Martin Wolf discute no FT (aqui) as diferentes explicações avançadas para a situação actual dos mercados financeiros mundiais e conclui que o problema é equivalente àquele, clássico, de determinar que animal se esconde num quarto escuro (quando esse animal é, efectivamente, um elefante). Os excertos abaixo procuram dar conta das explicações inventariadas por Wolf e da conclusão final (uma melhor compreensão obriga a aceder ao artigo completo, o que poderá obrigar ao registo):
"One view is that this crisis is a product of a fundamentally
defective financial system. An email I received this week laid out the charge:
the crisis, it asserted, is the product of “greedy, immoral, solely
self-interested and self-delusional decisions made throughout the 2000s, and
earlier, by very real human beings at the very top of the financial food chain”.
"Those who emphasise rationality can readily point to the incentives
for the financial sector to take undue risk. This is the result of the
interaction of “asymmetric information” – the fact that insiders know more than
anybody else what is going on – with “moral hazard” – the perception that the
government will rescue financial institutions if enough of them fall into
difficulty at the same time. There is evident truth in both propositions: if,
for example, the UK government feels obliged to rescue a modest-sized mortgage
bank, such as Northern Rock, moral hazard is rife".
"Yet there is a
different perspective. The argument here is that US monetary policy was too
loose for too long after the collapse of the Wall Street bubble in 2000 and the
terrorist outrage of September 11 2001. This critique is widely shared among
economists, including John Taylor of Stanford University.* The view is also popular
in financial markets: “It isn’t our fault; it’s the fault of Alan Greenspan, the
‘serial bubble blower’.”
"A final perspective is that the crisis is the
consequence neither of financial fragility nor of mistakes by important central
banks. It is the result of global macroeconomic disorder, particularly the
massive flows of surplus capital from Asian emerging economies (notably China),
oil exporters and a few high-income countries and, in addition, the financial
surpluses of the corporate sectors of many countries".
"When I read
these analyses, I am reminded of the story in which four people are told to go
into a dark room, hold on to whatever they find and then say what it is. One
says it is a snake. Another says it is a leathery sail. A third says it is a
tree trunk. The last says it is a pull rope. It is, of course, an elephant.The truth is that an accurate story would be a combination of
the various elements. Global macroeconomic imbalances played a huge part in
driving monetary policy decisions. These, in turn, led to house-price bubbles
and huge financial excesses, particularly in securitised assets. Now
policymakers are forced to deal with today’s symptoms as best they can. But they
must also tackle the underlying causes if further huge disturbances are not to
come along".
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