15.12.09

En defensa del Consumidor

De acuerdo con Gabriel Zaid:
"Hacen falta leyes y organismos que faciliten las acciones colectivas de los consumidores. Los poderes económicos tradicionales (el Estado, las centrales obreras, los organismos patronales) han ignorado históricamente a los consumidores, aunque se trata de la misma población desde otra perspectiva del crecimiento económico. Es ilusorio ganar más produciendo más "satisfactores" cuando no son satisfactorios."

A Gold Bubble?

Nouriel Roubini commented:

"Gold prices rise sharply only in two situations: when inflation is high and rising, gold becomes a hedge against inflation; and when there is a risk of a near depression and investors fear for the security of their bank deposits, gold becomes a safe haven."

"The last two years fit this pattern. Gold prices started to rise sharply in the first half of 2008, when emerging markets were overheating, commodity prices were rising, and there was concern about rising inflation in high-growth emerging markets. Even that rise was partly a bubble, which collapsed in the second half of 2008, when – after oil reached $145, killing global growth –the world economy fell into recession. As concerns about deflation replaced fear of inflation, gold prices started to fall with the correction in commodity prices."

"[...]Eventually, central banks will need to exit quantitative easing and zero-interest rates, putting downward pressure on risky assets, including commodities. Or the global recovery may turn out to be fragile and anemic, leading to a rise in bearish sentiment on commodities – and in bullishness about the US dollar."

"Another downside risk is that the dollar-funded carry trade may unravel, crashing the global asset bubble that it, together with the wave of monetary liquidity, has caused. And, since the carry trade and the wave of liquidity are causing a global asset bubble, some of gold’s recent rise is also bubble-driven, with herding behavior and “momentum trading” by investors pushing gold higher and higher. But all bubbles eventually burst. The bigger the bubble, the greater the collapse."

14.12.09

"Too big to manage" & "too big to fail"

Accordingly with Howard Davies

"[...] The overriding conclusion that emerges from any analysis of these unhappy events is that nothing will ever be the same again: the relationship between the state and the markets needs to be rethought. A new “social contract” between finance and the people, through their governments, is required."

"That is easy to say, but governments, individually and collectively, are still struggling to redefine the terms of that contract. Progress has been painfully slow, partly because officials have been fire-fighting, and partly because urgent domestic political imperatives compete with the desire to establish new, globally applicable mechanisms that would provide a stable underpinning for the international financial system and prevent regulatory arbitrage and the de-globalization of finance."

Samuelson dies at 94

10.12.09

El Desencanto

El lunes por la tarde me encontré con la última publicación de José Woldenberg "El Desencanto" (bajo el sello de Cal y Arena) inicié una breve lectura y decidí adquirir el libro al día siguiente (liquidity constraint); sin embrago se agoto. Trataré de rastrearlo en la Porrúa o en última instancia me lanzo a Gadhi.

Mientras comparto parte de la reseña que realizó Rafael Pérez Gay en la presentación del libro:

"Hace algunos meses, José Woldenberg me entregó el original de su nuevo libro. No lo leí en tres patadas, me tomé una o dos semanas, pero desde las primeras páginas supe que estaba leyendo un libro duro, triste. Es una novela, una crónica, una historia política, una memoria personal, un homenaje a la amistad. Ante todo, este libro revisa la historia moderna de la izquierda mexicana y se dedica a la construcción de un personaje, Manuel Martínez, un hombre comprometido con sus sueños, o mejor, un sueño: la invención de un nuevo sistema político, la búsqueda de un país menos desigual, la creación de una izquierda como opción de gobierno para el porvenir. Al final de su vida segada por el azar y en la plenitud de la madurez, Martínez emprende la última aventura, la exploración de las obras de siete escritores arrastrados por el sueño de la Revolución soviética: el desencanto."

8.12.09

Los Empresarios Oprimidos

"The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially" – Zaid

En el Número 132 de Letras Libres podemos encontrar una invitación a la lectura de "Empresarios Oprimidos" por Gerardo Esquivel.
"[..] lo que mucha gente no sabe es que Zaid es un precursor en la discusión sobre el enorme potencial de los pequeños empresarios en una economía como la mexicana. Así es: antes de que se pusiera de moda el tema de los microcréditos en México y antes de que se hablara a nivel mundial de la contribución de Muhammad Yunus, del Grameen Bank o del desarrollo de las microfinancieras y, por supuesto, mucho antes de la propuesta de changarrización del presidente Fox o del éxito financiero del Banco Compartamos, ya Zaid había enfatizado las ventajas de productividad de las pequeñas empresas, lo relativamente barato que podría ser el generar ingresos por esta vía y la gran contribución que esto podría tener para el verdadero progreso de la economía mexicana."
Por acá otras reseñas sobre la obra de Gabriel Zaid (miembro de El Colegio NacionalDiscurso de ingreso)

Vs. los Queda-Bien & la "Cleptocracia Rotativa"

Denise Dresser en pro de la rendición de cuentas:

"En México no hay reelección, pero sí hay trampolín. Cada tres años entran diputados y salen otros; cada seis años, entran senadores y salen otros. Aterrizan en el presupuesto público, viven de las partidas de los partidos, hacen como que legislan y después se van. Saltan de la Cámara de Diputados al Senado y de allí a una presidencia municipal o a una diputación local, para regresar eventualmente al Congreso. Hacen todo eso sin haber rendido cuentas jamás porque no existe un mecanismo para castigarlos si no cumplen."

"Con demasiada frecuencia la democracia mexicana termina capturada por poderes fácticos porque no cuenta con el contrapeso de la ciudadanía. Como la supervivencia política de un diputado no depende de la reelección en la urnas sino de la disciplina partidista y la buena relación con Televisa y TV Azteca, los partidos acaban embolsados. Este comportamiento condenable existe y persiste, pero no porque la clase política mexicana tenga una propensión genética a la corrupción, descubierta al descifrar el genoma mexicano. El problema no es cultural sino institucional; los políticos en México se comportan así porque pueden. Porque no hay suficientes mecanismos institucionales para acotar el poder de los partidos -o sus dueños- y aumentar el poder de quienes, con su voto, los eligieron."

7.12.09

Eight Failures

Stiglitz listed the following Crisis' Triggers:
1) Too-big-to-fail banks have perverse incentives; if they gamble and win, they walk off with the proceeds; if they fail, taxpayers pick up the tab.

2) Financial institutions are too intertwined to fail; the part of AIG that cost America's taxpayers $180 billion was relatively small.

3) Even if individual banks are small, if they engage in correlated behavior – using the same models – their behavior can fuel systemic risk;

4) Incentive structures within banks are designed to encourage short-sighted behavior and excessive risk taking.

5) In assessing their own risk, banks do not look at the externalities that they (or their failure) would impose on others, which is one reason why we need regulation in the first place.

6) Banks have done a bad job in risk assessment – the models they were using were deeply flawed.

7) Investors, seemingly even less informed about the risk of excessive leverage than banks, put enormous pressure on banks to undertake excessive risk.

8) Regulators, who are supposed to understand all of this and prevent actions that spur systemic risk, failed. They, too, used flawed models and had flawed incentives; too many didn't understand the role of regulation; and too many became "captured" by those they were supposed to be regulating.

[...] These are not matters of black and white: the more we limit the size, the more relaxed we can be about these and other details of regulation. That is why King, Paul Volcker, the United Nations Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, and a host of others are right about the need to curb the big banks. What is required is a multi-prong approach, including special taxes, increased capital requirements, tighter supervision, and limits on size and risk-taking activities.

Such an approach won't prevent another crisis, but it would make one less likely – and less costly if it did occur.

Economic Cycles

Harold James commented:
"In the nineteenth-century world, people rapidly picked themselves up after downturns and went back to business as usual. In that sense, the phenomenon of the business cycle looked relatively permanent and unchanging. Nowadays, however, a cyclical collapse comes as a great surprise. In its aftermath, we start to reinvent our view of economics. Every ten years or so, we think that a particular model of growth is so broken that it cannot be resurrected. The world needed to be rethought in 1979, 1989, 1998, and 2008."

"[…] But each wave of collapse breeds a greater degree of disillusion about particular institutions, which are blamed for the outcome. It may be the welfare state in the 1970’s, the Communist Party apparatus in the 1980’s, the Asian industry and trade ministries in the 1990’s, or the nexus of the US Treasury and Wall Street in the 2000’s."

"As each institution is eroded, there is less and less left in the way of alternatives. That is also true of currencies."

"The dollar has been knocked off its pedestal by the crisis, but any conceivable substitute is obviously even more flawed and more problematical. The euro is the composite currency of an area with a poor growth record and an inadequate response to the economic crisis. The renminbi is still non-convertible. So there is no master currency at all any more."