¿Existe alguna terapia de choque contra la crisis? ¿Y para prevenir las futuras? – Desconstruyendo los Informes del FMI (Parte 2) (página 6)

But There Are Still Far LARGER Potential Demands for
Bailouts

As we concluded in Part II, banks and thrifts that we
believe are at risk of failure hold assets of $ 5.48
trillion.

And as we showed in Part III, the daisy-chain of broader
systemic risks can be triggered by any number of these – or other
– large failures around the globe.

Thus …

?? Although it may be argued that a small number of
large institutions can be bailed out by the system in order to
protect itself from collapse, it cannot be reasonably argued that
a large number of large institutions can be bailed out by the
system, for the simple reason that, in the aggregate, they are
the system.

?? In other words, although it may be possible to bail
out individual institutions with the infusion of capital drawn
from elsewhere in the system, it is not possible to apply a
similar approach to bail out the system as a whole. Any attempt
to do so beg the simple question: Where would the capital come
from?

Part VIII

Recommendations for a Balanced,
Sustainable Recovery

An economic depression, although
traumatic, is not the end of the world. Moreover, if managed
wisely, it can deliver fundamental benefits: A cleansing of
excess debts, a reduction in the cost of living, and a firmer
foundation for subsequent growth.

To maximize those silver-lining
benefits, while minimizing the most damaging consequences, we
recommend the following steps:

Step 1. The doctrine of too big to fail
must be promptly replaced by the recognition that troubled
megabanks are too big to bail.

Step 2. Before debating strategies and
tactics, policymakers must seriously consider the fundamental,
long term goals of government intervention in the debt crisis. Until
now, the oft-stated goal has been to prevent a national banking
crisis and avoid an economic depression. However, it is now
becoming increasingly apparent that the true costs of that
enterprise- not only 13-digit dollar figures but potentially
fatal damage to the nation"s credit- are far too high.

Step 3. Replace the irrational, largely
unachievable goal of jury-rigging the economic cycle, with the
reasoned, readily achievable goal of rebuilding the economy"s
foundation in preparation for an eventual recovery.

Step 4. Switch priorities
from the battles we can"t win to the war we can"t afford to lose:
Emergency assistance for the millions most severely victimized by
a depression. Until it is recognized that our economy is not
unsinkable, it will not be politically possible to provide
financial or infrastructural lifeboats to cover all passengers on
board. However, once it"s fully recognized that financial
hurricanes almost inevitably come with deep depressions, the
appropriate emergency preparations can be made swiftly and with
relatively low cost.

Step 5. Bring into alignment (a)
overarching goals, (b) long-term strategies, and (c) short-term
tactics.

Currently, they are in conflict: We seek
to squelch each crisis and kick it down the road. We then repeat
the process for each succeeding crisis, trying to resolve the
debt crisis with more debts, and the dearth of thrift with still
less. The undersaving, overborrowing, overspending and
overspeculation that got us into trouble in the first place are
fed with more of the same. Meanwhile, fiscal reforms
are talked up in debates but pushed out in time. Regulatory
changes are mapped out in detail, but undermined in
practice.

In contrast, with reasonable, achievable
and right-headed goals, theory and practice naturally come into
synch.

The new overarching goals:

?? To guide and manage the natural
depression cycle in order to reap its benefits, such as the
cleansing of bad debts and a reduction in the cost of
living.

?? To buffer the population from its
most harmful social side effects.

?? To make sacrifices today that build a
firm foundation for an economic recovery in the
future.

Step 6. Restore tried and tested
accounting principles, healthy transparency and honest reporting,
adhering to the following axiomatic definitions.

?? The price is the price. Until now,
Congress, bankers and regulators have debated how to properly
value the assets on the books of banks, seeking various ways to
justify above-market valuations. Not surprisingly, few in the
industry pushed for this approach when bubble-market prices
overstated values. However, once it is established that the
overarching goal is to manage- not block- natural economic
cycles, it will naturally follow that regulators can guide,
rather than hinder, a market-driven cleansing of bad
debts.

?? A loss is a loss. Whether an
institution holds an asset or sells an asset, whether it decides
to sell now or sell later, if the asset is worth less than what
it was purchased for, it"s a loss. Moving it around on the
balance sheet or time-shifting it to a different period does not
change that loss.

?? Capital is capital. It is not
goodwill, or other intangible assets that are unlikely to ever be
sold. It is not tax advantages that may never be reaped. Capital
is strictly the difference between assets and
liabilities.

?? A failure is a failure. If market
prices mean that institutions have big losses, and if the big
losses mean capital has been wiped out, then the institutions
have failed. Precisely how that failure is subsequently resolved
is a separate issue.

With a more sober recognition of, (a)
the market value of toxic assets, (b) the true losses banks have
incurred, (c) the actual depletion of their capital, and (d) the
large number of banks already vulnerable to failure in a
depression; the next steps flow naturally.

Step 7. Abandon the endless, fruitless
and largely counterproductive buyouts and bailouts in favor of
traditional triage for financial institutions, as
follows:

?? proactively shut down the weakest
institutions, no matter how large they may be;

?? provide opportunities for borderline
institutions to rehabilitate themselves under a strict regulatory
regime and a slim diet of low-risk lending;

?? give the surviving well-capitalized,
liquid and prudently-managed institutions better opportunities to
gain market share.

Kansas City Federal Reserve President
Thomas Hoenig"s broad framework, outlined in a speech earlier
this month, proposes a similar approach. Here are his
recommendations, followed by our comments.

?? Declare bankruptcy. "First, public
authorities would be directed to declare any financial
institution insolvent whenever its capital level falls too low to
supports its ongoing operations and the claims against it, or
whenever the market loses confidence in the firm and refuses to
provide funding and capital". We agree.

?? Apply one policy for all. "This
directive should be clearly stated and consistently adhered to
for all financial institutions that are part of the
intermediation process or payments system". We agree.

?? Accept the FDIC"s limitations. "We
must also recognize up front that the FDIC"s resources and other
financial industry support funds may not always be sufficient for
this task and that the Treasury money may also be needed." We
agree, however, unlimited contingent liabilities that threaten
the credit of the U.S. Treasury must be strictly avoided. (See
Step 10 below)

?? Put failed banks under government
receivership. "Next, public authorities should use receivership,
conservatorship, or "bridge bank" powers to take over the failing
institution and continue its operations under new management".
Agreed, this must not, however, be used as an excuse to
nationalize.

?? Dispose of the bad assets. "Following
what we have done with banks, a receiver would then take out all
or a portion of the bad assets and either sell the remaining
operations to one or more sound financial institutions or arrange
for the operations to continue on a bridge basis under new
management and professional oversight". Agreed, however, no
buying institution should be encouraged to make bad business
decisions in order to sweep toxic assets under the
rug.

?? Be mindful of complex operations. "In
the case of larger institutions with complex operations, such
bridge operations would need to continue until a plan can be
carried out for cleaning up and restructuring the firm and then
reprivatizing it". Agreed, but an expected chain reaction of
losses or failures, such as in the AIG rescue, is no excuse for
perpetuating complex operations. The counterparties in any broken
trades must share the losses in accordance with the risks they
assumed.

?? Let shareholders take their lumps.
"Shareholders would be forced to bear the full risk of the
positions they have taken and suffer the resulting losses. The
newly restructured institution would continue the essential
services and operations of the failing firm". Agreed, but such
operations must be restricted to those that are essential for the
infrastructure of financial transactions.

?? Follow the natural hierarchy of
claims. "All existing obligations would be addressed and dealt
with according to whatever priority is set up for handling
claims. This could go so far as providing 100percent guarantees
to all liabilities, or, alternatively, it could include resolving
short-term claims expeditiously and, in the case of uninsured
claims, giving access to
maturing funds with the potential for haircuts depending on
expected recoveries, any collateral protection and likely market
impact". Agreed, however, 100 percent guarantees should be
strictly limited.

Step 8. Seriously consider breaking up
megabanks, following the model of the Ma Bell breakup of January
1, 1984. At that time, AT&T was split into seven independent
Regional Bell Operating Companies as part of an antitrust lawsuit
settlement with the U.S. government, and we believe something
similar would be appropriate today Step 9. Ward off
disintermediation with consumer-friendly education and continuing
information. The FDIC and other banking regulators must recognize
that a shift to safety by consumers in response to true
underlying weaknesses of individual banks is not
irrational.

It is rational; and although rational
behavior may be disruptive, it is not necessarily destructive.
Although it may harm individual banks in the short run, it does
not necessarily harm the banking system in the long
run.

Quite the contrary, when consumers can
discriminate rationally between safe and unsafe institutions, and
when they can shift their funds freely to stronger hands, they
naturally strengthen the banking system. They punish banks that
have made imprudent decisions, while rewarding those that are
more worthy of their trust.

They fulfill a role similar to the
traditional role of banking regulators whose overriding objective
is -or should be- to restrict or shut down individual weak banks
for the sake of fortifying the system as a whole.

To assist consumers in that role, we
recommend the regulators continually release their CAMELS or
similar ratings for each institution for which adequate data is
reported. Contrary to the prevailing official view, although the
release of negative ratings may have a short-term negative impact
on some institutions, the transparency will help build greater
public confidence in the banking system as a whole.

Step 10. Pass new legislation to reverse
the expansion of FDIC insurance coverage, restoring the prior
limits of $ 100,000 for both individual deposits and business
checking accounts.

Step 11. Prepare the public for the
worst: Research and publish worst-case depression scenarios for
the banking system, the housing market, and the economy. Almost
invariably, a clear vision of dark clouds is healthier than
wanton fear of the unknown.

– The Quiet Coup (The Atlantic Online – Economy May
2009)

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the
United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief
economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance
industry has effectively captured our government – a state of
affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at
the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF"s staff
could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells
all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we
break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.
And if we are to prevent a true depression, we"re running out of
time.

(By Simon Johnson)

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the
International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to
see you. Typically, your "clients" come in only after private
capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners
have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after
last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the
European Union have fallen through. You"re never at the top of
anyone"s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in
telling its clients what they don"t want to hear. I should know;
I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my
time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the
effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with
governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and
with the private sector in Asia and Latin
America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over
that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady
flow of officials -from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia,
South Korea, and elsewhere- trudging to the fund when
circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced
hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its
short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998;
the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the
corporate economy; that same year, South Korea"s 30-year economic
miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to
extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these
crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course,
needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big
changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always,
countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means
after a period of excess -exports must be increased, and imports
cut- and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of
recessions. Naturally, the fund"s economists spend time figuring
out the policies -budget, money supply, and the like- that make
sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very
hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund"s senior staff, and the
biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics
of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic
situation for one simple reason -the powerful elites within them
overreached in good times and took too many risks.
Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies
commonly form a tight-knit -and, most of the time, genteel-
oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking
company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a
country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the
ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their
mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly
benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger
and riskier bets. They reckon -correctly, in most cases- that
their political connections will allow them to push onto the
government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in
serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it
borrowed at least $ 490 billion from global banks and investors
on the assumption that the country"s energy sector could support
a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As
Russia"s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies
and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs,
their importance to the political elite increased. Growing
political support meant better access to
lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign
investors could not have been more pleased; all other things
being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the
implicit backing of their national governments, even if that
backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried
away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a
mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the
government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and
to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly,
whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or
later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you
money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep.
Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local
banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday"s
"public-private partnerships" are relabeled "crony capitalism".
With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and
conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to
draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports,
service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will
eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before
that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an
economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the
bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national
champions -now hemorrhaging cash- and usually restructure a
banking system that"s gone badly out of balance. It will, in
other words, need to squeeze at least some of its
oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy
of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary:
at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the
first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential
access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -here"s
a classic Kremlin bailout technique- the assumption of private
debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity
toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile,
needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look
first to ordinary working folk – at least until the riots grow
too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin"s Russia now
realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery
can begin. It"s a game of musical chairs: there just aren"t
enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the
government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt
completely.

So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of
finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The
fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but
first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready,
willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is
not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait.
And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful
suggestions – particularly with regard to wresting control of the
banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and
avaricious "entrepreneurs".

Of course, Putin"s ex-friends will fight back. They"ll
mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts
of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases,
they"ll even try subversion- including calling up their contacts
in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians
did with some success in the late 1990s.

Many IMF programs "go off track" (a euphemism) precisely
because the government can"t stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and
the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A
program "goes back on track" once the government prevails or
powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern -and
thus win or lose-under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in
Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families
would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively
smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto
and economic chaos.

From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its
program will succeed -stabilizing the economy and enabling growth
– only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much
to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem
of all emerging markets.

Becoming a Banana Republic

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and
financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have
recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets):
South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time
and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that
the country or its financial sector wouldn"t be able to pay off
mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case,
that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn"t roll
over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is
precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September
15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector
to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the
weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the
rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and
hardship for millions of people.

But there"s a deeper and more disturbing similarity:
elite business interests -financiers, in the case of the U.S.-
played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger
gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the
inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their
influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are
needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The
government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against
them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to
lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S.
interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better -in a "buck
stops somewhere else" sort of way- on the flow of savings out of
China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or
Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote
broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to
everyone that the regulators responsible for "safety and
soundness" were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies -lightweight regulation,
cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance,
the promotion of homeownership- had something in common. Even
though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some
with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy
changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have
limited the financial sector"s profits -such as Brooksley Born"s
now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998 – were ignored or
swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such
favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has
boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the
Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory
policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry"s
ascent. Paul Volcker"s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the
increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made
bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of
securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps
greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could
make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population
invested more and more money in securities, helped by the
invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these
developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in
financial services.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these
opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never
earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In
1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated
between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been
in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay
rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average
compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent
and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private
industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in
2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and
concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight- a weight not
seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that
period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by
coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity
was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of
banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant
banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the
reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite
recent.

The Wall Street-Washington Corridor

Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the
world"s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also
have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted
through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups,
private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more
typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money:
bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying
and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the
American political system, old-fashioned corruption -envelopes
stuffed with $ 100 bills- is probably a sideshow today, Jack
Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained
political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital – a belief
system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good
for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold
that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The
banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top
contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its
influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example,
the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to.
Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders
already believed that large financial institutions and
free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America"s position
in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of
individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin,
once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as
Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of
Citigroup"s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman
Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under
George W. Bush. John Snow, Paulson"s predecessor, left to become
chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity
firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan
Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant
to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond
markets.

These personal
connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels
of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the
ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something
of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public
service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni
-including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along
with Rubin and Paulson- not only placed people with Wall Street"s
worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image
of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that
was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an
air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the
levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from
Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for
a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway.
Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of
leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and
the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a
meeting in early 2008 -attended by top policy makers from a
handful of rich countries- at which the chair casually
proclaimed, to the room"s general approval, that the best
preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work
first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized
by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the
banks said was true. Alan Greenspan"s pronouncements in favor of
unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was
hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded
him, said in 2006: "The management of market risk and credit risk
has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking
organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the
past two decades in their ability to measure and manage
risks".

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators,
legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers
of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they
didn"t. AIG"s Financial Products division, for instance, made $
2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling
underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities.
Often described as "picking up nickels in front of a
steamroller", this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and
catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding
insurance on more than $ 400 billion in securities. To date, the
U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has
committed about $ 180 billion in investments and loans to cover
losses that AIG"s sophisticated risk modeling had said were
virtually impossible.

Wall Street"s seductive power extended even (or
especially) to finance and economics professors, historically
confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit
of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more
essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took
positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions.
Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were
perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund
Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously
flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar
paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and
the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning
world of high finance.

As more and more of the rich made their money in
finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large.
Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of
the Vanities -all intended as cautionary tales- served only to
increase Wall Street"s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio
last year that when he wrote Liar"s Poker, an
insider"s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had
hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street"s hubris and
excess. Instead, he found himself "knee-deep in letters from
students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other
secrets to share. … They"d read my book as a how-to
manual". Even
Wall Street"s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky,
became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of
making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the
financial sector were the same as the interests of the country
-and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what
was good for America than did the career civil servants in
Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into
conventional wisdom- trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall
Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal
connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade,
a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight,
astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across
borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations
separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of
credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed
to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the
Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory
enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to
measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations
so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial
innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington
seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration:
finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the
economy to greater heights.

America"s Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis

The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it
did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year.
Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by
households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the
financial world. But major commercial and investment banks -and
the hedge funds that ran alongside them- were the big
beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of
this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of
transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual
physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged,
securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and
the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees
as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of
the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate
and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question
what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President
Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally
sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and
credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk
was distributed safely.

In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started
appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small
economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising
delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block.
Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have
been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light
of past emerging-market crises.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of
course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists – at least
in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by,
financial elites have continued to assume that their position as
the economy"s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they
have caused.

Stanley O"Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his
firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its
peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, "The
bottom line is, we -I- got it wrong by being overexposed to
subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in
that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that
result". O"Neal took home a $ 14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007,
he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $ 162
million, although it is presumably worth much less
today.

In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch"s final CEO,
reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $ 30
million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $ 10 million
in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of
protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus
payments, $ 4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably
to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of
America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall
Street paid out $ 18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its
New York City employees, after the government disbursed $ 243
billion in emergency assistance to the financial
sector.

In a financial panic, the government must respond with
both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is
uncertainty – in our case, uncertainty about whether the major
banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half
measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see
attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the
response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow
of credit, sap consumer
confidence, and cripple the economy – ultimately making the
problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics
of the government"s response to the financial crisis have been
delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the
financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as "policy
by deal": when a major financial institution gets into trouble,
the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a
bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything
is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase
in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP
Morgan"s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury
Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of
Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and
the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan
– all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine
large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed
doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional
bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again),
and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses
to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still
isn"t) what combination of interests was being served, and how.
Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly
articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and
claimed it was the best that could be done under the
circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and
simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme
care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or
to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In
September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $ 700 billion to
buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no
judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers
suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and
thereby take the problem off the banks" hands – indeed, that is
the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything.
Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy
politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks,
buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the
banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial
institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten
more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with
subsidies that are too complex for the general public to
understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good
terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further
bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup
bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset
guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market
rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted
government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price
significantly higher than the market price – a subsidy that
probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on
first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the
Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the
conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the
government.

This latest plan -which is likely to provide cheap loans
to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank
assets at relatively high prices- has been heavily influenced by
the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As
Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry
Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in
March, "We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people
in the private sector saying, "We have capital on the sidelines;
we want to go after (distressed bank) assets"". And the plan lets
them do just that: "By marrying government capital -taxpayer
capital- with private-sector capital and providing financing, you
can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a
price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that
makes sense for the banks". Kashkari didn"t mention anything
about what makes sense for the third group involved: the
taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the
government"s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply
troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the
behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on
its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an
unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last
fall, "It doesn"t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one
is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns". But there"s
the rub: the economy can"t recover until the banks are healthy
and willing to lend.

The Way Out

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside
some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major,
interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking
sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that
the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political
balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over
public policy, even as that sector loses popular
support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength
since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the
financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure
could cause -Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of
America- is much greater than it would be during ordinary times.
The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable
deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second
bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it
might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill
Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to
consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar
territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the
country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what
old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break
them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already
taken control of the banking system. It has essentially
guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their
only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal
Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the
economy – the function that the private banking sector is
supposed to be performing, but isn"t. Yet there are limits to
what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are
still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the
incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the
government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over
what they do.

At the root of the banks" problems are the large losses
they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan
portfolios. But they don"t want to recognize the full extent of
their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent.
So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren"t
enough to make them healthy (again, they can"t reveal the size of
the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to
keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive:
unhealthy banks either don"t lend (hoarding money to shore up
reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and
investments that could pay off big, but probably won"t pay off at
all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does,
bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate – creating a
highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks
to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF
understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to
multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct
way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to
negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks
hold all the cards – contorting the terms of each deal to
minimize government ownership while forswearing government
influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these
conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is
impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state
ownership. The IMF"s advice would be, essentially: scale up the
standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC
"intervention" is basically a government-managed bankruptcy
procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out
bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the
balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private
sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the
problem so that it can be solved before it grows
worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and
identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These
banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true
value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over
by the government. The government would write down the toxic
assets of banks taken into receivership -recognizing reality- and
transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which
would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the
taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the
savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks -cleansed
and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders
and investors- could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will
be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF
numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost
close to $ 1.5 trillion (or 10 percent of our GDP) in the long
term. But only decisive government action -exposing the full
extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to
publicly verifiable health- can cure the financial sector as a
whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while
necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces
-the power of the oligarchy- is just as important as the
immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this
front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence
public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their
power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and
re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of
the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and
sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful
managers for another would change only the names of the
oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces,
divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves
impractical -since we"ll want to sell the banks quickly-they
could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up
within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should
also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is
the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a
sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course,
some people will complain about the "efficiency costs" of a more
fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are
the costs when a bank that is too big to fail -a financial weapon
of mass self-destruction- explodes. Anything that is too big to
fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the
eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to
overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than
100 years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed
to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial
sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market
share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of
interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The
Obama administration"s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we
need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt"s
trust-busting.

Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of
populism, might help restore the political balance of power and
deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street"s main
attraction -to the people who work there and to the government
officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory-
has been the astounding amount of money that could be made.
Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial
sector and make it more like any other industry.

Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the
long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated
private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay
would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of
the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve
more transparency and competition, which would bring
financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive
financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say:
fine.

Two Paths

To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century
economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change
them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country,
coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic
about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I"ve
mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most
part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us
to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging
markets.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on
wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble,
they quite literally run out of money – or at least out of
foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must
make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked
into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world"s most
powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the
exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own
currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well
stumble along for years -as Japan did during its lost decade-
never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never
really recovering. A clean break with the past -involving the
takeover and cleanup of major banks- hardly looks like a sure
thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force
it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The
first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual
drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February
with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle
through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia,
struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs,
corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to
say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of
the powerful – letting them take things, legally and illegally,
with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece
of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported
by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do
you know that you aren"t being fleeced?

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds
the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more
about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the
economy just can"t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end
that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we"ll
be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global
economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in
east-central Europe collapses, and -because eastern Europe"s
banks are mostly owned by western European banks- justifiable
fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent.
Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The
Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated,
and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not
much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment
forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both
knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration"s
current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy
"stress scenario"
that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks"
balance sheets becomes a source of great
embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect
of a national and global collapse, minds may become more
concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that
the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression".
This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse
than the Great Depression -because the world is now so much more
interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We
face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening
of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for
government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential
consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking
system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not
then too late.

(A continuación los comentarios de referencia
sobre el artículo anterior)

– El golpe silencioso (El Confidencial –
14/5/09)

(Por José Luis Pérez
Estévez)

"Nos enfrentamos a dos problemas
interrelacionados: uno, un sector bancario enfermo que amenaza
con ahogar la incipiente recuperación que el
estímulo fiscal pueda llegar a generar, y dos, el balance
de poder que da
al sector bancario la capacidad de veto, incluso en un momento en
el que está perdiendo el apoyo popular", escribe en el
último número del "Atlantic Magazine" Simon
Johnson, economista jefe del FMI entre el 2007
y 2008".

"La gran banca ha ganado
fuerza
política
desde que empezó la crisis", continua Johnson en su
artículo, donde dibuja un paralelismo entre las crisis
sufridas por los países emergentes y la actual. Estos
países caen en una situación desesperada "por una
simple razón: su oligarquía llevan al país
como si fueran una gran compañía donde ellos son
los accionistas mayoritarios, reciben ayudas, frenan la
intervención estatal". A esto lo llama "El golpe
silencioso".

Mientras en el periodo 1973 a 1985 el sector financiero
nunca representó más de 16% de los beneficios
corporativos, en esta década ha llegado al 41%, lo que "ha
dado a la banca un peso político enorme" llegando a
creerse que "lo que era bueno para Wall Street era bueno para el
país".

"Al comienzo de las crisis, los oligarcas son
normalmente los primeros en recibir ayuda de sus gobiernos",
señala el economista. La elite, financiera en el caso de
EEUU, ha tenido un papel crucial al crear esta crisis, haciendo
cada vez apuestas más arriesgadas con el respaldo
implícito del gobierno. "Y lo
que es más preocupante, están empleando su
influencia para evitar que se implementen las medidas necesarias
frenar la caída por el precipicio".

Muy crítico con su gobierno, "que ha sido muy
creativo a la hora de crear subsidios para la banca cada vez
más complejos y más difíciles de entender",
Johnson aboga por la nacionalización de la banca para una
vez saneada privatizarla de nuevo a un tamaño que no ponga
de nuevo en peligro al sistema:
"Cualquier cosa que es demasiado grande para quebrar es demasiado
grande para existir". Recuerda Johnson una cita del economista
Schumpeter: "Todo el mundo tiene elites, lo importante es
cambiarlas de vez en cuando".

– Golpe silencioso, sacrificio doloroso (El Confidencial
– 5/6/09)

(Por Fernando Suárez)

Tal día como hoy, hace sesenta y cinco
años, la BBC radiaba el segundo verso de la Chanson
d"Automne de Verlaine, señalizando así el inicio de
operaciones de
la Resistencia
francesa, ante el inminente desembarco aliado en
Normandía. Comenzaba la Gran Cruzada en Europa, doloroso
e imprescindible sacrificio para combatir la tiranía, en
favor de un mundo libre que no aceptaría menos de una
completa victoria.

Oportuna efeméride a fin de introducir El Golpe
Silencioso, un magnífico ensayo de
Simon Johnson, Chief Economist del FMI en 2007 y 2008, hallado
por casualidad mientras trasteaba en la web del MIT, y
cuya reseña luego descubrí recogida en La Columna
(artículo anterior). El autor introduce cómo la
industria
financiera ha capturado eficazmente al gobierno norteamericano,
convirtiéndolo en su rehén, evidenciando una
situación crítica
más propia de economías emergentes. La
extralimitación y asunción de riesgos
excesivos en tiempos de bonanza por parte de las élites
poderosas, quienes despilfarran dinero y
construyen imperios sobre montañas de deudas, invita al
símil de una siniestra dictadura al
alimón, empeñada en inmolar tropas y pertrechos a
toda costa, protegiendo a sus déspotas con tal de quedar
sanos y salvos en el machito.

La pieza discurre por sugerentes caminos, como la
analogía del proceso de
conversión en República Bananera, gracias al
creciente peso de la oligarquía financiera en la economía norteamericana; la escultura y
moldeado del inconsciente colectivo respecto a lo que es bueno
para Wall Street es bueno para el país; el irresistible
poder de seducción y atracción que ejerce el
mundillo financiero en la arena política y santuarios
académicos, con ese incesante trasiego de talentosas
carreras profesionales; y los sucesivos enroques para proteger
los crecientes conflictos de
interés
entre los oligarcas, el gobierno y los contribuyentes.
Razón no le falta, a tenor del affaire BofA-ML. Aunque su
escrito no tiene desperdicio, avanzo hasta la décima y
última página para extraer sus dos futuribles ante
el statu quo:

EEUU es la nación
más poderosa del mundo, de riqueza inconmensurable, y
bendecida con el exorbitante privilegio de pagar su deuda
exterior en su propia moneda, la cual puede imprimir. Como
resultado, podría muy bien seguir dando traspiés a
lo largo de los años, como hiciera Japón
durante su década perdida, sin armarse del coraje
suficiente para hacer lo que debe, nunca llegando realmente a
recuperarse. Una clara ruptura con el pasado, asumiéndose
la toma de control y saneamiento de sus mayores entidades
financieras, difícilmente parece cosa segura en estos
momentos. Y nadie en el FMI puede obligarles a ello.

En mi opinión, USA enfrenta dos posibles
escenarios. El primero de ellos supone complicados acuerdos
banco por
banco, y continuos y repetidos rescates. La
administración se las ingeniará para salir del
paso, reinando la confusión. Nuestro futuro podría
consistir en constantes tumultos que alimenten el saqueo del
sistema
financiero, cada vez se hable más sobre cómo
nuestros oligarcas se convirtieron en bandidos y la
economía no parezca que termine de arrancar.

El segundo escenario empieza de manera más
lóbrega, y podría también acabar así.
Pero al menos proporciona cierta esperanza en que sacudamos
nuestro letargo. Sería de esta forma: la economía
mundial continúa deteriorándose, el sistema
bancario en Europa Central y del Este colapsa y, puesto que estas
entidades son en su mayoría propiedad de
bancos
europeos occidentales, justificados temores de insolvencia
gubernamental se extienden por todo el continente. Los acreedores
siguen recibiendo varapalos adicionales y la confianza cae
aún más. Las economías asiáticas que
exportan bienes
manufacturados son devastadas, y los países productores de
materias primas en América
Latina y África no
les van a la zaga. Un dramático deterioro del entorno
global obliga a la economía norteamericana, ya
tambaleante, a hincarse de rodillas. Las tasas de crecimiento
tomadas como referencia en el presupuesto
corriente por la administración son vistas cada vez
más irrealistas, y el halagüeño escenario de
estrés
utilizado por el Tesoro para evaluar los balances de los bancos,
deviene en causa de enorme bochorno.

Bajo este tipo de presión, y
encarando la posibilidad de un colapso nacional y mundial, puede
que las mentes se concentren un poco más. La
opinión de consenso entre la élite sigue siendo que
el actual hundimiento "no puede ser tan malo como la Gran
Depresión". Esta visión es
errónea. Lo que tenemos ante nosotros, de hecho,
podría ser peor que la Gran Depresión, porque el
mundo está hoy mucho más interconectado y el sector
bancario es ahora tan grande. Enfrentamos un declive sincronizado
en casi todos los países, un debilitamiento de la
confianza entre individuos y empresas, y
enormes problemas en las finanzas
públicas. Si nuestros dirigentes despiertan ante las
consecuencias potenciales, todavía podríamos
asistir a una dramática acción
sobre el sistema bancario y la ruptura de la vieja élite.
Esperemos que entonces no sea demasiado tarde.

Ojalá funcione el despertador y se toque a
degüello. Mientras tanto, la confusión y el caos
interesan mucho a los poderosos, permitiéndoles
apropiarse, legal e ilegalmente, de las cosas, con impunidad.
Cuando la inflación es alta, ¿quién puede
decir cuánto vale realmente una propiedad? Una
cuestión que, con el tiempo,
deviene cada vez más diáfana. Véronique
Riches-Flores, Economista Jefe de SocGen, abordaba la semana
pasada la solución inflacionista como única manera
de aliviar el exceso de endeudamiento de los agentes
económicos: Sustituta del crecimiento insuficiente de los
salarios reales,
la inflación puede eliminar la carga de la deuda
manteniendo condiciones económicas viables. Terriblemente
eficaz, una inflación de sólo el 3% anual
reduciría automáticamente los ratios de deuda en
una cuarta parte en diez años, en el supuesto de que el
crecimiento de la deuda no supere el del PIB real. Con
la inflación al 4%, el montante de deuda se
reduciría en un tercio en un período equivalente.
Más que un mal necesario…

Teniendo en cuenta el impacto demográfico en las
cuentas
públicas, la OCDE estima que, en el caso de la zona euro,
se requeriría un superávit primario medio anual en
torno al 8% del
PIB para devolver el endeudamiento, en 2020, al límite
impuesto por
Maastricht. Y en el caso de España,
toujours différente, hasta 2050 deberíamos obtener
un superávit primario anual del 6'2% del PIB para
estabilizar la deuda en los niveles de 2008, y del 7'2% si se
toman los previstos para 2010, según los datos ofrecidos
en la página 6 de la V.O francesa. A tenor de la evolución conjunta de los últimos
diez años, misión
imposible.

Las democracias occidentales parecen estar abocadas a un
desastre fiscal de proporciones épicas, pues la esencia de
sus políticas
es inflar los valores de
garantía (colaterales) en términos nominales,
devaluando sus monedas. La emisión de deuda
pública para financiar los diversos programas de
estímulo ya ha aumentado hasta máximos
plurianuales. Esta emisión se elevará aún
más, tal y como los estímulos se incrementen y los
ingresos
fiscales vayan reduciéndose. Al mismo tiempo, los
compradores extranjeros han disminuido drásticamente sus
compras de
bonos del
Tesoro USA. Esto sólo deja a los consumidores
norteamericanos o a la Reserva Federal para cubrir la diferencia,
argumentaba John Hathaway, hace apenas un par de semanas.
Quizá, sea pedirle demasiado al consumidor,
ahorrador, contribuyente y desempleado, norteamericano y
europeo.

Entre sol y sombra, queda desplegado el tablero de
operaciones del perverso juego de
confianza, de una aparente estabilidad que nunca puede ser un
destino, sólo un viaje a la inestabilidad. A pesar de los
brotes germinados con fiduciaria ilusión, se otean huecos
por cubrir y hostil resistencia desde posición elevada.
Sin embargo, ni trincheras ni parapetos impiden que hieran mi
corazón
con monótona languidez…

Autor:

Ricardo Lomoro