Escritorio Internacional de Exposicoes: uma historia secular

International Exhibitions Bureau
Date:30/01/2008
Official site

The Bureau International des Expositions (International Exhibitions Bureau) was established by a diplomatic international Convention, signed in Paris,in 1928. Its function is to regulate the frequency and quality of exhibitions falling within its remit.

This may simply be defined as covering all international exhibitions of a non-commercial nature (other than fine art exhibitions) with a duration of more than three weeks, which are officially organised by a nation and to which invitations to other nations are issued through diplomatic channels. The BIE is therefore not concerned with trade fairs and indeed the degree of commercial activity carried out at BIE exhibitions is carefully regulated.

Why does the BIE exist?
The first International Exhibition is generally considered to have been that held in London in 1851.

The success of this event produced many highly successful exhibitions throughout the world. For example, the Paris Exhibition of 1889 is well remembered for the creation of the Eiffel Tower.

But as the number of these events increased, it became clear that some measures were needed to control the frequency and quality of exhibitions. The 1928 Convention on International Exhibitions established the BIE and set out simple rules, which restricted the number of exhibitions which could be held and defined their characteristics. The original 1928 Convention has been amended by various additional protocols, but the basic framework of that Convention is still valid today.

How does the BIE work ?
The Secretariat General of the BIE, which is located in Paris, is headed by the Secretary General. The French Foreign Office carries out formal diplomatic relationships for the BIE.

Membership to the BIE -- currently comprising 140 nations -- is open to any Government by accession to the 1928 Convention and the 1972 Protocol on International Exhibitions. An annual fee is charged on a sliding scale based on United Nations principles on such contributions. However, a substantial part of the BIE's income derives from the registration fees for staging exhibitions and from a percentage of the gate money raised for that exhibition.

General Assemblies of the BIE are held twice a year in Paris under the chairmanship of the elected President of the BIE. These meetings are attended by all member states and by observers. Delegates review applications for new projects and consider reports from those exhibitions in a more advanced state. They are also attentive to reports by the four Committees, which supervise appropriate aspects of the BIE's activities. The Executive Committee assesses new projects and exercises an overview on the different aspects of exhibitions, while the Rules Committee is concerned with the detailed documentation and technical provisions of exhibitions as well as the internal rules of the BIE.

The Administration and Budget Committee and the Information and Communication Committee complete this structure. Each of the four Committees has a Chairman, who at the same time is a Vice President of the BIE, and a Vice Chairman. These eight members form a controlling body which assesses the activities of the BIE as a whole in preparation for the summer and winter General Assemblies. Committee members are elected by the General Assembly.

The registration of exhibitions
Controlling not only the frequency and quality of exhibitions but, in particular, also the conditions of participation for international participants is a continuous process carried out by the B.I.E. from the inception of a project to its close. There are three main steps an exhibition must follow in order to achieve the essential registration. Following the first formal nomination of a new project, which must specify the date of opening and closing, the theme and the legal status of the organising body, a BIE preliminary enquiry missioncarries out an on-the-spot assessment of the project. Led by a Vice President of the BIE, the enquiry team is able to request detailed information of a technical and financial nature to assist it and documentary evidence is examined.

This thorough research is the basis for a report, which is submitted to the Executive Committee for consideration and subsequently to the General Assembly for approval. If the project is successful in achieving support from these bodies, the Assembly will decide by secret balloton the "allocation of the date", that is the election of the candidate country which will host the next exhibition.

The third and final process is the registration of the exhibition on the basis of the formal review and acceptance of the General Regulations and Draft Participation Contract by the Assembly. The completion of the registration procedure (which may take three years) is marked by the awarding of the BIE flag.

This is also the point at which the Government may commence despatching invitations through diplomatic channels to other nations to participate in the event. Without registration, an exhibition cannot seek the support of the BIE Member States, which are in fact prohibited from participating in any event, which could violate the BIE Convention. Registration indicates the solemn acceptance by the host Government of its responsibility to apply and maintain the BIE's rules.By this process, the future development of international exhibitions is protected and the interests of the member states maintained.

During an exhibition, the BIE maintains its control function through the College of Commissioners General who are the representatives of a participating Government at the exhibition and an elected Steering Committee, which maintains a close liaison not only with the exhibition organisers but with the BIE.

Different categories of exhibitions
From the earliest date, the BIE has accepted the need to differentiate between two categories of exhibitions: major events which last for six months and with a theme of a general nature and shorter, more economical events, where the theme is more precise and specialised.

The two categories of exhibitions and their distinctive characteristics are as follows (more information www.bie-paris.org) :

International Registered Exhibition (or World Exhibition)
Frequency : every five years
Duration : 6 months at most
Area : not restricted
Theme : general (cf. General classification for International exhibitions)

International Recognised Exhibition
Frequency : during the interval between two International Registered Exhibitions
Duration : 3 months at most
Area : 25 ha at most
Theme : specialized

This type of event could give all nations the possibility of hosting an international exhibition.

The BIE will also continue to recognise those Horticultural Exhibitions such as the Netherlands Floriade 2002 and IGA 2003 Rostock in Germany, recommended to it by the International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH), and the Milan Triennale, an exhibition of long standing featuring the decorative arts.

Since 1928 the BIE's work has been dedicated to identifying and refining the role of those exhibitions within its concern as a means of promoting international goodwill and of exploring the limits of human experience and knowledge.

quinta-feira, julho 23, 2009

472) Socialismo: um teste simples por analogia

Socialism: a simple analogy

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.

The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

471) Uma interpretacao monetaria da crise atual

Channeling Milton Friedman

The great free-market economist isn't around, but his coauthor is. And Anna Schwartz is not happy.
Michael Hirsh
Newsweek Web Exclusive

Anna Schwartz is 93 and has been working at the same place since 1941. She's that rarity in economics, or indeed any field: a living legend from another era who hasn't lost a step mentally and who grasps everything that's going on around her in the present. Or at least she seems to—but more on that later. Schwartz is one of the most renowned monetary scholars in the world. She's the woman who authored, with Milton Friedman, The Monetary History of the United States—the book that launched the free-market counterattack against Keynesianism in the early '60s. And now, as she surveys the wreckage of the last two years, Schwartz has one thought: if only Milton were here. "Ever since his death I have lamented the fact that he has not been around to express his views on what's going on," she told me the other day at her mid-Manhattan office at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Despite constant criticism of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve over their handling of the financial crisis, opponents of their policies don't have a leader—especially on the right. Their problem is "the big lack of a voice like Friedman's, someone who's got instinctive understanding of the way markets operate, a very profound knowledge of history," Schwartz told me. Had Friedman been around to speak out (he died in 2006), "I don't believe we would have had a Fed balance sheet currently that has doubled, or tripled, in such a short period of time without any kind of Fed acknowledgment that it was creating a problem for itself [with] inflation already baked into the economy." In clear, strong tones marked by her New York accent, Schwartz said: "Everybody's talking about what kind of exit strategy does the Fed have, given that its balance sheet has exploded. It's something [Fed chair Ben Bernanke] doesn't discuss. It's as if he isn't willing to acknowledge that it is a problem."

Slamming the Fed, of course, is old hat for Schwartz and her alter ego, Friedman. They concluded in Monetary History that had the Federal Reserve not existed, the Great Depression might never have happened. Their argument: the Fed bungled things by tightening money from 1929 to 1932, something the New York bankers who used to be in charge of resolving crises would never have done. But Schwartz says that Friedman—who along with John Maynard Keynes, his polar opposite in thought, was the 20th century's most influential economist—would be just as disturbed by what Barack Obama is doing today. "Obama nowadays is the typical believer that government can do everything. So he's going to change the way electricity is produced in this country. He's going to change the way energy is going to be produced in this country. And it's all going to be a government effort. And Friedman would say, 'Look, if these really are such desirable things, why isn't it that the private sector has taken advantage of an opportunity to make money and to improve things?' "

Schwartz is more than a prominent voice for free markets; she is a breathing intellectual link to the Depression and its lessons. All of modern economics—and every major debate currently raging over the financial crisis—dates back to the 1930s. All the policy options we now discuss without even thinking about them—deficit spending, monetary policy, the role of the Fed, government intervention in general—spring out of what economists learned from that period. It was thanks to the Depression that Keynes created macroeconomics. It was in response to the Depression, and his finding that the Fed dramatically deepened it by tightening money supply, that Friedman developed his theory of monetarism, rebutting Keynes. (Monetarism holds that the money supply is the primary driver of prosperity and recession, and that Keynesian fiscal spending doesn't work. Government should therefore stay out of the way, other than to adjust the money supply.) And it was because of the Depression that Bernanke, another renowned scholar who studied its causes, expanded the Fed's lending by more than $2 trillion, angering Anna Schwartz.

Schwartz's criticism is unpleasant to hear for Bernanke, who has long admired both her and Friedman. He has said that reading Monetary History "hooked" him on monetary economics when he was an MIT student. Against her arguments now, Bernanke has one main counterargument, and it's a pretty good one: if he hadn't done what he did, we would be in another depression. The banking and financial system would have melted down; ironically enough, the near meltdown that occurred after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, which Bernanke was criticized for, is the best proof of that. Bernanke knows more about this than perhaps anyone in the world; the academic work for which he was most noted showed that a serious recession became the Great Depression when, in the critical three and a half years between the 1929 stock-market crash and FDR's New Deal, the Hoover administration allowed a third of the nation's banks to go under. As a result, Bernanke and Friedman/Schwartz are now considered the leading theorists of the Depression. Indeed, in a touching and generous gesture—considering the importance of his own work showing that bank failures were mainly responsible—Bernanke turned to the aging Friedman at a 90th-birthday celebration in 2002 and told him and Schwartz, who was there, "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we [the Fed] did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

He's made sure of that, by flooding the system with liquidity. The effect of Bernanke's actions has been to increase the money supply, which is what you might think Milton Friedman would have wanted. But Schwartz still believes that, as she told The Wall Street Journal last fall, Bernanke is fighting the last war. Yes, he's studiously taken the opposite course from what the Fed did in the early 1930s. But she maintains that the current crisis is less a liquidity problem and more a crisis of confidence because of the market's doubts about the toxic assets on banks' balance sheets. "What disturbed me particularly about Bernanke's performance was the insistence on bailouts," said Schwartz in a flood of passion. "If he had been absolutely candid to the markets and explained on what basis he would choose to bail out firms, and which ones he would not consider as meriting bailout, I think if the market had understood that he had principles and they would be able to understand a decision in light of these principles, there would have been much less bewilderment about why did they rescue Bear Stearns and pass over Lehman Brothers. Even though he has made a lot of rhetorical statements about the importance of transparency, he has not been transparent. I think that's a real failure. I think the Fed or the government has no business bailing out a firm that is not solvent."

Bernanke has no particular response to this criticism—the Fed did not respond to a request for comment. But I'll hazard a try at channeling him. Schwartz is right: this crisis is different from the Great Depression. But it's because this is true that it might be a little unfair to judge his actions in the way Schwartz does. First, it's no accident that neither Bernanke, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, nor current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has found any effective way to dispose of the toxic assets. For most of the past 10 months or so, selling them at any price the market might pay would have made many of the major banks automatically insolvent. Which means you're automatically in a depression. So what "principles" should Bernanke have applied? Who should he have saved, and who not?

Beyond that, there is another lesson, one that shows just how deep and systemic this disaster has been—far worse, in fact, than the crash that began the Great Depression or any other crisis that even the esteemed Anna Schwartz has dealt with. In capitalism, bankruptcy is supposed to be the fate of market players who make bad choices. The system gets cleaned out, the survivors deservingly pick up their failed rivals' business and get richer, and the economy comes back to life quickly. That, after all, was Andrew Mellon's infamous response after the 1929 crash. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers," Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary said—earning himself a permanent place in the annals of American villainy. But all Mellon was really doing was administering standard economic wisdom: allow the market to clear by selling. The problem was, things were probably too far gone for that to happen without a very painful depression.

Similarly, today the government is keeping failing banks artificially afloat. Interestingly, this policy has angered critics on the left, like economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, as much as critics on the right like Schwartz. They want the Obama team and Bernanke to be tougher on the banks. But here is the kind of thing Bernanke might say, if he were to respond: so out of control was Wall Street in recent years, and so unbalanced were global capital flows, that almost every major global bank grew weighed down with toxic assets (a few, like Goldman Sachs, handled things better than others). The system came so horribly unglued, in other words, that there was no longer any way to allow capitalist forces to restore the system to health—without a massive failure of banking and therefore another depression. So what exactly should Bernanke have done? Yes, there is a case to be made that the Obama administration and Bernanke's Fed could have taken over a couple of banks at the outset, broken up or restructured pathological monstrosities like Citigroup. But there was very little time to develop "principles" for a crisis the likes of which no one had ever seen before.

The evidence is precisely the omnipresence of those toxic assets, and the inability of both a Republican and a Democratic administration to figure out how to dispose of them.

All of which suggests that it may be time for modern economics, created around the Great Depression, to reinvent itself. New ideas are needed. It's a debate that Ben Bernanke would no doubt love to have with Milton Friedman, were the great man still around.

470) Ruy Barbosa, discurso no Colegio Anchieta

DISCURSO NO COLÉGIO ANCHIETA
Ruy Barbosa

" ...Não é a soberania do povo o que salva as repúblicas . Não são as urnas eleitorais que melhoram os governos. Não é a liberdade política o que engrandece as nações. A soberania do povo constitui apenas uma força, a grande força moderna, entre as nações embebidas na justa aspiração de se regerem a si mesmas. Mas essa força popular há mister dirigida por uma alta moralidade social. As eleições mudam os governos, mas não os reformam.

As liberdades políticas não têm por objeto satisfazer a vaidade dos cidadãos, entregando-lhes em frações dispersas o cetro do poder. O verdadeiro destino dessas liberdades está em revestirem e abroquelarem as liberdades civis, isto é, os direitos da consciência, da família e da propriedade.

Essas três categorias de direitos ancoram na palavra divina, a saber, na divina constituição do homem. Mas só os povos religiosos os têm definido e praticado seriamente, ao menos no que respeita à consciência e à família.

Só entre eles o santuário é inviolável. Só entre eles a mulher não pára em débil instrumento do outro sexo. Só entre eles a liberdade de testar consagra a autoridade paterna, depura o amor filial e oferece ao trabalho estímulos incomparáveis. Só entre eles, pelo direito de reunião e pelo direito de associação, consubstanciados na vida cotidiana, se pratica em escala realmente benfazeja a grande caridade, e as classes possuidoras se misturam, pela beneficência mais profusa, às classes laboriosas.....

As formas políticas são vãs, sem o homem que as anima. É o vigor individual que faz as nações robustas. Mas o indivíduo não pode ter essa fibra, esse equilíbrio, essa energia, que compõem os fortes, senão pela consciência do seu destino moral, associada ao respeito desse destino nos seus semelhantes.

Ora, eu não conheço nada capaz de produzir na criatura humana em geral esse estado interior, senão o influxo religioso.Nem o ateísmo reflexivo dos filósofos, nem o inconsciente ateísmo dos indiferentes são compatíveis com as qualidades de ação, resistência e disciplina essenciais aos povos livres.

Os descrentes, em geral,são fracos e pessimistas, resignados ou rebeldes, agitados ou agitadores.

Mas ainda não basta crer: é preciso crer definida e ativamente em Deus, isto é, confessá-lo com firmeza, e praticá-lo com perseverança.".....

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Para ler na integra

COLÉGIO ANCHIETA

469) A escola e a educacao, Rodrigo Constantino

O Estado e a Educação
Rodrigo Constantino
23 de julho de 2009

“Eu nunca deixei a escola interferir na minha educação.” (Mark Twain)

Poucas instituições são mais sagradas atualmente do que a escola pública. Mesmo muitos liberais acreditam que deve ser uma função do governo oferecer educação ao povo. Rothbard, em seu manifesto libertário For a New Liberty, discorda. Para ele, a mistura entre governo e educação, com o acréscimo das leis de presença obrigatória nas aulas, foi um contundente fracasso, além de ameaçar a liberdade individual. Pelos mesmos motivos que o Estado deve ser separado da religião, ele deve também ser afastado da importante questão educacional.

Naturalmente, condenar o uso do governo no serviço de educação não é o mesmo que desprezar a educação em si. Pelo contrário: o meio estatal acaba se mostrando sempre ineficiente para fornecer os importantes serviços. A educação – lembrando que a escola é apenas uma parte dela – é um dos mais valiosos recursos de uma sociedade, principalmente em um mundo onde o capital humano ganha cada vez mais importância frente ao capital físico. Justamente por ser tão importante para o progresso, ela não deve ficar a cargo do governo, sempre com gestão mais ineficiente e corrupta, por causas intrínsecas ao seu modelo de incentivos. A alimentação é uma necessidade ainda maior, e quando ficou sob o comando do Estado, como na União Soviética ou China, o resultado foi uma fome generalizada, com milhões de mortes por inanição. Nas nações mais livres e capitalistas, sobra comida*.

Parte da demanda por uma “educação universal” através do governo deriva de um altruísmo inadequado por parte da classe média. Para seus membros, as classes mais baixas deveriam ter a oportunidade de aproveitar o ensino das escolas que a classe média tanto valoriza. E se os próprios pais dessas crianças não desejam oferecer esta gloriosa oportunidade a seus filhos, então um pouco de coerção deve ser empregada, “para seu próprio bem”. Esta é uma postura arrogante, além de paradoxal: ela assume que os próprios pais não sabem o que é melhor para seus filhos, e que por isso necessitam da tutela do governo paternalista. Entretanto, são esses mesmos “mentecaptos” que irão escolher os governantes através do voto. O paternalismo estatal e o sufrágio universal são duas bandeiras contraditórias.

Rothbard lembra que a educação é um processo de aprendizado pela vida toda, e que este aprendizado não ocorre somente nas escolas, mas em todas as áreas de vida. Pode ser que algumas dessas crianças mais pobres encontrem mais valor em outros tipos de educação, em vez de permanecer compulsoriamente por horas “aprendendo” coisas eventualmente inúteis nas escolas públicas. Muitos trabalhos são “escolas” infinitamente melhores que as escolas públicas. Que bem faria a um jogador de futebol de família humilde ser forçado a permanecer horas por dia numa escola pública, em vez de investir em sua carreira? Qual seria a perda para a humanidade, caso indivíduos jovens como Bill Gates e Michael Dell não tivessem abandonado suas faculdades para criar suas empresas? É preciso tomar muito cuidado com o “culto ao diploma”. Na verdade, muito da pressão por freqüência compulsória às aulas e proibição do trabalho adolescente vem dos sindicatos. O verdadeiro objetivo, de acordo com Rothbard, seria afastar do mercado de trabalho os potenciais concorrentes.

Além disso, a educação formal não é uma panacéia, principalmente em países onde o governo controla demais a economia. Como disse o economista William Easterly em O Espetáculo do Crescimento, “criar pessoas com elevada qualificação em países onde a atividade mais rentável é pressionar o governo por favores não é uma fórmula de sucesso”. Em países subdesenvolvidos, com excesso de intervenção estatal, vemos diversas pessoas com diplomas, mas em subempregos, assim como muitos analfabetos ficam ricos somente pela “amizade com o rei”. Trocar favores e ser bem relacionado acaba valendo mais nesses países do que investir em qualificação para competir no mercado. Basta lembrar que as duas partes da Alemanha e da Coréia tinham o mesmo padrão de educação, mas o grau de liberdade fez toda a diferença, permitindo a prosperidade das partes livres e mantendo na total miséria as partes socialistas.

Para Rothbard, há forte causalidade entre a obrigatoriedade escolar e a crescente insatisfação de muitos jovens rebeldes. Prender por anos na escola publica, alunos que não possuem muita habilidade ou interesse nessa área é um ato criminoso contra a mente dessas crianças, segundo Rothbard. Ele lembra que a nação americana foi construída por cidadãos e líderes que, em muitos casos, não receberam muito ensino formal. Thomas Paine é um excelente exemplo. O autor de Common Sense começou a trabalhar aos 13 anos, ao lado do pai, e foi um autodidata. Além disso, como disse Thomas Sowell, não é possível ensinar todos no mesmo ritmo, a não ser que este ritmo seja reduzido para acomodar o menor denominador comum. Assim, um ensino público universal deverá necessariamente se balizar pelos piores alunos, que em inúmeros casos estariam aprendendo coisas mais úteis para si em outros lugares.

O maior problema, entretanto, reside no risco de doutrinação ideológica. Como coloca Rothbard, se as massas serão educadas em escolas do governo, como poderiam essas escolas não virar um poderoso instrumento para incutir obediência às autoridades estatais? O cão não morde a mão que o alimenta. Escolas públicas dificilmente vão criticar os governos. Muito mais provável será elas virarem máquinas de propaganda ideológica de governos. De fato, esse é justamente o resultado que pode ser observado mundo afora. E Rothbard não deixa de notar que no começo, as escolas públicas americanas eram defendidas exatamente com o intuito de moldar e criar obediência nas massas. Nos dias coloniais, a escola pública era usada como um mecanismo de supressão dos dissidentes religiosos, assim como para ensinar as virtudes da obediência ao Estado. Os pioneiros em controle estatal na educação foram a Prússia autoritária de Bismark, e a França imperial, longe de representarem modelos adequados de liberdade. Muitos gostam de enaltecer a “educação” cubana, ignorando o alerta de Mário Quintana: “Os verdadeiros analfabetos são os que aprenderam a ler e não lêem”. Que educação é esta onde o povo é compulsoriamente afastado das leituras de livre escolha?

Automaticamente, surge um evidente problema: qual será a educação oficial do governo? Parece óbvio que este modelo irá incentivar todo tipo de disputa e briga entre grupos de interesse, cada um tentando vencer o “jogo democrático” para impor a sua visão de mundo. Deve a educação pública ter inclinação tradicional ou construtivista? Deve ela ter cunho religioso ou secular? Deve ela adotar a ideologia socialista ou liberal? Quais matérias merecem maior destaque na grade curricular? A uniformização do ensino público irá limitar as alternativas através do domínio de certas características. O burocrata não conta com os incentivos adequados para satisfazer os consumidores, e toda burocracia acaba optando por regras uniformes para evitar transtornos. Ao contrário disso, o livre mercado é notório por atender todo tipo de demanda. Quanto mais pública for a educação escolar, mais uniforme ela tende a ser, ofuscando as necessidades e desejos das minorias. Basta lembrar que jornais e revistas são um importante aspecto da educação, e existem todos os tipos de linha editorial nesse setor. Abolindo a escola pública, o mesmo aconteceria na área de ensino escolar, com um mercado livre fornecendo enorme variedade para os clientes.

Além da visão utilitarista, Rothbard foca, como de praxe, mais ainda no aspecto moral da coisa. Em primeiro lugar, as escolas públicas forçam aqueles pais que desejam mandar seus filhos para escolas privadas a arcar com um custo duplo: eles são obrigados a subsidiar as crianças dos outros nas escolas públicas, e também devem pagar pelo ensino de seus próprios filhos. Como Herbert Spencer defendeu: um homem não deve ter o direito de jogar sobre os ombros da comunidade o fardo de educar seus filhos, assim como não pode demandar que devam alimentá-los e vesti-los. Além disso, os adultos solteiros ou casais sem filhos são obrigados a subsidiar famílias com filhos. Seria isso ético?

Nota-se que há inclusive um incentivo a ter mais filhos, se a educação deles representa um custo alheio, e não próprio. No limite, como os outros pagam, podem acabar se sentindo no direito de controlar o tamanho da família de cada um, o que de fato acontece em países totalitários como a China. Para piorar, isso significa também que pessoas humildes sem filho são obrigadas a subsidiar famílias ricas com filhos. Esse fato é ainda mais evidente no caso das universidades públicas, que abrigam basicamente filhos de pais mais ricos. Há algum sentido ético nisso?

A era moderna parece a “era dos direitos”, ignorando que muitos produtos e serviços não caem do céu. Logo, se alguém tem “direito” a moradia, escola e saúde, isso quer dizer que outro tem o dever de fornecer tais bens. Como dizia Bastiat, “o Estado é a grande ficção através da qual todo mundo se esforça para viver à custa de todo mundo”. Mas deve-se ter em mente sempre que o “direito” ao ensino público representa a obrigação de outros trabalharem para pagar a conta. Rothbard questiona ainda porque o governo deveria parar na escola então, já que o ensino formal é apenas uma parte da educação toda. Será que o governo deveria fornecer revistas e jornais “grátis” para todos?

Na tentativa de separar o Estado da educação, o economista Milton Friedman defendeu a tese dos vouchers, estimulando a competição no lado da oferta e mantendo com os pais o direito de escolha. Rothbard, apesar de considerar esta idéia uma melhora em relação ao modelo atual, enxerga graves falhas nela. Em primeiro lugar, a coerção imoral aos pagadores de impostos continua. Em segundo lugar, parece inevitável que o poder do governo de subsidiar o ensino traria junto o poder de regulá-lo. O governo não aceitaria dar vales para qualquer entidade escolar, mas apenas para aquelas que preenchessem os critérios definidos pelo próprio governo. O governo ainda teria, portanto, o controle sobre o currículo escolar, os métodos de ensino, etc.

Em suma, a prescrição libertária para resolver o estado deplorável em que se encontra o sistema de educação pública pode ser resumida da seguinte forma: retirar o governo do processo educacional.

* Rothbard destaca a seguinte passagem do professor E.G. West no livro: “Protection of a child against starvation or malnutrition is presumably just as important as protection against ignorance. It is difficult to envisage, however, that any government, in its anxiety to see that children have minimum standards of food and clothing, would pass laws for compulsory and universal eating, or that it should entertain measures which lead to increased taxes or rates in order to provide children’s food, ‘free’ at local authority kitchens or shops”. Infelizmente, o autor não conheceu os “restaurantes populares” brasileiros, que como todos sabem, tinham como único objetivo o populismo em busca de votos. Alguém ainda consegue acreditar que o verdadeiro interesse dos governantes com a escola pública será educar as massas de verdade?

468) America Latina, se atrasou a si mesma...

Recebi pela internet, e não tenho certeza de que se trata, efetivamente, do discurso do presidente Oscar Arias, da Costa Rica, na Cupula das Américas, em Abril de 2009.
Vou verificar; enquanto isso, pode-se sempre ler e concordar, ou não...

ALGO HICIMOS MAL
(Algo fizemos errado)
Palavras do Presidente Oscar Arias da Costa Rica na Cúpula das Américas em Trinidad e Tobago, 18 de abril de 2009

"Tenho a impressão de que cada vez que os países caribenhos e latino-americanos se reúnem com o presidente dos Estados Unidos da América, é para pedir-lhe coisas ou para reclamar coisas. Quase sempre, é para culpar os Estados Unidos de nossos males passados, presentes e futuros. Não creio que isso seja de todo justo.

Não podemos esquecer que a América Latina teve universidades antes que os Estados Unidos criassem Harvard e William & Mary, que são as primeiras universidades desse país. Não podemos esquecer que nesse continente, como no mundo inteiro, pelo menos até 1750 todos os americanos eram mais ou menos iguais: todos eram pobres.

Ao aparecer a Revolução Industrial na Inglaterra, outros países sobem nesse vagão: Alemanha, França, Estados Unidos, Canadá, Austrália, Nova Zelândia e, aqui, a Revolução Industrial passou pela América Latina como um cometa, e não nos demos conta. Certamente perdemos a oportunidade.

Há também uma diferença muito grande. Lendo a história da América Latina, comparada com a história dos Estados Unidos, compreende-se que a América Latina não teve um John Winthrop espanhol, nem português, que viesse coma Bíblia em sua mão, disposto a construir uma Cidade sobre uma Colina, uma cidade que brilhasse como foi à pretensão dos peregrinos que chegaram aos Estados Unidos.

Há 50 anos, o México era mais rico que Portugal. Em 1950, um país como o Brasil tinha uma renda per capita mais elevada que a da Coréia do Sul. Há 60 anos, Honduras tinha mais riqueza per capita que Cingapura, e hoje Cingapura, em questão de 35 a 40 anos, é um país com $40.000 de renda anual por habitante. Bem, algo nós fizemos mal, os latino-americanos.

Que fizemos errado? Nem posso enumerar todas as coisas que fizemos mal. Para começar, temos uma escolaridade de sete anos. Essa é a escolaridade média da América Latina e não é o caso da maioria dos países asiáticos.

Certamente não é o caso de países como Estados Unidos e Canadá, com a melhor educação do mundo, similar à dos europeus. De cada 10 estudantes que ingressam no nível secundário na América Latina, em alguns países, só um termina esse nível secundário. Há países que têm uma mortalidade infantil de 50 crianças por cada mil, quando a média nos países asiáticos mais avançados é de 8, 9 ou 10.

Nós temos países onde a carga tributária é de 12% do produto interno bruto e não é responsabilidade de ninguém, exceto nossa, que não cobremos dinheiro das pessoas mais ricas dos nossos países. Ninguém tem a culpa disso, a não ser nós mesmos.

Em 1950, cada cidadão norte-americano era quatro vezes mais rico que um cidadão latino-americano. Hoje em dia, um cidadão norte-americano é 10, 15 ou 20 vezes mais rico que um latino-americano. Isso não é culpa dos Estados Unidos, é culpa nossa.

No meu pronunciamento desta manhã, me referi a um fato que para mim é grotesco e que somente demonstra que o sistema de valores do século XX, que parece ser o que estamos pondo em prática, também no século XXI, é um sistema de valores equivocado. Porque não pode ser que o mundo rico dedique 100.000 milhões de dólares para aliviar a pobreza dos 80% da população do mundo "num planeta que tem 2.500 milhões de seres humanos com uma renda de $2 por dia" e que gaste 13 vezes mais ($1.300.000.000.000) em armas e soldados.

Como disse esta manhã, não pode ser que a América Latina gaste $50.000 milhões em armas e soldados. Eu me pergunto: quem é o nosso inimigo? Nosso inimigo, presidente Correa, desta desigualdade que o Senhor aponta com muita razão, é a falta de educação; é o analfabetismo; é que não gastamos na saúde de nosso povo; que não criamos a infra-estrutura necessária, os caminhos, as estradas, os portos, os aeroportos; que não estamos dedicando os recursos necessários para deter a degradação do meio ambiente; é a desigualdade que temos que nos envergonhar realmente; é produto, entre muitas outras coisas, certamente, de que não estamos educando nossos filhos e nossas filhas.

Vá alguém a uma universidade latino-americana e parece, no entanto que estamos nos anos oitenta, setenta, sessenta. Parece que nos esquecemos de que em 9 de novembro de 1989 aconteceu algo de muito importante, ao cair o Muro de Berlim, e que o mundo mudou. Temos que aceitar que este é um mundo diferente, e nisso francamente penso que os acadêmicos, que toda gente pensante, que todos os economistas, que todos os historiadores, quase concordam que o século XXI é um século dos asiáticos não dos latino-americanos. E eu, lamentavelmente, concordo com eles. Porque enquanto nós continuamos discutindo sobre ideologias, continuamos discutindo sobre todos os "ismos" (qual é o melhor? capitalismo, socialismo, comunismo, liberalismo, neoliberalismo, social-cristianismo...) os asiáticos encontraram um "ismo" muito realista para o século XXI e o final do século XX, que é o pragmatismo.

Para só citar um exemplo, recordemos que quando Deng Xiaoping visitou Cingapura e a Coréia do Sul, depois de ter-se dado conta de que seus próprios vizinhos estavam enriquecendo de uma maneira muito acelerada, regressou a Pequim e disse aos velhos camaradas maoístas que o haviam acompanhado na Grande Marcha: "Bem, a verdade, queridos camaradas, é que a mim não importa se o gato é branco ou negro, só o que me interessa é que cace ratos". E se Mao estivesse vivo, teria morrido de novo quando disse que "a verdade é que enriquecer é glorioso". E enquanto os chineses fazem isso, desde 1979, e até hoje crescem a 11%, 12% ou 13%, e tiraram 300 milhões de habitantes da pobreza, nós continuamos discutindo sobre ideologias que devíamos ter enterrado há muito tempo atrás.

A boa notícia é que isto Deng Xiaoping o conseguiu quando tinha 74 anos.

Olhando em volta, queridos presidentes, não vejo ninguém que esteja perto dos 74 anos. Por isso só lhes peço que não esperemos completá-los para fazer as mudanças que temos que fazer.

Muchas gracias."

sexta-feira, julho 17, 2009

467) Economia, o que deu errado? (The Economist)


What went wrong with economics
The Economist, July 16th 2009
And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past

Illustration by Jon Berkerly

OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”

In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”

In its crudest form—the idea that economics as a whole is discredited—the current backlash has gone far too far. If ignorance allowed investors and politicians to exaggerate the virtues of economics, it now blinds them to its benefits. Economics is less a slavish creed than a prism through which to understand the world. It is a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow. Much of that body of knowledge has no link to the financial crisis and remains as useful as ever.

And if economics as a broad discipline deserves a robust defence, so does the free-market paradigm. Too many people, especially in Europe, equate mistakes made by economists with a failure of economic liberalism. Their logic seems to be that if economists got things wrong, then politicians will do better. That is a false—and dangerous—conclusion.

Rational fools

These important caveats, however, should not obscure the fact that two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined (see article, article). There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.

The first charge is half right. Macroeconomists, especially within central banks, were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles. Financial economists, meanwhile, formalised theories of the efficiency of markets, fuelling the notion that markets would regulate themselves and financial innovation was always beneficial. Wall Street’s most esoteric instruments were built on these ideas.

But economists were hardly naive believers in market efficiency. Financial academics have spent much of the past 30 years poking holes in the “efficient market hypothesis”. A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions.

So there were caveats aplenty. But as insights from academia arrived in the rough and tumble of Wall Street, such delicacies were put aside. And absurd assumptions were added. No economic theory suggests you should value mortgage derivatives on the basis that house prices would always rise. Finance professors are not to blame for this, but they might have shouted more loudly that their insights were being misused. Instead many cheered the party along (often from within banks). Put that together with the complacency of the macroeconomists and there were too few voices shouting stop.

Blindsided and divided

The charge that most economists failed to see the crisis coming also has merit. To be sure, some warned of trouble. The likes of Robert Shiller of Yale, Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the team at the Bank for International Settlements are now famous for their prescience. But most were blindsided. And even worrywarts who felt something was amiss had no idea of how bad the consequences would be.

That was partly to do with professional silos, which limited both the tools available and the imaginations of the practitioners. Few financial economists thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it; and few worried about the effect on the overall economy of the markets for all asset classes seizing up simultaneously, since few believed that was possible.

Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly. Their framework reflected an uneasy truce between the intellectual heirs of Keynes, who accept that economies can fall short of their potential, and purists who hold that supply must always equal demand. The models that epitomise this synthesis—the sort used in many central banks—incorporate imperfections in labour markets (“sticky” wages, for instance, which allow unemployment to rise), but make no room for such blemishes in finance. By assuming that capital markets worked perfectly, macroeconomists were largely able to ignore the economy’s financial plumbing. But models that ignored finance had little chance of spotting a calamity that stemmed from it.

What about trying to fix it? Here the financial crisis has blown apart the fragile consensus between purists and Keynesians that monetary policy was the best way to smooth the business cycle. In many countries short-term interest rates are near zero and in a banking crisis monetary policy works less well. With their compromise tool useless, both sides have retreated to their roots, ignoring the other camp’s ideas. Keynesians, such as Mr Krugman, have become uncritical supporters of fiscal stimulus. Purists are vocal opponents. To outsiders, the cacophony underlines the profession’s uselessness.

Add these criticisms together and there is a clear case for reinvention, especially in macroeconomics. Just as the Depression spawned Keynesianism, and the 1970s stagflation fuelled a backlash, creative destruction is already under way. Central banks are busy bolting crude analyses of financial markets onto their workhorse models. Financial economists are studying the way that incentives can skew market efficiency. And today’s dilemmas are prompting new research: which form of fiscal stimulus is most effective? How do you best loosen monetary policy when interest rates are at zero? And so on.

But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.
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The state of economics
The other-worldly philosophers
The Economist, July 16th 2009

Although the crisis has exposed bitter divisions among economists, it could still be good for economics. Our first article looks at the turmoil among macroeconomists. Our second (see article) examines the foundations of financial economics.

ROBERT LUCAS, one of the greatest macroeconomists of his generation, and his followers are “making ancient and basic analytical errors all over the place”. Harvard’s Robert Barro, another towering figure in the discipline, is “making truly boneheaded arguments”. The past 30 years of macroeconomics training at American and British universities were a “costly waste of time”.

To the uninitiated, economics has always been a dismal science. But all these attacks come from within the guild: from Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times; and Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics (LSE), respectively. The macroeconomic crisis of the past two years is also provoking a crisis of confidence in macroeconomics. In the last of his Lionel Robbins lectures at the LSE on June 10th, Mr Krugman feared that most macroeconomics of the past 30 years was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst”.

These internal critics argue that economists missed the origins of the crisis; failed to appreciate its worst symptoms; and cannot now agree about the cure. In other words, economists misread the economy on the way up, misread it on the way down and now mistake the right way out.

On the way up, macroeconomists were not wholly complacent. Many of them thought the housing bubble would pop or the dollar would fall. But they did not expect the financial system to break. Even after the seizure in interbank markets in August 2007, macroeconomists misread the danger. Most were quite sanguine about the prospect of Lehman Brothers going bust in September 2008.

Nor can economists now agree on the best way to resolve the crisis. They mostly overestimated the power of routine monetary policy (ie, central-bank purchases of government bills) to restore prosperity. Some now dismiss the power of fiscal policy (ie, government sales of its securities) to do the same. Others advocate it with passionate intensity.

Among the passionate are Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman. They turn for inspiration to Depression-era texts, especially the writings of John Maynard Keynes, and forgotten mavericks, such as Hyman Minsky. In the humanities this would count as routine scholarship. But to many high-tech economists it is a bit undignified. Real scientists, after all, do not leaf through Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” to solve contemporary problems in physics.

They accuse economists like Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman of falling back on antiquated Keynesian doctrines—as if nothing had been learned in the past 70 years. Messrs DeLong and Krugman, in turn, accuse economists like Mr Lucas of not falling back on Keynesian economics—as if everything had been forgotten over the past 70 years. For Mr Krugman, we are living through a “Dark Age of macroeconomics”, in which the wisdom of the ancients has been lost.

What was this wisdom, and how was it forgotten? The history of macroeconomics begins in intellectual struggle. Keynes wrote the “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, which was published in 1936, in an “unnecessarily controversial tone”, according to some readers. But it was a controversy the author had waged in his own mind. He saw the book as a “struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought” he had inherited from his classical predecessors.

That classical mode of thought held that full employment would prevail, because supply created its own demand. In a classical economy, whatever people earn is either spent or saved; and whatever is saved is invested in capital projects. Nothing is hoarded, nothing lies idle.

Keynes appreciated the classical model’s elegance and consistency, virtues economists still crave. But that did not stop him demolishing it. In his scheme, investment was governed by the animal spirits of entrepreneurs, facing an imponderable future. The same uncertainty gave savers a reason to hoard their wealth in liquid assets, like money, rather than committing it to new capital projects. This liquidity-preference, as Keynes called it, governed the price of financial securities and hence the rate of interest. If animal spirits flagged or liquidity-preference surged, the pace of investment would falter, with no obvious market force to restore it. Demand would fall short of supply, leaving willing workers on the shelf. It fell to governments to revive demand, by cutting interest rates if possible or by public works if necessary.

The Keynesian task of “demand management” outlived the Depression, becoming a routine duty of governments. They were aided by economic advisers, who built working models of the economy, quantifying the key relationships. For almost three decades after the second world war these advisers seemed to know what they were doing, guided by an apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment. But their credibility did not survive the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. These condemned Western economies to “stagflation”, a baffling combination of unemployment and inflation, which the Keynesian consensus grasped poorly and failed to prevent.

The Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, eventually defeated American inflation in the early 1980s, albeit at a grievous cost to employment. But victory did not restore the intellectual peace. Macroeconomists split into two camps, drawing opposite lessons from the episode.

The purists, known as “freshwater” economists because of the lakeside universities where they happened to congregate, blamed stagflation on restless central bankers trying to do too much. They started from the classical assumption that markets cleared, leaving no unsold goods or unemployed workers. Efforts by policymakers to smooth the economy’s natural ups and downs did more harm than good.
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Financial economics
Efficiency and beyond
The Economist, July 16th 2009

The efficient-markets hypothesis has underpinned many of the financial industry’s models for years. After the crash, what remains of it?

IN 1978 Michael Jensen, an American economist, boldly declared that “there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the efficient-markets hypothesis” (EMH). That was quite a claim. The theory’s origins went back to the beginning of the century, but it had come to prominence only a decade or so before. Eugene Fama, of the University of Chicago, defined its essence: that the price of a financial asset reflects all available information that is relevant to its value.

From that idea powerful conclusions were drawn, not least on Wall Street. If the EMH held, then markets would price financial assets broadly correctly. Deviations from equilibrium values could not last for long. If the price of a share, say, was too low, well-informed investors would buy it and make a killing. If it looked too dear, they could sell or short it and make money that way. It also followed that bubbles could not form—or, at any rate, could not last: some wise investor would spot them and pop them. And trying to beat the market was a fool’s errand for almost everyone. If the information was out there, it was already in the price.

On such ideas, and on the complex mathematics that described them, was founded the Wall Street profession of financial engineering. The engineers designed derivatives and securitisations, from simple interest-rate options to ever more intricate credit-default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. All the while, confident in the theoretical underpinnings of their inventions, they reassured any doubters that all this activity was not just making bankers rich. It was making the financial system safer and the economy healthier.

That is why many people view the financial crisis that began in 2007 as a devastating blow to the credibility not only of banks but also of the entire academic discipline of financial economics. That verdict is too simple. Granted, financial economists helped to start the bankers’ party, and some joined in with gusto. But even when the EMH still seemed fresh, economists were picking holes in it. A strand of sceptical thought, behavioural economics, has been booming. There are even signs of a synthesis between the EMH and the sceptics. Academia thus moved on, even if Wall Street did not. Nonetheless, the extent to which politicians and regulators trying to reform finance can trust financial economists is an open question.

The EMH, to be sure, has loyal defenders. “There are models, and there are those who use the models,” says Myron Scholes, who in 1997 won the Nobel prize in economics for his part in creating the most widely used model in the finance industry—the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options. Mr Scholes thinks much of the blame for the recent woe should be pinned not on economists’ theories and models but on those on Wall Street and in the City who pushed them too far in practice.

Financial firms plugged in data that reflected a “view of the world that was far more benign than it was reasonable to take, emphasising recent inputs over more historic numbers,” says Mr Scholes. “Apparently, a lot of the models used for structured products were pretty good, but the inputs were awful.” Indeed, the vast majority of derivative contracts and securitisations have performed exactly as their models said they would. It was the exceptions that proved disastrous.

Mr Scholes knows whereof he speaks. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund he founded with, among others, Robert Merton, a fellow Nobel laureate, skidded off the road in 1998. Since then, he has been pointing out dangers ignored or underestimated in the finance industry, such as the risk that liquid markets can dry up far faster than is typically assumed. (That did not stop Platinum Grove, the latest hedge fund in which he is involved, taking a big hit during the recent meltdown.)

He has also been “criticising for years” the “value-at-risk” (VAR) models used by institutional investors to work out how much capital they need to set aside as insurance against losses on risky assets. These models mistakenly assume that the volatility of asset prices and the correlations between prices are constant, says Mr Scholes. When, say, two types of asset were assumed to be uncorrelated, investors felt able to hold the same capital as a cushion against losses on both, because they would not lose on both at the same time. However, as Mr Scholes discovered at LTCM and as the entire finance industry has now learnt for itself, at times of market stress assets that normally are uncorrelated can suddenly become highly correlated. At that point the capital buffer implied by VAR turns out to be woefully inadequate.

Even as financial engineers were designing all sorts of clever products on the assumption that markets were efficient, academic economists were focusing more on how markets fall short. Even before the 1987 stockmarket crash gave them their first real-world reminder of markets’ capriciousness, some of them were examining the flaws in the theory.

In 1980 Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz, another subsequent winner of a Nobel prize, pointed out a paradox. If prices reflect all information, then there is no gain from going to the trouble of gathering it, so no one will. A little inefficiency is necessary to give informed investors an incentive to drive prices towards efficiency. For Mr Scholes, it is the belief that markets tend to return prices to their efficient equilibrium when they move away from it that gives the EMH its continuing relevance.

Economists also began to study “institutional frictions” in markets. For instance, the EMH’s devotees had assumed that smart investors would be able to trade against less well-informed “noise traders” and overwhelm them by driving prices to reflect true value. But it became clear that there were limits to their ability to arbitrage folly away. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist, among others, pointed out that it could be too costly for informed investors to borrow enough to bet against the noise traders. Once it is admitted that prices can move away from fundamentals for a long time, informed investors may do best by riding the trend rather than fighting it. The trick then is to get out just before momentum shifts the other way. But in this world, rational investors may contribute to bubbles rather than preventing them.

In the early years of the EMH, researchers spent little time worrying about the workings of financial institutions—a weakness of macroeconomics too. In 2000, in his presidential address to the American Finance Association, Franklin Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, asked: “Do financial institutions matter?” Lay people, he said, “might be surprised to learn that institutions play little role in financial theory.” Indeed they might. Mr Allen’s explanation was partly that the dominant theories had been shaped at a time when America, especially, was spared financial crises.

In the past decade or so, financial economists have been paying more attention to institutional questions, such as how bankers should be paid. Many of these researchers broadly accept the EMH, but see their role as uncovering sources of inefficiency that can be addressed to make markets more efficient.

However, a second branch of financial economics is far more sceptical about markets’ inherent rationality. Behavioural economics, which applies the insights of psychology to finance, has boomed in the past decade. In particular, behavioural economists have argued that human beings tend to be too confident of their own abilities and tend to extrapolate recent trends into the future, a combination that may contribute to bubbles. There is also evidence that losses can make investors extremely, irrationally risk-averse—exaggerating price falls when a bubble bursts.

Behavioural economists were among the first to sound the alarm about trouble in the markets. Notably, Robert Shiller of Yale gave an early warning that America’s housing market was dangerously overvalued. This was his second prescient call. In the 1990s his concerns about the bubbliness of the stockmarket had prompted Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, to wonder if the heady share prices of the day were the result of investors’ “irrational exuberance”. The title of Mr Shiller’s latest book, “Animal Spirits” (written with George Akerlof, of the University of California, Berkeley), is taken from John Maynard Keynes’s description of the quirky psychological forces shaping markets. It argues that macroeconomics, too, should draw lessons from psychology.

“In some ways, we behavioural economists have won by default, because we have been less arrogant,” says Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, one of the pioneers of behavioural finance. Those who denied that prices could get out of line, or ever have bubbles, “look foolish”. Mr Scholes, however, insists that the efficient-market paradigm is not dead: “To say something has failed you have to have something to replace it, and so far we don’t have a new paradigm to replace efficient markets.” The trouble with behavioural economics, he adds, is that “it really hasn’t shown in aggregate how it affects prices.”

Yet EMH-ers and behaviouralists are increasingly asking the same questions and drawing on each other’s ideas. For instance, Mr Thaler concedes that in some ways the events of the past couple of years have strengthened the EMH. The hypothesis has two parts, he says: the “no-free-lunch part and the price-is-right part, and if anything the first part has been strengthened as we have learned that some investment strategies are riskier than they look and it really is difficult to beat the market.” The idea that the market price is the right price, however, has been badly dented.

Mr Thaler also says that only some of the recent problems were behavioural. Many were due to things that are open to non-behavioural economics, “like better risk analysis, how we identify hidden correlations.” It will be no surprise if, thanks to the catalytic power of the bubble and market meltdown, the distinctions between the two camps disappear and a new paradigm emerges.

One economist leading the effort to define that new paradigm is Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sees merit in both the rational and behavioural views. He has tried to reconcile them in the “adaptive markets hypothesis”, which supposes that humans are neither fully rational nor psychologically unhinged. Instead, they work by making best guesses and by trial and error. If one investment strategy fails, they try another. If it works, they stick with it. Mr Lo borrows heavily from evolutionary science. He does not see markets as efficient in Mr Fama’s sense, but thinks they are fiercely competitive. Because the “ecology” changes over time, people make mistakes when adapting. Old strategies become obsolete and new ones are called for.

The finance industry is in the midst of a transformative period of evolution, and financial economists have a huge agenda to tackle. They should do so quickly, given the determination of politicians to overhaul the regulation of financial markets.

One task, also of interest to macroeconomists, is to work out what central bankers should do about bubbles—now that it is plain that they do occur and can cause great damage when they burst. Not even behaviouralists such as Mr Thaler would want to see, say, the Fed trying to set prices in financial markets. He does see an opportunity, however, for governments to “lean into the wind a little more” to reduce the volatility of bubbles and crashes. For instance, when guaranteeing home loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, America’s giant mortgage companies, could be required to demand higher down-payments as a proportion of the purchase price, the higher house prices are relative to rents.

Another priority is to get a better understanding of systemic risk, which Messrs Scholes and Thaler agree has been seriously underestimated. A lot of risk-managers in financial firms believed their risk was perfectly controlled, says Mr Scholes, “but they needed to know what everyone else was doing, to see the aggregate picture.” It turned out that everyone was doing very similar things. So when their VAR models started telling them to sell, they all did—driving prices down further and triggering further model-driven selling.

Several countries now expect to introduce a systemic-risk regulator. Financial economists may have useful advice to offer. Many of them see information as crucial. Data should be collected from individual firms and aggregated. The overall data should then be published. That would be better, they think, than a system based solely on the micromanagement of individual institutions deemed systemically significant. Mr Scholes favours relying less on VAR to calculate capital reserves against losses. Instead, each category of asset should have its own risk-capital reserves, which could not be shared with other assets, even if prices had not been correlated in the past. As experience shows, correlations can change suddenly.

Financial economists also need better theories of why liquid markets suddenly become illiquid and of how to manage the risk of “moral hazard”—the danger that the existence of government regulation and safety nets encourages market participants to take bigger risks than they might otherwise have done. The sorry consequences of letting Lehman Brothers fail, which was intended to discourage moral hazard, showed that the middle of a crisis is not the time to get tough. But when is?

Mr Lo has a novel idea for future crises: creating a financial equivalent of the National Transport Safety Board, which investigates every civil-aviation crash in America. He would like similar independent, after-the-fact scrutiny of every financial failure, to see what caused it and what lessons could be learned. Not the least of the difficulties in the continuing crisis is working out exactly what went wrong and why—and who, including financial economists, should take the blame.
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quarta-feira, julho 15, 2009

466) Euro: dez anos de uma moeda internacional

Os Dez anos do Euro: Passado de orgulho, Futuro de Incertezas
Patrícia Nasser de Carvalho e Elói Martins Senhoras
Mundorama, 9 de julho de 2009

A criação de um espaço monetário único entre Estados soberanos e politicamente independentes é um fenômeno com poucos paralelos históricos, o que torna os dez anos de surgimento do euro em um marco significativo nos processos de integração regional. O surgimento da moeda única chamada euro nada mais foi que um dos pilares econômicos dentro de uma trajetória maior de convergência e cooperação entre os países europeus desde o final da Segunda Grande Mundial no multifacetado processo de integração regional que hoje consubstancia a União Européia.

Firmado por chefes europeus de Estado em 1992, o Tratado de Maastricht transformou-se em um ponto decisivo para a estratégia de integração monetária através de um enfoque gradualista de transição rumo a uma zona monetária. Na primeira etapa, os países do Sistema Monetário Europeu (SME) aboliram todos os controles de capitais que ainda persistiam, e foi aumentado o grau de cooperação entre os Bancos Centrais. Na segunda etapa foi criado o Instituto Monetário Europeu (IME), precursor do Banco Central Europeu (BCE), que tinha por funções o reforço da cooperação dos Bancos Centrais Nacionais. Na terceira etapa foram fixados os câmbios entre as distintas moedas nacionais de forma irrevogável e o BCE começou a operar, emitindo a moeda européia, que se convertiria em uma divisa de pleno direito.

Em 1999, na terceira etapa, a transição para a moeda única foi realizada inicialmente por 11 países que a utilizavam apenas na contabilidade empresarial como uma divisa virtual de referência durante os dois primeiros anos.

O euro somente entrou em circulação enquanto papel moeda e moedas metálicas a partir de 2002, e desde então, a União Européia se expandiu por meio de adesões principalmente originadas da Europa Oriental. Dos 27 países-membros que aderiram ao processo de integração regional da União Européia, 16 aderiram ao euro, conformando assim uma zona monetária única.

A formação desta zona monetária única trouxe uma representativa inflexão geopolítica para o continente europeu desde a derrubada do Muro de Berlim e do fim da União Soviética, uma vez que estes eventos trouxeram a desmontagem de estruturas do passado, enquanto que o euro engendrou uma ousada aposta no futuro que têm sido importante junto a outras políticas para retirar o continente de uma situação de perda de dinamismo econômico desde os anos 1980 conhecida como euroesclerosis.

Passados dez anos desde o seu surgimento, a centralidade do euro como divisa nas relações econômicas internacionais atesta para um sucesso de empreendimento para sair da crise européia, que se via com cautela em 1999, pois de fato, a moeda comum tornou-se a expressão máxima do desdobramento histórico da cooperação européia, cujo processo gerou a superação de divergências e obstáculos de toda ordem à integração por mais de cinqüenta anos. Este desempenho afirmativo vai em desencontro às previsões dos economistas mais céticos, especialmente da Inglaterra e dos Estados Unidos à época do lançamento do euro, que não estavam convencidos de que a moeda única conseguiria vingar ou, mesmo se conseguisse, não perduraria.

Os dez anos do euro mostram que gradativamente os representantes dos Bancos Centrais dos Estados membros conseguiram superar os prognósticos mais sombrios, diagnóstico este que também contradiz a crença dos cidadãos europeus quanto ao futuro da participação do euro no sistema monetário internacional à época de seu lançamento.

O mérito da moeda única está ainda no fato de que, no início do século XXI, o euro se transformou rapidamente na segunda moeda de referência do Sistema Monetário Internacional e alcançou alto valor no mercado financeiro. Aos dez anos, o euro é capaz de proporcionar menores riscos aos investimentos e maior estabilidade monetária em função dos mecanismos de coordenação cambial nas economias européias em relação a períodos anteriores.

A despeito do sucesso relativo do euro ao longo destes 10 anos, a adesão de países com características distintas na União Européia complexifica a zona monetária do euro e por isso torna menos clara a capacidade amortecedora frente às crises, demonstrando que apesar dos sinais positivos da união monetária é necessário uma boa dose de sobriedade, por dois motivos.

Em primeiro lugar, se nominalmente no campo monetário-financeiro o êxito do euro é evidente, na economia real o seu desempenho se apresenta mais preocupante uma vez que a moeda única ainda não resultou em um crescimento econômico mais efetivo nos países que a adotaram. Por um lado, a valorização do euro trouxe o fortalecimento no âmbito do Sistema Monetário Internacional nos últimos anos, embora, por outro, tenha provocado efeitos negativos para o comércio internacional de muitos Estados membros da União Européia, com grande impacto na demanda por exportações, componente importante para o crescimento de uma economia.

Em segundo lugar, a coincidência do aniversário dos dez anos do euro com os sinais da crise financeira internacional fez arrefecer as celebrações do aniversário de 10 anos uma vez que desde o colapso do banco norte-americano Lehman Brothers, em setembro de 2008, que transbordou as fronteiras norte-americanas, os países europeus passaram a sofrer com as tempestades financeiras, embora em menor medida do que a economia estadunidense.

A situação de incertezas em que se encontra a União Européia a “divide” em dois grupos nesse momento: de um lado, os Estados fundadores que questionam, cada vez mais, a eficiência do fragmentado sistema comunitário de regulação financeira e, até mesmo, se a associação ao euro realmente vale à pena, tendo em vista os riscos que oferecem as economias orientais. De outro, os países da Europa Central e Oriental, tradicionalmente mais instáveis, em degradante situação macroeconômica, tanto do setor pública, quanto do privado.

O decenário é um momento impar na história do euro pois ao demarcar uma celebração de sucesso atesta o que pode ser considerado o maior desafio desde o seu lançamento: enfrentar a crise internacional e, ao mesmo tempo, balancear necessidades tão distintas dos Estados membros, por meio de uma política monetária comum, sem tornar o continente europeu em uma colcha de retalhos

Patrícia Nasser de Carvalho é Economista e doutoranda pela Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP.

Elói Martins Senhoras é Professor assistente do Departamento de Relações Internacionais da Universidade Federal de Roraima – UFRR.

terça-feira, julho 14, 2009

465) The Economist: In defence of dismal science

In defence of the dismal science
Economics focus
The Economist, August 5, 2009

In a guest article, Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, rebuts criticisms that the financial crisis represents a failure of economics

THERE is widespread disappointment with economists now because we did not forecast or prevent the financial crisis of 2008. The Economist’s articles of July 18th on the state of economics were an interesting attempt to take stock of two fields, macroeconomics and financial economics, but both pieces were dominated by the views of people who have seized on the crisis as an opportunity to restate criticisms they had voiced long before 2008. Macroeconomists in particular were caricatured as a lost generation educated in the use of valueless, even harmful, mathematical models, an education that made them incapable of conducting sensible economic policy. I think this caricature is nonsense and of no value in thinking about the larger questions: What can the public reasonably expect of specialists in these areas, and how well has it been served by them in the current crisis?

One thing we are not going to have, now or ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets, like the declines that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in September. This is nothing new. It has been known for more than 40 years and is one of the main implications of Eugene Fama’s “efficient-market hypothesis” (EMH), which states that the price of a financial asset reflects all relevant, generally available information. If an economist had a formula that could reliably forecast crises a week in advance, say, then that formula would become part of generally available information and prices would fall a week earlier. (The term “efficient” as used here means that individuals use information in their own private interest. It has nothing to do with socially desirable pricing; people often confuse the two.)

Mr Fama arrived at the EMH through some simple theoretical examples. This simplicity was criticised in The Economist’s briefing, as though the EMH applied only to these hypothetical cases. But Mr Fama tested the predictions of the EMH on the behaviour of actual prices. These tests could have come out either way, but they came out very favourably. His empirical work was novel and carefully executed. It has been thoroughly challenged by a flood of criticism which has served mainly to confirm the accuracy of the hypothesis. Over the years exceptions and “anomalies” have been discovered (even tiny departures are interesting if you are managing enough money) but for the purposes of macroeconomic analysis and forecasting these departures are too small to matter. The main lesson we should take away from the EMH for policymaking purposes is the futility of trying to deal with crises and recessions by finding central bankers and regulators who can identify and puncture bubbles. If these people exist, we will not be able to afford them.

The Economist’s briefing also cited as an example of macroeconomic failure the “reassuring” simulations that Frederic Mishkin, then a governor of the Federal Reserve, presented in the summer of 2007. The charge is that the Fed’s FRB/US forecasting model failed to predict the events of September 2008. Yet the simulations were not presented as assurance that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected conditional on a crisis not occurring. Until the Lehman failure the recession was pretty typical of the modest downturns of the post-war period. There was a recession under way, led by the decline in housing construction. Mr Mishkin’s forecast was a reasonable estimate of what would have followed if the housing decline had continued to be the only or the main factor involved in the economic downturn. After the Lehman bankruptcy, too, models very like the one Mr Mishkin had used, combined with new information, gave what turned out to be very accurate estimates of the private-spending reductions that ensued over the next two quarters. When Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned Hank Paulson, the then treasury secretary, of the economic danger facing America immediately after Lehman’s failure, he knew what he was talking about.

Mr Mishkin recognised the potential for a financial crisis in 2007, of course. Mr Bernanke certainly did as well. But recommending pre-emptive monetary policies on the scale of the policies that were applied later on would have been like turning abruptly off the road because of the potential for someone suddenly to swerve head-on into your lane. The best and only realistic thing you can do in this context is to keep your eyes open and hope for the best.

After Lehman collapsed and the potential for crisis had become a reality, the situation was completely altered. The interest on Treasury bills was close to zero, and those who viewed interest-rate reductions as the only stimulus available to the Fed thought that monetary policy was now exhausted. But Mr Bernanke immediately switched gears, began pumping cash into the banking system, and convinced the Treasury to do the same. Commercial-bank reserves grew from $50 billion at the time of the Lehman failure to something like $800 billion by the end of the year. The injection of Troubled Asset Relief Programme funds added more money to the financial system.

There is understandable controversy about many aspects of these actions but they had the great advantages of speed and reversibility. My own view, as expressed elsewhere, is that these policies were central to relieving a fear-driven rush to liquidity and so alleviating (if only partially) the perceived need for consumers and businesses to reduce spending. The recession is now under control and no responsible forecasters see anything remotely like the 1929-33 contraction in America on the horizon. This outcome did not have to happen, but it did.

Not bad for a Dark Age
Both Mr Bernanke and Mr Mishkin are in the mainstream of what one critic cited in The Economist’s briefing calls a “Dark Age of macroeconomics”. They are exponents and creative builders of dynamic models and have taught these “spectacularly useless” tools, directly and through textbooks that have become industry standards, to generations of students. Over the past two years they (and many other accomplished macroeconomists) have been centrally involved in responding to the most difficult American economic crisis since the 1930s. They have forecasted what can be forecast and formulated contingency plans ready for use when unforeseeable shocks occurred. They and their colleagues have drawn on recently developed theoretical models when they judged them to have something to contribute. They have drawn on the ideas and research of Keynes from the 1930s, of Friedman and Schwartz in the 1960s, and of many others. I simply see no connection between the reality of the macroeconomics that these people represent and the caricature provided by the critics whose views dominated The Economist’s briefing.

464) Barreiras à entrada: artigo da The Economist

Idea
Barriers to entry, exit and mobility

The Economist, July 13th 2009

The idea that there are barriers preventing firms from entering markets and barriers preventing them from leaving requires that we view markets as similar to fields surrounded by gates of differing sizes and complexity. The gates have to be surmounted by firms wishing to enter or to leave.

To some extent the gates can be both raised and lowered, not just by those inside the fields but also by those outside wishing to enter. Typical barriers to entry include patents, licensing agreements and exclusive access to natural resources. A patented pharmaceutical, for instance, gives the patent holder exclusive rights for a certain period (usually a maximum of seven years) to manufacture and sell that pharmaceutical within a specified market.

The economies of scale (see article) that can be gained from being large and established in a particular field can also act as a barrier to entry. If new entrants calculate that they need to sell large volumes before they can hope to be competitive with existing firms, this acts as a deterrent to their ambition. When, for instance, did a new entrant last try to begin manufacturing for the mass car market?

Barriers to entry can also be erected by governments. Regulations covering the financial services industry are designed to act as a barrier to rogues and villains. But inevitably they also deter many honest businesses too. Forty years ago, foreign banks could not operate in Britain unless they had an office within walking distance of the Bank of England, then the industry’s regulator. Needless to say, property prices in the City of London’s “Square Mile” were among the highest in the world and acted as a powerful barrier to entry for newcomers.

Well-established firms in a particular field or market may be tempted to raise the barriers when they see a newcomer approaching their patch. They can do this, for instance, by lowering their prices, thus making the newcomers’ products less competitive. Moreover, lowering prices may be an easy option for the incumbents since their prices may have been higher than the free-market level because of the barriers.

Monopolies exist where there are insurmountable barriers to entry. If there were no (or only low) barriers, other firms would enter such markets to participate in the monopoly profits.

Barriers to exit make it more difficult for a company to get out of a particular business than it would otherwise have been. They include things like the cost of laying off staff, and contractual obligations such as the payment of rent. For a classic high-street bank with a large number of staff and a wide network of branches, the barriers to exit from traditional banking businesses can be considerable.

Paradoxically, firms sometimes decide for themselves to erect barriers that hinder their own exit from a market. This can be a strategic ploy designed to convey to their competitors the message that they are committed to that market, and that they are not going to leave it in a hurry.

Old ideas about barriers to entry were given a new twist with the development of e-commerce. By using the internet, firms can sometimes surmount traditional barriers with an ease not previously available. Economies of scale, for instance, do not apply in quite the same way.

Much of the deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s was designed by free-market-oriented governments to lower barriers to entry in industries ranging from airlines to stockbroking. But it had only limited success. A 1996 study of the airline industry by the American government’s General Accounting Office, for example, illustrated the complex way in which barriers to entry become tightly woven into the fabric of an industry. The study found that three things—namely, limits on take-off and landing slots at certain major airports; the existence of long-term leases giving airlines the exclusive use of airport gates; and rules prohibiting flights of less than a certain distance—continued to impede new airlines’ access to airports.

Despite this, in recent years a number of low-cost carriers have managed to some extent to circumvent these barriers by using secondary airports and by marketing tickets via the internet.
Further reading

Geroski, P., “Market Dynamics and Entry”, Blackwell, 1991

Geroski, P., Gilbert, R. and Jacquemin, A. (eds), “Barriers to Entry and Strategic Competition”, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990

Karakaya, F. and Stahl, M.J., “Entry Barriers and Market Entry Decisions”, Quorum Books, 1991

Yip, George, “Barriers to Entry: A Corporate Strategy Perspective”, Lexington Books, 1982