Curiosidades de la democracia

1.Mientras en Estados Unidos la crisis económica parece haber contribuido al triunfo de la centro-izquierda, en Europa parece estar contribuyendo a la derecha, incluso la extrema.

2. Dice la revista Semana: "Tanto Lucho Garzón como Gustavo Petro y Carlos Gaviria gozan de mayor popularidad en los estratos 5 y 6, que entre el resto de la población. En cambio, el que sí gusta en los estratos 1 y 2 es el ex ministro de Defensa Juan Manuel Santos, donde alcanza el 64 por ciento de imagen favorable. "

Testimonios sobre la causa de la crisis

"After Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan reduced interest rates at the start of the decade, banks borrowedAfter Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan reduced interest rates at the start of the decade, banks borrowed inexpensively to buy long-term assets including subprime mortgage securities, said Michael Aronstein, Oscar Gruss & Son Inc.’s chief investment strategist.
“When liquidity became free, five or seven years ago, that changed the Street: You could trade $500 million of anything in a second,” said Shawn Matthews, chief executive officer of Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. in New York, a unit of Cantor Fitzgerald LP. "

Fuente: Bloomberg

El problema con los economistas

Ya salió un paper explicando porque la mayoría de los economistas no previeron la crisis.

La hipotesis no es nueva:"The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real-world markets. The economics profession has failed in communicating the limitations, weaknesses, and even dangers of its preferred models to the public. This state of affairs makes clear the need for a major reorientation of focus in the research economists undertake, as well as for the establishment of an ethical code that would ask economists to understand and communicate the limitations and potential misuses of their models.......We believe that economics has been trapped in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which much of its research efforts are not directed towards the most prevalent needs of society. Paradoxically self-reinforcing feedback effects within the profession may have led to the dominance of a paradigm that has no solid methodological basis and whose empirical performance is, to say the least, modest. Defining away the most prevalent economic problems of modern economies and failing to communicate the limitations and assumptions of its popular models, the economics profession bears some responsibility for the current crisis. It has failed in its duty to society to provide as much insight as possible into the workings of the economy and in providing warnings about the tools it created. It has also been reluctant to emphasize the limitations of its analysis. We believe that the failure to even envisage the current problems of the worldwide financial system and the inability of standard macro and finance models to provide any insight into ongoing events make a strong case for a major reorientation in these areas and a reconsideration of their basic premises."

Justin Wolfers comenta sobre el paper en el blog de Freakonomics:"The claim is that academic macroeconomists have become mired in a particularly fruitless equilibrium, in which each is engaged in the search for ever-greater levels of formal elegance, at the expense of empirical relevance. There’s definitely something to this.Today’s macroeconomists write for other macroeconomists. If you aren’t using the right tools, you aren’t part of the club."

En otras palabras se convirtió en jueguito de status para ver quien sabe es mas formal, mas elegante matemáticamente. Hay que tener en cuenta que ese jueguito puede tener graves consecuencias para la sociedad (un magister en economía ( y MBA y Phd en estadística) fue el creador de la "formula que mató a Wall Street")

El problema tambien parece que tiene que ver con el "sesgo de publicación":

"The more I look at empirical results, the closer appear the flaws of a data-centric worldview. Data never speak for themselves, and the process of their interpretation is every bit as political as other forms of analysis. But when you analyze data, you focus on the minutae of your dataset, so you're further divorced for the subject matter. You can make all sorts of crazy claims that would never slide if you were forced to present your views in a clear manner in front of a lay-audience remotely familiar with the subject matter.

The problem is that empirical claims are generally accepted or rejected on the basis of statistical tests meeting a certain treshold. But creating such a treshold gives researchers a pole to vault; when they manage to do so, they publish, when they don't, they do not publish. Instead of statistical tests revealing anything about the state of the world, they only reveal what researchers could torture the data into saying.

Brad DeLong makes the case that virtually all economic hypotheses are wrong, and the results from other meta-analyses are also worrying."


El economista James Galbraith (hijo de John Kenneth) es aún mas duro en su crítica:

"So what is modern economics about? It seems to be, mainly, about itself: The AEA meets to celebrate the importance of its members, their presence in high public positions, their influence in foreign lands, and the winning of the Nobel Prize. Female and black members have won the right to organize sessions about gender and race--thus domesticating some of those who might otherwise complain. Radicals and Keynesians, on the other hand, appeared only on panels organized separately, by an alphabet soup of splinter associations. What was therefore most conspicuously missing from this meeting of America's premier social science organization, was any actual discussion of economic ideas.....Leading active members of today's economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule--as one might expect from a gentleman's club--this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. They offer a "rape is like the weather" fatalism about an "inevitable" problem (pay inequality) that then starts to recede. They oppose the most basic, decent, and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs."

Sin embargo, me parece que la mejor crítica viene de Nassim Taleb:

"We are good at fitting explanations to the past, all the while living in the illusion of understanding the dynamics of history.

My claim is about the severe overestimation of knowledge in what I call the " ex post" historical disciplines, meaning almost all of social science (economics, sociology, political science) and the humanities, everything that depends on the non-experimental analysis of past data. I am convinced that these disciplines do not provide much understanding of the world or even their own subject matter; they mostly fit a nice sounding narrative that caters to our desire (even need) to have a story. The implications are quite against conventional wisdom. You do not gain much by reading the newspapers, history books, analyses and economic reports; all you get is misplaced confidence about what you know. The difference between a cab driver and a history professor is only cosmetic as the latter can express himself in a better way.

There is convincing but only partial empirical evidence of this effect. The evidence can only be seen in the disciplines that offer both quantitative data and quantitative predictions by the experts, such as economics. Economics and finance are an empiricist's dream as we have a goldmine of data for such testing. In addition there are plenty of "experts", many of whom make more than a million a year, who provide forecasts and publish them for the benefits of their clients. Just check their forecasts against what happens after. Their projections fare hardly better than random, meaning that their "stories" are convincing, beautiful to listen to, but do not seem to help you more than listening to, say, a Chicago cab driver. This extends to inflation, growth, interest rates, balance of payment, etc. (While someone may argue that their forecasts might impact these variables, the mechanism of "self-canceling prophecy" can be taken into account). Now consider that we depend on these people for governmental economic policy!......

If you look closely at the data to check the reasons of this inability to see things coming, you will find that these people tend to guess the regular events (though quite poorly); but they miss on the large deviations, these " unusual" events that carry large impacts. These outliers have a disproportionately large contribution to the total effect.
Now I am convinced, yet cannot prove it quantitatively, that such overestimation can be generalized to anything where people give you a narrative-style story from past information, without experimentation. The difference is that the economists got caught because we have data (and techniques to check the quality of their knowledge) and historians, news analysts, biographers, and "pundits" can hide a little longer."

Links variados

1. Las triquinuelas de Obama I

2. Las contradicciones del Estado Colombiano (por un lado pico y placa y mayores impuestos de rodamiento, por otro lado subsidios para prestamos de compra de vehiculos)

3. Una nueva palabra en el diccionario: Obamatons

4. Un cambio estructural detras de la perdida masiva de empleos en Estados Unidos?

5. Mutualismo.org, blog libertario anti-capitalista

Links variados

1. Tio Sam necesita que el dragón le siga prestando

2. La receta del desastre: la formula que mató a Wall Street

3. Keynes no era Keynesiano

4. El origen del termino capitalismo

Recordatorio del dia

"Banks, at least the behemoths, were public-private partnerships before the crisis. Deposit insurance, access to the Fed's lending, and the implicit (now explicit) government guarantee for banks "too big to fail" all constituted a system of financial corporatism. It must be ended not extended."

GERALD P. O'DRISCOLL JR en el Wall Street Journal

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.

"Por que lloran los niños?"

"Bienaventurados los niños porque ellos heredaran la deuda nacional":

La mejor defensa de mercado...

que he leído hoy:

"A lot of global growth during the boom came in countries where the government owned or influenced the domestic banking sector and thus influenced the domestic allocation of credit. And policies that kept exchange rates lower than they otherwise would also indirectly encouraged private investment in those countries export sectors as well as discouraging investment in the export sectors of other countries. Governments were playing a significant role in the allocation of capital even before there was any talk of nationalizing the financial sector of key G-7 countries. Those who attribute the growth of the past several years solely to the market miss the large role the state played in many of the world’s fast growing economies. Conversely, those who attribute all the excesses of the past few years to the market miss the role that governments played in financing many of those excesses"

Bueno en realidad es una verdad que los propagandistas del estatismo no quieren reconocer: la crisis actual no se ha originado en un mercado libre sino en un mercado intervenido por el Estado o donde este ha actuado asignado recursos y tomando decisiones económicas.

Los siete pecados capitales de la crisis

Fuente: Steve Breen

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.

Graficas del dia

Declinacion de la produccion de petroleo en la era Chavez:Declinacion de la produccion de petroleo en la era Chavez:

Grafica del origen de la estructura de deuda que condujo a la crisis:

Europa y la crisis

Los europeos han quedo culpa al supuesto "capitalismo salvaje" de los gringos y su supuesta "falta de regulacion" por el origen de la crisis.

Sin embargo, se sabe ya que los bancos alemanes estan sobreexpuestos a deudas de paises como Islandia o España, fuertemente golpeados por la crisis.

Y se ha sabido que los bancos europeos tambien estaban fuertemente endeudados y eran unos de los grandes clientes de AIG.

Los derivados y la crisis

Mucho se ha escrito en las ultimas semanas sobre el uso y abuso de los "derivados" como una de las causas de esta crisis. Y naturalmente varios analistas y expertos han salido a pedir que sean fuertemente regulados.

Sin duda, los derivados de credito, una forma de seguros, conocidos como "Credit Default Swap" o CDS (por sus siglas en ingles), han sido uno de los principales elementos de esta crisis. Para un excelente resumen del tema, ver esta pagina.

Sin embargo, como lo explica este articulo, la mayoria de estos derivados de credito, excepto los relacionados con las hipotecas han funcionado bien y su rol como "gestionadores de riesgo" no deberia ignorarse:

"The amount of blame laid at the feet of the derivatives market never ceases to amaze me. True, the sheer size of the derivatives market, and the fact that it grew faster than regulators could handle, raise legitimate concerns. But financial products are not solely to blame for the current situation (severe financial crises occur without them). Further, the markets for most financial derivatives (excepting mortgage-backed CDOs) are not in serious peril. Felix Salmon wrote an eloquent defence of how the Credit Default Swap (CDS) market has functioned and continues to function quite well.
Products like CDS provide invaluable transparency for the debt market. The problem, as both Mr Salmon and Mr Merton point out, is that these derivatives hedge risk. This makes investors feel safer, and just as people wearing seat belts drive faster and those with four-wheel drive become more likely to drive in the snow, a financial safety net encourages some investors to take on more risk than might otherwise be their preference.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. It encouraged people to invest in developing countries, which gave those countries the capital necessary to build infrastructure and expand markets. Which brought many people out of poverty. But it also meant some foolish and foolishly large investments were made. Blaming the financial derivatives for the crisis is like blaming the seat belt or four-wheel drive for the accident. Should we limit automotive safety innovations, because they encourage risky driving?"

El problema de los derivados en esta crisis esta basicamente circunscrito a los relacionados con hipotecas. No deberia olvidarse que esta crisis se origina por una caida de precios en el sector inmobiliario.

No es esta una crisis de derivados. Es una crisis del sector inmobiliario, altamante dependiente de las tasas de interes, que se extendio al sector financiero y luego al sector real.

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.

Cual fue el impacto de la desregulacion en la crisis?

"As for the evils of deregulation, exactly which measures are they referring to? Financial deregulation for the past three decades consisted of the removal of deposit interest-rate ceilings, the relaxation of branching powers, and allowing commercial banks to enter underwriting and insurance and other financial activities. Wasn't the ability for commercial and investment banks to merge (the result of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act) a major stabilizer to the financial system this past year? Indeed, it allowed Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch to be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, and allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to convert to bank holding companies to help shore up their positions during the mid-September bear runs on their stocks.
Even more to the point, subprime lending, securitization and dealing in swaps were all activities that banks and other financial institutions have had the ability to engage in all along. There is no connection between any of these and deregulation. On the contrary, it was the ever-growing Basel Committee rules for measuring bank risk and allocating capital to absorb that risk (just try reading the Basel standards if you don't believe me) that failed miserably. The Basel rules outsourced the measurement of risk to ratings agencies or to the modelers within the banks themselves. Incentives were not properly aligned, as those that measured risk profited from underestimating it and earned large fees for doing so.
That ineffectual, Rube Goldberg apparatus was, of course, the direct result of the politicization of prudential regulation by the Basel Committee, which was itself the direct consequence of pursuing "international coordination" among countries, which produced rules that work politically but not economically. International cooperation, in case you haven't heard, is exactly what the French and the Germans now say was missing in the past few years."

CHARLES W. CALOMIRIS en el Wall Street Journal

Para una explicación mas detallada del rol de las regulaciones de Basilea II en la crisis, leer aquí.

El costo de los rescates....

La deuda de los Estados Unidos llega a 10.2 trillones (el PIB del pais es aprox. 14 trillones).

Escadaloso.

Greenspan pudo evitar la crisis...

Pero no lo hizo.

Y que tal este dato? Seguro no aparecerá en alguna propaganda de Obama.

No es tan simple

Excelente columna sobre la busqueda de culpables en la crisis financiera en USA.

No es tan simple como quieren hacer creer los medios, algunos analistas politizados y la demagogía de las campañas de Mccain y Obama.

Mientras tanto, el líder de los democratas en el senado manifiesta que no saben que hacer.

Ya se reconoce

Portafolio pública un resumen de agencias noticias: "El origen de los problemas actuales del sistema financiero están en la expansiva política monetaria de Alan Greenspan, que puso a disposición mucho dinero y ello creó la burbuja inmobiliaria que ha explotado, según Kerssenbrock."

Si esto viene de las noticias que públican esas agencias, quiere decir que ya se acepta en el público en general, que el causante de la crisis es la mala política monetaria de Alan Greenspan.

Pero entonce por qué tantos analistas y políticos insisten en que el problema fue la falta de regulación?