Que es lo que esta haciendo Obama y la Fed?

Jeffrey Sachs lo explica de manera fácil:

"President Barack Obama’s economic team is now calling for an unprecedented stimulus of large budget deficits and zero interest rates to counteract the recession. These policies may work in the short term but they threaten to produce still greater crises within a few years. Our recovery will be faster if short-term policies are put within a medium-term framework in which the budget credibly comes back to balance and interest rates come back to moderate sustainable levels. "

Pero en realidad solo se esta aplicando "continuismo de políticas" como lo explica el mismo Sachs:

"Looking back to the late 1990s, there is little doubt that unduly large swings in macroeconomic policies have been a major contributor to our current crisis. The lessons of the high inflation of the 1970s had supposedly chastened policy makers against trying to fine-tune the economy. The quest for never-ending full employment had contributed to high inflation in that decade, which required years of economic pain to wring out of the system. Monetary policies thereafter were supposed to be “steady as she goes,” not trying to smooth out every fluctuation and business cycle in the economy.

During the decade from 1995 to 2005, then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan over-reacted to several shocks to the economy. When financial turbulence hit in 1997 and 1998—the Asian crisis, the Russian ruble collapse and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management—the Fed increased liquidity and accidentally helped to set off the dot-com bubble. The Fed eased further in 1999 in anticipation of the Y2K computer threat, which of course proved to be a false alarm. When the Fed subsequently tightened credit in 2000 and the dot-com bubble burst, the Fed quickly turned around and lowered interest rates again. The liquidity expansion was greatly amplified following 9/11, when the Fed put interest rates down to 1 percent and thereby helped to set off the housing bubble, which has now collapsed.

We need to avoid reckless short-term swings in policy. Massive deficits and zero interest rates might temporarily perk up spending but at the risk of a collapsing currency, loss of confidence in the government and growing anxieties about the government’s ability to pay its debts. That outcome could frustrate rather than speed the recovery of private consumption and investment. Deficit spending in a recession makes sense, but the deficits should remain limited (less than 5 percent of GNP) and our interest rates should be kept far enough above zero to avoid wild future swings...................

Most important, we should stop panicking. One of the reasons we got into this mess was the Fed’s exaggerated fear in 2002 and 2003 that the U.S. was following Japan into a decade of stagnation caused by deflation (falling prices). To avoid a deflation the Fed created a bubble. Now the bubble has burst, and we’ve ended up with the deflation we feared! Panics end badly, even panics of policy; more moderate policies will be safer in the medium term. "

Una nueva crisis o la prolongación de la actual se esta gestando con las medidas que se han venido tomando en ya casi dos años.

Links variados sobre la burbuja y la crisis

1. Monetary Policy and Mussaism: We Economists Were Wrong

2. Bubble of Bubbles Due to Asset Inflation:Morgan Stanley Says Bubbles Will Likely Burst Soon

3.Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened

4. Debt and Delusion

5. The Great Inflation

6. The Central (Banking) Importance of Asset Inflation

Los reyes filosofos de la FED

Brad Delong comenta la causa de la crisis:

"The current financial crisis has its roots in Greenspan's decision to keep interest rates very low in 2002 and 2003 to head off the danger of a deflation-induced double-dip recession, and his subsequent decision that the costs of cleaning up after a housing bubble were likely to be less than the costs of the high unemployment that would be generated by a preemptive attempt to pop a housing-speculation bubble. Two years ago, I would have said that Greenspan's judgment here was correct. Six months ago, I would have said that his judgment was probably correct. Today -- in the middle of the largest nationalizations in history -- I can no longer state that Greenspan made the right calls with respect to the level of interest rates and the housing bubble in the 2000s."


El articulo tambien resume la historia de la banca central y la economía política de la FED vs congreso vs ejecutivo en Estados Unidos.Lo extraño es que no veo llamados a cuestionar los poderes de la banca central. Solo piden mas regulación para los bancos, mientras reconocen que la causa estuvo en las acciones de la FED!

Que la banca central debe tener mucho poder se ha convertido en un tabú incuestionable. Y esta crisis parece que no va a cambiar eso.

Esta es la introducción al articulo:

"Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to a central economic planner the United States has ever had. He bestrides our narrow economic world like a colossus. Unelected (he was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate) and unaccountable (unless the Congress decides that it wishes to amend the Federal Reserve Act and take the blame for whatever else goes wrong with the economy), he is responsible only to his conscience -- and his open-market committee of himself, the other six governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks. The fate of the economy in the next administration depends far less on the president than on this moral-philosopher-prince to whose judgment we have entrusted a remarkable share of control over our destiny.

How did an ivory-tower academic whose specialty is the details of the Great Depression get to this position? What does he do all day? How did so much power come to rest in a single institution, a single individual? The current system is the product of a century and a half of evolution in the role of a central bank, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a series of accidents and crises. For a generation, the idea of social democracy -- with government ownership, control, and regulation of at least the "commanding heights" of the economy -- has been in retreat. But in the middle of this market economy is an immense island of central planning: the Federal Reserve.

In normal times, the Fed -- not the market -- decides what the short-term interest rate is. The interest rate is perhaps the key price in the economy. It is the price at which we trade wealth in the present for wealth in the future. When the interest rate is low, our focus is on the future: Businesses and consumers borrow and invest. When the interest rate is high, our focus is on the present because distant-future promises of cash are not worth very much in today's dollars. You might think that if there were ever a decision we would leave to the market and the aggregated preferences of millions of individuals, it would be the terms on which we trade present comfort off for future wealth. But we don't. We leave that decision to the discretion of the philosopher-prince Bernanke and his committee. And in extraordinary moments like the September Wall Street crisis, when the flow of funds through financial markets dries up, we leave the decisions of which banks to nationalize, which to close down, which to forcibly merge, and which to rescue and on what terms to our financial overlords in the Eccles Building on the National Mall."

Vale la pena mencionar que Delong es democrata, trabajo en la administración Clinton y se considera de centro o centro-izquierda. Su articulo no corresponde a la típica visión libertaria, pero estada carga del realismo político que le falta, diría yo, a la mayoría de economistas.

Termina con este parrafo:"Cicero said that the problem with his political ally Cato was that he thought they lived in the Republic of Plato while they really lived in the Sewer of Romulus. It is either our curse or our blessing that we live in the Republic of the Central Banker."

Creo que los modelos de algunos economistas seguro tambien funcionarían bien en la republica de Platón, el sistema de los filosofos reyes que planifican la sociedad.

Sobre el origen de la crisis

Explica el NY Times: "The roots of the credit crisis stretch back to another notable boom-and-bust: the tech bubble of the late 1990’s. When the stock market began a steep decline in 2000 and the nation slipped into recession the next year, the Federal Reserve sharply lowered interest rates to limit the economic damage.
Lower interest rates make mortgage payments cheaper, and demand for homes began to rise, sending prices up. In addition, millions of homeowners took advantage of the rate drop to refinance their existing mortgages. As the industry ramped up, the quality of the mortgages went down.
And turn sour they did, when home buyers had to leverage themselves to the hilt to make a purchase. Default and delinquency rates began to rise in 2006"

A pesar de entender los problemas de politica monetaria relacionados con la crisis, ni el NY Times ni ningun medio masivo pide cambios institucionales en la FED.

Como funcionan los bancos

y porque dependen de la existencia de un banco central en una relacion simbiotica o de dependencia total?

La explicacion esta en este articulo.

En estos tiempos de crisis financiera nada mejor que entender la raices del "problema bancario" y porque la existencia de un banco central se ha vuelto un tema de prohibida discusion.

Sobre la banca central

"El problema aquí no es que el tipo a cargo no sea lo suficientemente inteligente. El problema es que hay un tipo a cargo.Hemos puesto un planificador centrol en el corazón palpitante de nuestro sistema de mercado, pero hemos sabido por decadas que los planificadores centrales rara vez tienen la información que necesitan, o el incentivo para usarlo correctamente"

Will Wilkinson

Sobre Becker, la toma de decisiones y la crisis de hipotecas

Alejandro Gaviria comentó(ver aquí y aquí) sobre la columna de Becker acerca de la responsabilidad individual:

"Algo hay de cierto en las opiniones de Becker y Posner pero, en épocas de crisis, los economistas pragmáticos (como Bernanke) son más confiables que los ideólogos (como Becker). Esta crisis, en últimas, parece contradecir muchos de los postulados que Becker ha defendido toda su vida"

"Lo que me parece curioso de Becker et al. es que han defendido de manera casi religiosa la idea de los mercados perfectos, avivaron las llamas con su oposición obtusa a cualquier tipo de regulación y ahora vienen a hablar de responsabilidad individual."

1.Creo que el punto de Becker no es que las personas tenían información perfecta y tomaron la decisión de forma racional. Al contrario, cuando Becker dice: "An obvious alternative explanation for their behavior is that they gambled that the good times would continue indefinitely.", al usar el verbo "gamble"(apostar) subraya claramente un comportamiento irracional y desinformado.

Me parece que la apreciación de Alejandro sobre lo que Becker dijo en este articulo particular esta un poco parcializada por su conocimiento de escritos anteriores del nobel de economía.

No creo que se pueda inferir, de este texto particular de Becker, que el este recalcando algunos de los peores supuestos de la teoría neoclásica, como son la información perfecta y la toma de decisiones racional de los agentes económicos.

Lo que Becker quiere subrayar es que si queremos que los agentes económicos tomen mejores decisiones (y eso incluye que ellos realizen un mayor esfuerzo para informarse mejor) no debemos quitarles los incentivos para hacerlo mediante intervenciones estatales que los individuos terminan incluyendo en sus expectativas (tanto los banqueros como los prestamistas si saben que el Estado al final los va a rescatar, tenderán a comportarse de forma irresponsable. Es el famoso "riesgo moral" que todos los economistas conocen).

Además, Becker enfatiza que el evitar el riesgo moral tambien contribuirá a que los agentes aprendan a tomar mejores decisiones: "An important foundation of the philosophy behind the arguments for private enterprise, free economies, and free societies more generally, is that these societies rely on and require individual decision-making and responsibility. This philosophy not only emphasizes the moral hazard reasons to require individual responsibility, but also "the use it or lose it principle", a colloquial expression indicating that various mental and physical capacities wear down and erode if they are not used on a regular basis. This principle implies that people who are accustomed to having other persons or governments make their decisions for them lose the ability to make good decisions for themselves. Free societies lead to better decision-making partly because men and women accumulate more experience at making decisions that affect their well-being and that of others."

Este argumento(que tiene un sabor kantiano como señale en este post) me parece a mi, muy convincente, a partir de mi propia experiencia con los procesos de aprendizaje propios y de amigos.

2. Alejandro se une al coro stiglitziano que pide mas regulaciones bancarias y referencia un articulo de The New Yorker que menciona a Minsky, un economista ya fallecido, entusiasta de las regulaciones al sector financiero. Y utiliza la frase "banqueros irresponsables".

Lo curioso que ese mismo articulo de New Yorker dice lo siguiente:
"If anybody is at fault it is Greenspan, who kept interest rates too low for too long and ignored warnings, some from his own colleagues, about what was happening in the mortgage market."

Me pregunto si el abjetivo irresponsable incluye al banquero mayor, Mr. Greenspan. Porque no he leído que ninguno de los ideologos del intevencionismo, incluyendo el autor del articulo de New Yorker (a pesar que le da la principal culpa a la reserva federal) pida mayores regulaciones PARA LA FED. Supongo que en los tiempos que vivimos, pedir limitaciones a agencias/instituciones estatales es tabú, porque de eso no hablan.

Milton Friedman si propuso alguna vez, regulaciones para limitar o prevenir las malas decisiones de los bancos centrales.Pero el era "ideologo neoliberal", al que nadie quisiera escuchar en estos momentos.

Otro punto, si de regulaciones se trata, tambien quisiera que los amantes de intervencionismo reconocieran que algunas regulaciones a los bancos pudieron en realidad, contribuir a la misma crisis. La "Community Reinvestment Act of 1977", de la epoca de Carter obliga a los bancos a realizar hipotecas en favor de las minorias asi estas no buenos sujetos de crédito. Así lo explica este columnista del Boston Globe:

"The subprime mortgage collapse is another tale of unintended consequences.

The crisis has its roots in the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Carter-era law that purported to prevent "redlining" - denying mortgages to black borrowers - by pressuring banks to make home loans in "low- and moderate-income neighborhoods." Under the act, banks were to be graded on their attentiveness to the "credit needs" of "predominantly minority neighborhoods." The higher a bank's rating, the more likely that regulators would say yes when the bank sought to open a new branch or undertake a merger or acquisition.

But to earn high ratings, banks were forced to make increasingly risky loans to borrowers who wouldn't qualify for a mortgage under normal standards of creditworthiness. The Community Reinvestment Act, made even more stringent during the Clinton administration, trapped lenders in a Catch-22.

"If they comply," wrote Loyola College economist Thomas DiLorenzo, "they know they will have to suffer from more loan defaults. If they don't comply, they face financial penalties . . . which can cost a large corporation like Bank of America billions of dollars."

Banks nationwide thus ended up making more and more subprime loans and agreeing to dangerously lax underwriting standards - no down payment, no verification of income, interest-only payment plans, weak credit history. If they tried to compensate for the higher risks they were taking by charging higher interest rates, they were accused of unfairly steering borrowers into "predatory" loans they couldn't afford.

Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government's making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. Mortgage lenders have been bankrupted, thousands of subprime homeowners have been foreclosed on, and countless would-be borrowers can no longer get credit. The financial fallout has hurt investors around the world. And all of it thanks to the government, which was sure it understood the credit industry better than the free market did, and confidently created the conditions that made disaster unavoidable."

Con esta información(lo de Greenspan y la ley que acabo de mencionar), yo me pregunto, si es tan cierto que el problema fue por falta de regulación?

Porque salen tantos casi de forma automática siempre a satanizar el mercado y a pedir mas regulaciones?

Por supuesto que los banqueros, los deudores, los compradores de titulos hipotecarios y muchos mas actuarón de forma irresponsable, pero quisiera un análisis mas realista de lo que realmente sucedió y de cual es la mejor solución. Un anális que reconozca los errores y problemas de los bancos centrales y de regulaciones que ponen la corrección política por encima de las consideraciones de riesgo de los créditos.

Ok, regulen a los bancos. Pero limiten tambien a los bancos centrales y a los políticos que crean malas leyes sobre prestamos hipotecarios. Si no, esto es solo un debate motivado por ideologías estatistas e intervencionistas, nubladas por la permanente satanización del mercado y la indulgencia y apología a políticos y burocratas cuya irresponsabilidad rara vez cuestionan.

Los bancos centrales y las crisis

A proposito de la subida de tasas de interes del Banco de la República, vale la pena mencionar que los bancos centrales son un de los mayores problemas de la economía moderna.

Según varios autores, la FED causó o por lo menos empeoró(reconocido por el mismo Bernanke) de la gran depresión de los años 30. Y tambien es la causante de la crisis actual.Y el Banco de la Republica, segun varios analistas(como el difunto Hernan Echavarría) fue uno de los principales causantes de la crisis de finales de la decada pasada en Colombia.El otro fue la constitución socialista del año 91, que de un plumazo duplico los gastos del gobierno central y disparó el deficit (ver al mismo Kalmanovitz, "las instituciones y el desarrollo económico en Colombia).Segun los datos del estudio de Junguito y Rincon, la carga tributaria del gobierno central solo supero el 10% del PIB en los años 90.

La explicación de Echavarría (ver link arriba):
"—¿Cree en el repunte de la economía? —La economía no ha repuntado porque no se tomaron las medidas adecuadas. Controlando el cambio creyeron que tenían controlado el país. Pero bajar la inflación y mantener el costo de vida fueron remedios demasiado dolorosos, pues mucha gente se quebró. Las autoridades monetarias dicen que la actual crisis se debe a la crisis asiática de 1997, pero ese es un cuento chino. La desesperada situación en que estamos proviene de una mala política monetaria. Fue el alza desmedida del circulante durante los años 1992-1994 lo que produjo el déficit de la balanza de pagos entre 1995-1998. La contracción monetaria que se observa a partir de 1998 tuvo que hacerla el Banco de la República para controlar el deficit. Y esa contracción causó la depresión que sufre actualmente la economía. Como dice el porro, "Si le hizo daño pa’ qué comió". —¿Y quién tiene la culpa? —Fue un error del Banco de la República haber permitido la expansión de los años 1992 a 1994. En esa época el precio de la propiedad raíz subió más de diez veces. Una hectárea en la Sabana que costaba tres millones de pesos llegó a valer $30 millones o $40 millones. Se creó un auge económico y la gente se sintió rica. En Bogotá tumbaban casas buenas para hacer edificios. Y como a la vez hubo auge petrolero, llegaron compañías extranjeras de todo orden, pues creían que esto era un emporio; y creció la demanda de productos de importación. Pero la falta de entradas descompensó la balanza. Debido a la expansión de 1992-1994, el Banco de la República tuvo que hacer la contracción que tiene postrada la economía."