Que bom!

Estimulámos mais do que queríamos!

Regulação

Olhando para a discussão que vê nos jornais sobre a regulação do mercado financeiro, infelizmente fomentada por vários economistas, fica-se com a impressão que esta funciona como um termóstato no gabinete das agências reguladoras. Escolhe-se o nível de regulação desejado, ajusta-se o termoestáto e, como magia, já está.

Assim, temos que nos tempos do Bush o pessoal andava todo a poupar energia reguladora e decidiu manter a regulação em níveis altos. Devido a isso, o pessoal ficou todo maluco e fez asneira. A solução será, claro está, regular o termóstato para valores mais altos.

O problema é que a regulação económica é apenas um conjunto de regras. Estas regras podem ser mais ou menos apertadas, claro. Mas antes de falar em sobre-regulação ou sub-regulação, dever-se-ia talvez propor as medidas que se deviam adoptar e porquê. É que, afinal de contas, a crise começou no sector mais altamente regulado das economias modernas. Talvez, antes de pensarmos em sobre ou sub-regular, seriam bom perceber o que falhou nessa regulação.

Inserir título humorístico aqui

Teixeira dos Santos: "Não há GPS para a crise, temos de nos guiar pelas estrelas, o problema são as nuvens"

Engraçado, porque de acordo com o nosso primeiro ministro (não encontro link, mas procurar antes da recessão), o novo Keynes e Vital Moreira, parece que a solução é fácil e óbvia - Investimento público, quanto mais melhor e em todos os projectos possíveis.

A economia de Krugman

Se um estudo qualquer demonstra um multiplicador do investimento público menor do que 1, inventa-se desculpas para isso acontecer.

Se demonstrar maior do que 1.... espera, esse estudo não existe!

Investimento Público: Uma ciência

Alex Taborrok, no Marginal Revolution, cita um artigo de Linda Bilmes sobre um problema pouco explorado (ou referenciado) quanto ao estímulos fiscais:

...We will be attempting to ramp up spending in a very rapid way in a government bureaucracy not set up to deal with this kind of effort. In any organization that starts to increase spending very rapidly there are risks of waste, fraud and inefficiency....

A good play to start looking for lessons is by analyzing the three biggest recent examples of heavy government spending on infrastructure: the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, and the Big Dig artery construction in Boston. Let me start by pointing out that all of these were plagued by a number of serious problems.

Iraqi reconstruction: [T]he Special Inspector General for Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen,...has found that the effort has been riddled with cost overruns, project delays, fraud, failed projects and wasteful expenditures...even though the first tranche of $19 billion in Iraqi reconstruction money became available in October 2003, the Defense Department did not issue the first requests for proposals for this money until 10 months later...

Hurricane Katrina: ...the US has appropriated, over $100 billion in short and long term reconstruction grants, loan subsidies [etc]...GAO found that FEMA made over $1 billion--or 16% of the total in this particular category--in fraudulent payments...items like professional football tickets and Caribbean vacations.

The Big Dig: ...the largest single infrastructure project in the US...many lessons on how not to run a project...officially launched in 1982, but it did not break ground until 1991, due to environmental impact statements, technical difficulties and jurisdictional squabbles...not "completed" until 2007.

Lembro-me também de um trabalho de faculdade que fiz sobre as derrapagens nas obras públicas portuguesas e os resultados não eram nada promissores em obras normais programadas por uma eternidade (como o Centro Cultural de Belém, os prolongamentos do Metro de Lisboa...). Não percebo como é que alguém pode confiar que em casos de investimento público apressado "para combater a crise", essas derrapagens vão ser menores.

Ou seja:

• investimento público leva muito tempo a entrar em acção;
• grandes projectos de investimento público levam sempre a desperdício de dinheiro ineficientemente;
• retira possiblidades de crédito a entidades privadas.

Mas, de alguma forma, Paul Krugman insiste em chamar à "belief in tax-cut magic" voodoo economics. (adoro a forma como Krugman coloca republicanos ao lado de charlatães e aldrabões... basicamente, se não tens a mesma ideologia polítca que ele, então és um aldrabão)

Estimulo fiscal: mais comentários

Apenas mais algumas leituras, para a época natalícia.
Primeiro, Tyler Cowen, sobre o já aqui referido capítulo sobre a crise japonesa, deixa alguns comentários:

A few observations:

1. This is a piece of evidence in favor of fiscal stimulus and so we should take it seriously.

2. It is, quite literally, only a single data point.

3. In November 1994 there was a big cut in personal income taxes and that may be responsible for some of the increase in economic growth in 1995-6. (There was also reconstruction from the 1995 Kobe earthquake, as one reader notes in the comments.)

4. Japan was much weaker automatic stabilizers than does the United States. Some of the fiscal policy boost was to strengthen those economic stabilizers. The case for doing that is indeed much stronger than the case for initiating new government expenditures in the form of specific projects.

5. The history is fully consistent with an alternative interpretation, as I have discussed in my post on the fetishization of measured gdp. Namely, the Japanese spent more money putting unemployed resources to work on construction projects. Measured gdp went up, but the Japanese didn't get much of value for their money. (Japanese construction projects from this era are notoriously ugly, wasteful, and unpopular.) The spending also didn't set off any kind of lasting recovery. It was the proverbial ditch digging without much in the way of later-order benefits or multipliers. In these circumstances a boost in measured, temporary GDP is very different from an economic recovery.

6. There is a deeper question of why governments so often back away from aggressive fiscal stimulus, if that policy indeed will bring so much recovery and thus bring in so many votes and so much revenue. Posen in his chaper suggests that ideology is at fault but I am not convinced. After all Japan is not ruled by Grover Norquist. The alternative null hypothesis is simply that governments see the fiscal stimulus is not working.

Anyway, that is the evidence we are being asked to spend $600-700 billion on -- or $2 trillion for some --so I thought you should see it.

Depois, uma carta de um leitor do blog de Greg Mankiw:

I work for the DoD and when the Department of Homeland Security was established,we helped them with many things, not the least of which was contracting. To make a long story short, you cannot juice up a government agency's budget by tens of billions (or in the case of the stimulus package, hundreds of billions) and expect them to be able to process the paperwork to contract it out, much less oversee the projects or even choose them with any kind of hope for success. It's like trying to feed a Pomeranian a 25 lb turkey. It's madness.

It was years before DHS got the situation under control and between the start and when they finally assembled a sufficiently capable team of lawyers, contracting officials, technical experts and resource managers, most of the money was totally wasted. Now take the DHS situation and multiply it by 20 and you've got the Obama stimulus package. Even if they hand the money to existing governmental agencies, the situation will be the same. Those existing agencies are working full time administering the
budgets they have. They can't just add a zero at the end of each contract and be done with it.

O problema da concentração de poder

Dias depois da recusa do Senado, Bush "ajuda Detroit".

A visão de um microeconomista sobre a crise

Mario Rizzo sobre os bailouts:

The conventional macroeconomic diagnosis and proposed cures ignore many important factors, including the following:

The “irrationality” is not primarily in the system’s response to the initial financial impulse but in the unsustainable expansion of the housing and other capital markets in the first place. Proposals to prop up the housing market as if its contraction is some kind of unfortunate over-reaction are not credible. Too many resources went into the housing market due to the low interest-rate policy the Fed followed for too long. While housing prices have fallen recently in many markets, they need to fall further. Markets should be allowed to equilibrate.
Equilibrium in the housing market would provide greater transparency to the value of mortgage-backed securities. Lack of certainty about housing prices and the ultimate extent of foreclosures only adds to the problems surrounding the illiquidity of these securities.
Government infusion of capital with the purpose of restoring the status-quo ante ignores the fact that, for example, Fannie and Freddie were over-expanded, the domestic automobile industry is a destroyer of scarce capital, some financial firms did a poor job of allocating risk, banks extended loans under the pressure of the government to people who should not own homes and so forth. Resources were misallocated.


Recessions are not simply crises of confidence or of insufficient demand (due to increases in the demand to hold money). They also have their allocational – or microeconomic – aspects. I suggest that these systemic distortions have an important role in creating the aggregate phenomenon we are witnessing. To treat these distortions and their cure as relatively unimportant is a mistake. In my view investor and consumer confidence follows the correction of the underlying causative distortions and does not precede them. In fact, the dominant macroeconomic policy-framework does not leave room for correcting distortions at all because its basic theme is to restore, prop up, and maintain the current direction of resources.

I do not think that these hastily devised macroeconomic schemes will succeed in promoting recovery because they ignore the microeconomic fundamentals. I do fear, however, that will succeed in fundamentally transforming our economic system for the worse.

O Futebol e o conhecimento

Depois de por várias vezes ter ajudado milhões de portugueses e outros tantos (provavelmente mais) benfiquistas com as contas matemáticas, o mundo do futebol vem agora ensinar-nos uma lição básica de economia:
Se a moeda desvaloriza, as exportações aumentam.
Real Madrid aproveita desvalorização da libra para preparar “ataque” a Cristiano Ronaldo

Fontes fidedignas

Plano para o sector automóvel salva seis mil empregos
Se o Sócrates diz, então é verdade!

Dilema do Prisioneiro, outra vez

One thing here is that as best I can tell none of the five countries — US, Japan, Germany, France, Korea — with substantial auto industries are willing to let their national favorites fail. And yet there seems to be substantial global overcapacity in car manufacturing. If a few of the existing firms are allowed to fail, then the survivors will be in good shape. But if nobody fails, then all the firms worldwide will be left suffering because of overcapacity problems, all potentially drawing bailouts and subsidies indefinitely.

Tudo isto e mais aqui. (via Marginal Revolution)

Leituras Recomendadas

Joshua Keating, "Blaming Google Earth for Mumbai":

This isn't a new issue. The al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade also apparently used Google Earth to plan rocket attacks on Israel. But holding Google responsible for terrorists using its product makes about as much sense as blaming the Wright brothers for 9/11.

Just as the fact that terrorists take advantage of the laxer security regimes in democratic societies isn't a reason to unduly curb civil liberties, it would be a mistake to curtail the development of useful technologies because the bad guys have figured out how to use them too.

Miguel Botelho Moniz, Diferenças Salariais:

Numa análise que ignore aspectos eventualmente menos transparentes na atribuição destes vencimentos, a conclusão provável é que existirá maior competição entre pessoas qualificadas pelo cargo de chairman da Reserva Federal do que pelo cargo de governador do Banco de Portugal. A questão que se levanta é outra: Face ao desempenho algo insatisfatório (to say the least) do actual governador, especialmente em função das suas reduzidas responsabilidades, será aceitável tal diferença?

Adam, "Two buck Barack":

So the New York Times is breathless that "Obama Hauls in Record $750 Million for Campaign." A lot of people are astounded at the scale of the money, and I am too. In a long, hard campaign, he raised roughly $2.50 per American, and spent slightly less than that.

Unusually, he ended his campaign not in debt, but with a small surplus. Everyone and their brother is now grubbing after that, according to the Times article. If we had a campaign finance system with transparency and accountability for donations, we would likely see spending levels like this more often, and we might well see a broader range of interesting candidate emerge and get voters engaged again.

The reality is while $750 million is a lot of money, it's also a surprisingly small amount of money. For comparison, the 2008 Federal budget was 2.9 trillion dollars, or roughly 3900 times larger than the budget Obama just oversaw. It's also only 1/20th of the amount we're spending to keep Rick Wagoner in a job.

Ups

Confiança dos investidores alemães sobe inesperadamente em Dezembro
No meio de tantas más notícias económicas, a única boa vem da.... Alemanha? Merkel, deixa-te de ser do contra, pá!

Diário Económico no seu melhor

As contas trimestrais revelam que Portugal já está em contracção acompanhando a tendência das restantes economias europeias. Só o consumo das famílias cresceu, mas a redução do IVA pode explicar esta subida. Investimento, exportações, procura interna e emprego desaceleraram.

in Diário Económico
Alguém me explica o "mas" neste parágrafo?
Já agora, para os que afirmavam que com uma redução de impostos as pessoas iam apenas poupar mais, isto não é uma contradição?

Essa mania de não seguir o resto da Europa

Merkel has been heavily criticized for what many see as a hesitant reaction to the worsening economy in Germany and the rest of Europe. Seemingly in answer to such criticism, the chancellor told Bild: "The point of the meeting next Sunday is a collective analysis to obtain the most clarity possible about the economic developments we can expect in 2009. I will continue to keep all options open. But I am not a fan of daily speculation about new possibilities."

in Spiegel
Mas, não, o melhor é fazer como todos os outros países e propor uma coisa diferente todos os dias para agradar a gregos e troianos...

Obummer X: Comércio

California Rep. Xavier Becerra is Obama's choice for U.S. Trade Representative, but he reportedly is not sure he wants the job. He's another skeptic when it come to free trade, having said he regretted his vote in favor of NAFTA and having led the opposition to CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

in Foreign Policy: Transition Update

Jornalismo rigoroso

Utiliza "artigos de opinião" para fontes de notícias.
Algumas sugestões mais para títulos de notícias:
- "Bush será o anti-cristo"
- "Homosexualidade será uma doença"
- "O mundo será quadrado"

Mais sugestões são bem-vindas.
(Nota: Como é mostrado aqui essa opinião era, no mínimo, enganadora ou como se diz em bom inglês, complete bullshit)

Incentivos fiscais revisitados

Segundo Vital Moreira, no blogue Causa Nossa:

Ao anunciar um maciço pacote de intervenção pública para combater a crise, o Presidente Sarkozy declarou enfaticamente que «a resposta à crise é o investimento», para sustentar o emprego e o crescimento económico, e não a ajuda ao consumo.
Tem razão. Entre nós, porém, há na oposição quem proponha a suspensão do investimento público e a descida de impostos...

Claro que o facto de que toda a evidência de que a ajuda ao consumo funciona melhor do que os investimentos públicos. De que, por exemplo, mesmo quando não sobem a taxa de juro, os investimentos públicos têm o efeito de diminuir o investimento privado, como aliás Roosevelt notou. E de que foi a política monetária e não os investimentos públicos que levaram à recuperação da economia norte-americana.

Obviamente, tudo isso não serve de nada quando Sarkozy diz o contrário.

Double Think económico

No blog Marginal Revolution:

4. I no longer understand Krugman's overall story. He notes that the New Deal years saw a good bit of recovery (I agree), he notes that fiscal policy was not very expansionary (I agree), he believes there was a liquidity trap (I don't agree), and he believes that positive supply shocks run up against a more or less vertical AD curve and thus don't help output (I don't agree). Given all of Krugman's views, AS doesn't much matter and AD didn't much expand. So what exactly drove the (partial) recovery of the 1930s?

Expliquem-me, por favor

U.S. service industries contracted in November at the fastest pace on record, sinking the economy deeper into what may become the worst recession in decades.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index of non- manufacturing businesses, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy, fell to 37.3, the lowest level since records began in 1997, from 44.4 the prior month, the Tempe, Arizona-based ISM said. Readings below 50 signal contraction.

in Bloomberg

Deixem lá ver se percebi bem.
Premissa: O Sector não-manufactureiro teve a maior queda desde 1997 (há 11 anos atrás).
Conclusão: Vamos ter a pior recessão em décadas.