24 mar 2009

Sobre la Crisis Financiera

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

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Reacciones ante el Plan Geithner

Obama and Geithner gambling with their country's financial reputations

Barack Obama and his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, are starting to look like gambling addicts.

By Damian Reece
Last Updated: 5:48AM GMT 24 Mar 2009

Having seen the worst elements of casino capitalism ruin Wall Street and generate billions in losses, the pair have stepped back to the roulette table and plan to place up to $1 trillion (£690bn) on black to try to win back the banks' losses and restore America's financial credibility. All they can do is hope the spin doesn't end in the red.

Even the name of their latest bail-out plan – the Public Private Investment Program – sounds like the sort of financing partnership we have seen fail here all too often when applied to infrastructure investments such as the spectacular train wreck that was Metronet, the bust public private partnership (PPP) for parts of the London Underground. The UK Government's often flawed attempts at clever infrastructure funding and Geithner's plan have a lot in common.

The Americans want private investors both big and small to join with it and bid for banks' toxic assets to get lending and capital markets moving again.

But what price will be bid? Just as British PPPs such as Metronet failed because the bid pricing was too low, undermining the project from the start, there is absolutely no certainty that private investors in the US will bid a price that makes it worthwhile for American banks to sell their toxic assets.

Geithner's plan is on an impressive scale but that's not enough. Who will police these partnership agreements and guarantee that the rules don't change with a change in White House incumbent, for instance? If the profits soar for private investors who buy toxic assets with government help, what guarantee will there be that these super returns won't be clawed back by a deeply embarrassed Capitol Hill, or that their share of losses aren't increased if things go badly?

These political risks are all too familiar to British PPP companies and will make pricing US toxic assets under Geithner's plan all the more fraught. This extra layer of complexity and uncertainty will slow the financial detox down – not something President Obama, or any of us, can afford.

The incentive for banks to sell their dodgy assets into this scheme is far from compelling because they will immediately have to write off their value and take even more losses which may exacerbate the credit squeeze, not improve it.

Much of the funding for Geithner's plan was passed by a shaken Congress back in the autumn, but only now are we getting the details. The scheme is at least five months late and while it might look clever by involving private investors and the potential for profits, in reality it's ponderous, uncertain and slow. The UK's alternative of insuring banks' toxic assets comes at the price of more state ownership and greater potential taxpayer losses but it has the infinite advantage of delivering much greater certainty in a deeply uncertain world.

Ultimately, President Obama's partnership plan is a test of his government's credibility among American investors and frankly it's not a test he can afford to fail. For such a young administration this is a massively risky bet to be taking within 100 days of taking office.

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estrategia si fracasa plan Obama

BlackRock's Global Macro Hedge Fund Bets on More Stock Declines

By Malcolm Scott

March 24 (Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc.'s global macro fund, the world's second-best performer over two years among hedge funds that invest based on economic trends, is betting against this month's equities rally and buying bonds as a recovery from the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression falters.

BlackRock's A$216 million ($152 million) Asset Allocation Alpha Fund returned 41 percent in 2008, when hedge funds around the world lost a record 19 percent on average. The fund is short U.S. and Australian equities, expecting them to decline, and long U.S., German, Australian, Canadian, and U.K. bonds, said its manager David Hudson.

"The risk is that the economic recovery disappoints in the second half and that equity markets need to revisit their lows in the next few months and maybe go through them," Sydney-based Hudson said in an interview March 20.

The MSCI World Index, which tumbled 42 percent last year, has rallied 21 percent since March 9, boosted in part by the U.S. Federal Reserve's decision to pump money into the economy to get credit flowing. Hudson profited from the declines last year by betting against equities.

BlackRock, which oversees $1.3 trillion, is the biggest publicly traded asset manager in the U.S. Over a third of total assets are managed on behalf of non-U.S. investors, and nearly one-third of its employees are outside the U.S.

Clone Fund

The "overwhelmingly" retail investor base of the Alpha fund helped it avoid the redemptions that beset other Australian-based funds last year, Hudson said. About 35 percent of the offshore money invested in Australian hedge funds was redeemed in the last quarter of 2008, according to Australian Fund Monitors.

The fund, set up in March 2006, uses options and futures contracts to bet on currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities and cash. It gained an average 38 percent over two years. Among hedge funds with at least $20 million in assets, only the $706 million Pivot Global Value Fund performed better with an average 50 percent gain, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on the 363 funds globally with a similar strategy.

In January, BlackRock launched the Global Macro Hedge Fund, a Cayman Island-based fund that is denominated in U.S. dollars and clones the Asset Allocation Alpha fund's trading. The new fund, which is targeting fund of funds, private banks and family offices, has struggled to raise money after the credit crisis battered the appetite for hedge fund offerings.

"The interest has been good, but after a year like last year, a lot of people that would be normally allocating to this kind of fund have liquidity constraints," Hudson said.

The Global Macro fund has raised $12 million. Hudson declined to specify targets for funds under management or the capacity for the funds he manages, except to say it's "a long way north of here."

Currency Bets

The Alpha fund's 41 percent return net of fees was the biggest gain in 2008 among the 214 Australian-based hedge funds monitored by Australian Fund Monitors. The fund is up 1.7 percent this year, according to Bloombergdata. It returned 35 percent in 2007.

The Asset Allocation Alpha fund aims to provide investors with a return of 12 percentage points above the benchmark UBS Australia Bank Bill Index over rolling three-year periods, before fees.

Hudson is now looking at wagering against currencies of nations where central banks are resorting to so-called quantitative easing, where policy makers opt to purchase government bonds to push yields lower. He is considering taking short positions in the Swiss Franc, U.K. pound, U.S. dollar and Japanese yen.

The fund has already taken a position on the expectation the Australian dollar will gain and the Canadian dollar will decline because Canada may be next to introduce quantitative easing measures, while Australia is unlikely to, Hudson said. It remains long gold -- a bet that bullion will go up -- versus the U.S. dollar.

To contact the reporter on this story: Malcolm Scott in Sydney Mscott23@bloomberg.net

Krugman sobre plan Geithner

Tim Geithner's US bank rescue may not go far enough, experts warn

US President Barack Obama is poised within days to unveil a new trillion-dollar plan aimed at restoring America's crippled banking system to health, as anger over bonuses paid to executives at bailed-out institutions escalates.

By Richard Blackden and Edmund Conway
Last Updated: 9:48PM GMT 21 Mar 2009

Barack Obama is under pressure to rid America's lenders of toxic assets Photo: AP

However, even before it is officially launched, experts have warned that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's expected plan falls far short of what is needed to ease the financial crisis, with one Nobel prize-winning economist calling it an "awful mess".

The plan builds on the outline Mr Geithner provided last month, which was roundly slammed for lacking vital detail.

With US unemployment climbing towards 10pc, the Obama administration is under intense pressure to deliver proposals that rid America's lenders of the toxic assets that have choked off the supply of credit to the economy and that will also begin to restore private investors' confidence in the banking system.

Mr Geithner's new plan aims both to expand existing initiatives and to create new schemes alongside them. It plans first to dispose of toxic assets both by setting up a new entity to buy and hold the distressed loans that have eroded the capacity of banks to lend, and by creating a separate Public-Private Investment Fund, first outlined last month, to help fund private investors' purchases of some of the most illiquid mortgage-backed securities.

Second, the Federal Reserve will raise the amount it can lend to investors through its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to increase the credit available to cash-strapped consumers and small businesses.

In stark contrast to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's approach, the US administration is reluctant to take large stakes in Wall Street banks as the price for injecting desperately needed capital.

Leading US economist Paul Krugman said the scheme would potentially socialise losses and privatise any gains in the financial system, leaving taxpayers worse off. "This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn't actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalised," he said.

"And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won't be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess."

Other critics warn that Mr Geithner's hope to encourage private investors to take on the toxic assets is fraught with difficulties over how the securities, which have long since ceased to be traded, will be priced.

"The American authorities are reluctant to inject the taxpayers' funds needed to get them [the banks] on their feet," said Barry Eichengreen, an expert on America's financial system. "And no bank recapitalisation means no recovery."

The tightrope that President Obama and his Treasury Secretary will have to walk this week is being made that much more precarious by a growing reluctance in Congress to hand over more money to Wall Street. Sparked by the revelation that at least $165m in bonuses have been paid to executives of the bailed-out insurer American International Group, the Senate is due to vote this week on a plan to impose a 70pc tax on bonuses paid to banks that have received taxpayers' cash.

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Fwd: Macroperu Krugman critica el Geyhner

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Financial Policy Despair

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 22, 2009

Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration's bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the "cash for trash" plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Go to Columnist Page »Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

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This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we've just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn't do anything, and anyway it was someone else's fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public's doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they're doing.

It's as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.

Let's talk for a moment about the economics of the situation.

Right now, our economy is being dragged down by our dysfunctional financial system, which has been crippled by huge losses on mortgage-backed securities and other assets.

As economic historians can tell you, this is an old story, not that different from dozens of similar crises over the centuries. And there's a time-honored procedure for dealing with the aftermath of widespread financial failure. It goes like this: the government secures confidence in the system by guaranteeing many (though not necessarily all) bank debts. At the same time, it takes temporary control of truly insolvent banks, in order to clean up their books.

That's what Sweden did in the early 1990s. It's also what we ourselves did after the savings and loan debacle of the Reagan years. And there's no reason we can't do the same thing now.

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks' books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn't be in trouble.

And so the . Mr. Paulson proplan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to "fair" levelsposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama's top economic adviser, is to use "the expertise of the market" to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn't really about letting markets work. It's just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there's something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they're doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won't work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it's unlikely that he'll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

All is not lost: the public wants Mr. Obama to succeed, which means that he can still rescue his bank rescue plan. But time is running out.

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23 mar 2009

Salvataje financiero a la americana

Administration seeks to free frozen credit markets

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger, Ap Economics Writer – 8 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration took a fresh shot at ending a national paralysis in lending Monday, teaming up with investors to buy bad bank assets and ease credit for hard-pressed consumers and businesses.

The program, announced by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, was not the first such attempt by the new administration to revitalize an economy mired in recession.

Geithner pleaded for patience, saying work to rehabilitate the banking and financial industry has to go forward despite "deep anger and outrage" over bad lending and investment practices.

The newest initiative, he told reporters, will seek to harness government and private resources to purchase an initial half-trillion dollars of bad assets off the balance sheets of banks. And he held out the expectation that the program eventually could grow to $1 trillion

Wall Street seemed to feel rejuvenated, at least at the opening. In late morning, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 221 at 7,500. The Standard & Poor's 500 index was up 23 at 792, and the Nasdaq composite index is up 42 at 1,500.

But the investor reaction to the administration's initial bank rescue program on Feb. 10 was anything but enthusiastic. Disappointed investors sent the Dow Jones down that day by a whopping 380 points.

22 mar 2009

PERU: 2008 pobreza crece

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Farid Matuk <efmatuk@yahoo.com>
Date: 2009/3/22
Subject: Macroperu En 2008 la pobreza se incrementó
To: macroperu@googlegroups.com
Cc: macroperu@yahoogroups.com

http://29x55.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/%c2%bf2200-calorias-o-750-soles-por-dia-22-iii-09/

La pobreza calórica (porcentaje de personas que no consumen suficientes calorias) se incrementó en mas de 3 puntos en 2008 respecto a 2007, a niveles similares a los habidos entre 2004 y 2005.

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Roubini

The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini

by Helaine Olen

April 2009 Issue

Life is good for New York University's party-boy economist. Once regarded as a crank, he has parlayed his now-accurate predictions of an economic bust into fame, rising fortune, and a vigorous social life. But is the recession's "Doctor Doom" just a one-hit wonder?

It's Saturday night. A stream of young fashionistas and other assorted Manhattan scenesters pours into a fashionable Tribeca building. They're all headed for the loft of a middle-aged economist—a man whose name would hardly have registered with anyone but the most obsessive CNBC watcher a few years ago. A doorman on duty surveys the scene and rolls his eyes. "Another Roubini party," he mutters.

The host of the hour, Nouriel Roubini—the New York University professor credited with calling the current economic collapse and a ubiquitous presence on financial-news shows who continues to forecast gloom and doom—is looking positively upbeat this evening. He greets guest after guest with a kiss on both cheeks as music thumps at a volume loud enough to irritate the neighbors. Suspended from the ceiling, above the throngs of minglers, are dozens of small glass globes, resembling nothing so much as bubbles.

The decor is apt. As early as 2004, when other economists were proclaiming a new financial age, Roubini was predicting that the bubble buoying the United States economy was about to pop. At the time, he was derided as a crank. His downbeat message, combined with an accent reminiscent of a James Bond villain and a laugh that seems to kick in on a one-second tape delay, quickly earned him the sobriquet Doctor Doom.

Now the ridicule has turned into respect, not to mention countless TV appearances, speaking engagements, invitations to testify before Congress, new clients for the consulting firm he runs, and parties packed with young, beautiful admirers. But as the world searches desperately for signs of recovery, Doctor Doom faces his own potential doomsday scenario: If the economy turns up, he could go down as nothing more than a one-hit wonder. Unless he nails it again.

That might be tough. Not only has Roubini been a professional downer for years, his reasoning has frequently been off. He first predicted, incorrectly, that there would be a bust as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and later, again incorrectly, that the economy would tank as a result of trade imbalances. The collapse was initially triggered by subprime-credit problems, and he initially underestimated how devastating they would be. More than a few economists are convinced that Roubini's call was less a matter of his genius and more about the simple fact that if you forecast a recession often enough, sooner or later you'll be vindicated. "Nouriel Roubini has been singing the doom-and-gloom story for 10 years," says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight. "Eventually something was going to be right."

Bad times have certainly been good for Roubini's social life. For years, he has been a manic host of everything from small dinner parties to big bashes. The soirees are more crowded of late, attracting everyone from members of the hedge-fund set to a former Miss Ukraine and propelling the bachelor economist onto the tabloid gossip pages. (He has become a New York Post regular, and CNBC often plays disco music when he appears on the air.)

Roubini's partying side may have remained below the media radar but for his energetic use of Facebook. He kept his profile on the social-networking site open to the general public until a few months ago, something more privacy-minded users typically choose not to do. On his profile, he said he was single and interested in meeting women, and he posted photos of himself hamming it up with females who look two or three decades younger than he is.

Among Roubini's Facebook friends is Sarah Austin, a pretty blond who is featured in a black minidress on the website she runs, Pop17.com, which posts interviews with internet "personalities." Austin says she received an unsolicited email from Roubini last fall—complete with links to articles about himself—praising her site and inviting her to a party. She has yet to take him up on the invitation, but the two are now regular correspondents. She assumes he approached her because he wanted to be written up on her website—and also because, she says, "I fit the criteria for his loft parties. There are a lot of women."

Roubini's Facebook presence brought the media-gossip blog Gawker into the Roubini story last fall. In a post called "The Secret Pleasures of Dr. Doom," Nick Denton, the site's founder, flagged what he saw as a disconnect between Roubini's "gloomy public image" and "his playboy lifestyle": "The 50-year-old Iranian-Jewish economist is a promiscuous Facebook friend who draws a cosmopolitan crowd to the frequent parties at his Tribeca loft—an apartment with walls indented with plaster vulvas, incidentally."

The post would most likely have been forgotten if Roubini himself hadn't responded. He sent a series of rants in the middle of the night to Denton, including this one: "Nick Denton is trying to do a hatchet job on me in two pieces in his trashy junky Gawker; but he is just an ignorant anti-Semite with a Nazi mind and and [sic] a McCarthist [sic] bigot and hypocrite." Roubini defended the art in question as a "tasteful" piece by a noted Latin American artist. Roubini is, in fact, a serious art collector and a member of the Junior Associates program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist, Analia Segal, is a Guggenheim fellow.

Still, at the party I attended, occasional whispers could be heard among the guests: "Where are the vaginas?" Such chatter notwithstanding, the gathering was a friendly and civilized affair—no inappropriate behavior, not even a preponderance of booze; mostly scattered wine bottles and bubbly water. "I'm a serious professional economist. I live in New York and have a social life," Roubini says.. "I have book parties and social dinners. And, you know, people will take pictures of you with your friends, and there are some attractive women. It doesn't mean I go out with them. They're my friends. I have nothing to hide." When I send him a thank-you email, I can't resist adding, "If you ask me, the deep mystery at the center of your life is why you would want to subject your apartment to that sort of abuse." He quickly wrote back, "I do not subject my apt. to abuse. It is nice to have friends over, and I have a housekeeper that cleans up everything afterward."

Still, Roubini can't help himself: After Gawker cheekily noted that both he and dating columnist Julia Allison were going to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, he made sure to be photographed with her there. Gawker's dry comment: "Nouriel Roubini partying with intellectual peers." Roubini's response to me: "She's a very smart cookie. Very smart. She can intelligently discuss lots of things."

The first time I met Roubini, we had tea at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan, a meeting he squeezed in between late-afternoon business engagements and a live CNBC appearance to discuss the economic crisis. He was wearing what I would soon come to recognize as his uniform: an open-collared blue shirt revealing a bit of chest hair (he buttons up for TV), blue slacks, and a jacket. He looks younger than his 51 years, in part because of his thick, dark hair but also because he is almost boyishly enthusiastic when it comes to the subjects he cares about, which include art and books as well as economics (but not sports). He had just spent the day at his consulting firm, Roubini Global Economics LLC, which began as a webpage for his students in the late 1990s and has since evolved into a 50-person enterprise with offices in London and Hong Kong as well as New York. It was Halloween, and the RGE staff had dressed up as their boss. Roubini was waving around a mask of his likeness they'd given him. "I am going to be Doctor Doom for Halloween," he declared, mentioning plans to stop off at a few parties after his TV appearance was finished.

Roubini doesn't come with an off switch. He speaks in paragraphs—plural. I once watched him twirl his eyeglasses for 45 minutes without a break. Emails arrive from him at all hours. When he teaches, he can't stop himself from telling his second-year MBA students—the folks who will be job hunting soon—how dismal their prospects are.

"There are no jobs in New York. There are no jobs in London," he proclaimed during a class I sat in on.

The son of an Oriental-rug distributor and the oldest of four children, Roubini was born in Istanbul, but by the time he was five, his family had moved several times, making quick stops in Tehran and Tel Aviv before settling permanently in Italy. Roubini speaks four languages: English, Italian, Hebrew, and Farsi. He says he gravitated to economics out of an interest in left-wing politics. He graduated from college in Italy in 1982 and went on to earn his PhD from Harvard, where he studied under Larry Summers, now President Obama's chief economic adviser. In 1998, Roubini left academia to work in the Clinton administration, and he has also served as a consultant to both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

During his stint in Washington, Roubini's dour take on the U.S. economy began to gel. While following the Asian and Latin American monetary crises in the late 1990s, he saw similarities between developing countries and the U.S., arguing that they all fostered crony capitalists and tended to run huge current-account deficits. (In other words, they spent more money than they were taking in. In the case of the U.S., it's like we were using an in-store credit card at a retailer named China.) He became convinced that the U.S. had the potential to be the biggest bubble of all, and by 2004, he was speaking and writing about his belief that the country was facing economic catastrophe.

Roubini calls his economic approach "holistic." Instead of primarily studying mathematical models and formulas, he says he also draws his ideas from history, literature, and international politics. He maintains that this eclectic approach is what helped him be so prescient.

Perhaps appropriately for a modern media creature, Roubini has published some of his most notable theories and forecasts not in academic papers but in the form of blog posts. The article that arguably made his career, "The Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The 12 Steps to Financial Disaster," was posted on February 5, 2008. It pegged the start of the recession to December 2007 (dead accurate, it turned out) and warned that the downturn would be extremely severe, thanks to the continuing housing bust and the bursting of the credit bubble, which would, in turn, lead to an intense credit contraction and a "serious and protracted" falloff in consumer spending. For good measure, he also predicted the failure of at least one bank with heavy exposure to mortgages and major problems in the shadow banking system, which would affect everything from hedge and money-market funds to investment banks and structured investment vehicles. Losses on credit default swaps, he predicted, could lead to the bankruptcy of a "large broker dealer," and the entire chain of sorry events would cause an inevitable downward spiral. Bear Stearns collapsed a little more than a month later.

Roubini was far from the only person to go on television and point out that the world's financial emperor had no clothes. Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach, former Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney, and investment advisers like Gary Shilling, Peter Schiff, and Marc Faber questioned the conventional wisdom during the boom years. What distinguishes Roubini from the others, at least in part, is his persistent attention to the business of publicity.

Roubini is widely known for the speed with which he returns reporters' emails, and he is loath to pass up a media opportunity, no matter how early in the morning or late in the evening his presence is requested. Roubini, though, tells me that these days he actually turns down 95 percent of his interview requests. "Honestly, I never call anybody, but when CNBC and Bloomberg—literally, every week, several times a week—say, 'Come on our show,' there is no way we can say, 'I'm not going to do it.' Right?"

The fact that RGE has a sophisticated (and free) online component increases Roubini's profile. By aggregating material from other economics bloggers, he ensures that those commentators will, in turn, both link to RGE and mention Roubini's posts and his other work in their own writings. Roubini also Twitters: "Nouriel is having fun at the Google After Hours party in Davos after a day of wonkdom"; "Nouriel has an op-ed on how to control Systemic Risk in the Financial Times today."

Roubini turned his website and consulting into a more organized business three and a half years ago. Backed by notable investors, including William Janeway, a managing director at Warburg Pincus LLC, and Arminio Fraga, the former president of Brazil's central bank, Roubini set up an office above a Manhattan Mini Storage facility a few blocks from his loft. From that one room, RGE has since expanded to seven locations. The Hong Kong and London offices opened last year, and Roubini hopes to launch RGE outposts in Frankfurt, Singapore, Moscow, and Dubai by the end of 2009.

"We would be delusional if we thought we were growing because of anything but Nouriel's notoriety," says RGE chief executive officer Dean Daniels. "His predictions are what open the door."

Among the firm's new clients is billionaire investor Ronald Perelman, who first contacted Roubini after watching him on Charlie Rose last year. Perelman was so impressed with Roubini's performance that he asked him to meet with him and other members of his company. "I'm crazy about him. I think he's very smart, very direct," Perelman says, adding that Roubini's advice has caused him to back off from making certain investments, at least in the short term. "I think he is one of the brightest, the most effective economists that I've ever met, certainly that I've ever dealt with."

Perelman, another man-about-town who catches his share of tabloid flak, met up with Roubini on St. Barts and hung out with him during a recent vacation. Perelman says he plans to ask Roubini to one of his famous Shabbat dinners. But he has yet to attend one of Roubini's loft parties and had to turn down a recent invitation.

RGE's site, called Roubini Global Monitor, combines aggregated and original content in a way that's similar to the Huffington Post. Analysts hired by RGE parse data on economic and political conditions in every area of the world. In addition, RGE has about 250 bloggers and analysts who contribute to the site. Some material is available by subscription only; clients include hedge funds, think tanks, and even the World Bank, RGE says. Subscription prices range from $10,000, for "reading rights," to more than $100,000, which includes personal meetings and consultations with Roubini or his staff. But with Roubini's views so well known, why would anyone pay to become a client? "In many ways, I tell them the same things I'm telling the public," Roubini acknowledges, but he adds that he and his team flesh out arguments for clients and give them the time and attention they need.

Just back from Davos, Roubini meets me again at the Algonquin Hotel. This time he orders a $15 glass of pinot noir. The Davos conference, where shell-shocked finance executives treated him like a rock star, was but one stop in a three-week global jaunt. "Zurich, Moscow, London, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi, you name it," he says. Earlier, despite putting in a full day at RGE, he managed to find time to meet with five different publishers about writing a book on the economic crisis.

Even sitting down, Roubini can't stop moving—pulling his hair, tugging at his ear, shifting his position. He leaves at 8:30 to return to his NYU office and answer emails, but he's planning to quit at 11 to meet friends for dinner. And he's still trying to decide if he should have a party in his loft the following evening. At 4:12 a.m., he sends out a Twitter linking to a Bloomberg article on an International Monetary Fund report claiming that many advanced economies are already in a depression. He says his doctor has told him that he's endangering his health by sleeping only three or four hours a night. It isn't that he can't sleep, he says. It's just impossible for him to accomplish everything he wants to in a conventional workday of 8 or 10 or 12 hours.

At the moment, Roubini's level of influence is probably as great as it ever will be. When he announced at a conference in Dubai—a few hours before Barack Obama's inauguration—that he believed global losses in the credit crisis could top $3.6 trillion, the U.S. stock market promptly plunged. Britain's Telegraph claimed the economist's comments were partly responsible for intensifying the losses.

It wasn't the first time. During an October speech in London, Roubini predicted that stock markets in the U.S. and other countries would soon have to shut down for as long as a week to end the rash of panic selling. The forecast went viral immediately. The next day, a number of world markets suffered severe drops, and futures on U.S. markets fell so far that trading in them was halted. The Big Picture, Barry Ritholtz's popular financial blog, posted a guide to how the New York Stock Exchange's circuit breakers work and what sort of drop would be needed to close the market for the day. Ritholtz says the post was a coincidence and not a response to Roubini's predictions that the market would have to shut down.

The U.S. stock market ultimately rallied the following week, but Roubini suspects that there could have been some sort of government intervention. "You started low, and instead of falling more, it rallied like crazy. I think that the Treasury might have made such a call," he says. "It was way too strange to be market dynamics." It sounds like conspiracy-theory talk, the sort of chatter one might hear on late-night talk radio, except that other people started saying similar things: Scott Nations, president of Fortress Trading, went on CNBC a few weeks later to make a similar charge, though he claimed the government intervention occurred on different days.

Such controversy only fuels the Roubini publicity machine, which needs to be running in full gear to keep up with the growing competition among celebrity doom-mongers.. Nassim Taleb, the famously dour author of The Black Swan, recently said on Charlie Rose's show, "I think it's worse than Roubini thinks. I have the same story." Taleb, who met Roubini for the first time earlier this year, says he meant no rivalry by his comments. "When this crisis was evolving, he was the only economist who made sense," Taleb says. "I have enormous respect for him, and if you know me, I don't have respect for a lot of people." The two recently joined forces to set up (predictably) a Facebook group called Make Bankers Accountable, which encourages banking executives to return bonuses received in previous years.

Roubini says he does not want to be known only for his bearish views. But when I ask what it will take for him to see a positive future for the economy, he has a hard time answering. When I press him, he says consumption is key; it will be triggered by job stability and income growth. He has become an outspoken advocate of temporarily nationalizing insolvent banks, saying any other solution is simply prolonging the U.S.'s fiscal agony. Roubini actually thinks the recession could, according to official indicators, end by December. But he maintains that we are in for a weak recovery, one in which companies will continue to shed jobs for at least a year after the economy begins to grow.

He still continues to use the "Doctor Doom" sobriquet in his Facebook status updates and lists it prominently in his bio on the website of the company that books his speaking engagements. "It's a nice nickname," he says. "But I tell you, the day when we reach the bottom, I'll be the first one to call in and say Doctor Doom has become Doctor Boom. I'm not a permabear."

+++++++

Mas sobre el "apocaliptico" Roubini:

Hedging His Bets
The star economist splits his time between serious work and posh parties.

Six Bloggers of the Apocalypse
It takes a lot to make Roubini sound like a Polyanna, but these pundits do it.

Roubini Was Right
Nouriel Roubini's thoughts about the economy in October 2008.

http://www.betaggarcian.blogspot.com/

BBCMundo.com: DMG: ¿se esfum�� el dinero?

** DMG: ¿se esfumó el dinero? **
No aparecen la mayoría de los miles de millones captados por la firma intervenida por el gobierno de Colombia.<!-América Latina, Colombia, DMG-->
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_7955000/7955583.stm >

BBCMundo.com: Chávez toma medidas contra la crisis

** Chávez toma medidas contra la crisis **
El gobierno aumentó el IVA y triplicará su endeudamiento para paliar los efectos de la crisis económica mundial.<!-America Latina, Venezuela, reformas económicas-->
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_7957000/7957528.stm >

China inoculates itself against dollar collapse

By W Joseph Stroupe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KC18Cb01.html

There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.

There is also mounting evidence that China's increasingly energetic new campaign of capitalizing on the global crisis by making resource buys across the globe may be (1) helping its

central bank to decrease exposure to the dollar, while (2) simultaneously positioning China to make much greater profit on its investment of its reserves into hard assets whose prices are now greatly beaten down, while (3) also affording it greatly increased control of strategic resources and the geopolitical clout that goes with it. This is turning out to be a win-win-win situation for China as it capitalizes upon the important opportunities afforded it by the present global crisis.

The exact size and the precise composition of China's huge forex reserves, the exact degree of China's exposure to the dollar and its viable options, if any, in decreasing that exposure are matters of intense interest, because China's policies in this regard could have gargantuan implications for the US and the global financial systems and for the dollar.

One of the foremost experts who continues to research and track these matters is the highly respected Brad W Setser, a Fellow for Geoeconomics at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His work is providing significantly deeper insight into the size and composition of China's reserves and is affording the world a better view of that country's options in managing its reserves going forward and what the implications of those options might be.

Another expert whose ongoing work is also adding very important, deeper insight into such matters is the highly respected Rachel Ziemba, lead analyst on China and the oil exporting economies at the prestigious RGE Monitor, founded by Nouriel Roubini.

Drawing on the work of these two experts, let's examine the matter of the likely size and composition of China's forex reserves and its investment options going forward, and the probable implications of those options for the dollar.

The first issue is to determine the actual size of China's foreign exchange reserves. Its central bank officially confirms the current figure of about US$1.95 trillion. However, Setser's work reveals that China's actual reserves are significantly higher and may actually be as high as $2.4 trillion, according to his latest figures [1]. About $2.2 trillion of this total figure is easily identifiable, according to Setser, with the remaining $200 billion being his estimate of the amount currently held in China's state banks.

As for the issue of the composition of these reserves and its total exposure to the dollar, the most recent Treasury International Capital (TIC) report by the US Treasury has China's holdings of Treasuries at $696 billion as of the end of 2008. However, Setser's research indicates China's total holdings of US Treasuries is likely to be more than that figure, since some of the purchases of Treasuries by the UK and Hong Kong should actually be attributed to China's central bank. China also holds US government-sponsored agency debt (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paper) and corporate bonds, but the recent TIC reports indicate its central bank has been steadily divesting itself of these assets in favor of short-dated Treasuries.

As for China's purchases of Treasuries over the most recent three months (October - December of 2008), note this statement from Setser:

And over the past three months, almost all the growth in China's Treasury portfolio has come from its rapidly growing holdings of short-term bills not from purchases of longer-term notes.

Setser goes on to make the point that China's central bank is unquestionably divesting itself of the comparatively less-safe assets such as agency debt in favor of very short-dated Treasuries. The best estimates of the total exposure of China's central bank to dollar-denominated assets of all kinds is about 70%, or somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $1.7 trillion depending upon whether you use the $2.2 trillion figure or the $2.4 trillion figure for the total sum of China's reserves.

That uncomfortably high level of exposure to the dollar is what has been causing concern to flare in China most recently. A much more desirable figure, from China's standpoint, of its total exposure to the dollar would be 50% or less of its total reserves. A reserve composition of 50% dollars to 50% everything else is much safer because an excessive decline in the value of the dollar would tend to be offset by corresponding increases against the dollar in the value of the non-dollar assets comprising the rest of the reserves.

In order to get to that more desirable composition fairly quickly over the next several months, China would have to somehow divest itself of as much as $450 billion of its existing dollar-denominated assets, not purchase a significant amount of new dollar-denominated assets, and accomplish all this without triggering a global dollar panic. That's a very tall order indeed - but it is not by any means impossible. How so?

If we stand back to look at Setser's work from a distance, we see what appears to be a clear strategy on China's part that is potentially very compelling. The country has its official reserves, which it acknowledges now total about $1.95 trillion, and it also has its unofficial or secret reserves, which Setser estimates at about $450 billion at present.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not merely coincidentally) the secret reserves total about the same sum that China needs to divest itself of in order to reach the desired composition of its reserves noted in the previous paragraph - about $450 billion. At this point, recall the intriguing and potentially very important statement quoted earlier (see DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING, Part 2), a statement made by Fang Shangpu, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and reported by the Xinhua News Agency on February 18, 2009:

Fang Shangpu, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, noted Wednesday that the report released by the US Treasury of the amount of government bonds held by China included not only the investment from the reserves, but also from other financial institutions. It might be a hint that Chinese government is not holding as much US government bonds. [Italics added]

China is managing its foreign exchange reserves with a long-term and strategic view, Fang told a press briefing. "Whether China is to purchase, and to buy how much of the US government bonds will be decided according to China's need," Fang said. "We will make judgment based on the principle of ensuring safety and the value of the reserves," Fang said.

Is Fang Shangpu hinting that China has intentionally, as a deliberate strategy, divided its reserves into two general holdings, official and secret, and that SAFE (the State Administration of Foreign Exchange) has ensured that the composition of the official (government) holdings of the $1.95 trillion is such that its exposure to the dollar is not the roughly 70% assumed in the West, but rather something much closer to the desired target of 50%, while the secret reserves hold predominantly dollar-denominated assets?

If this is the case, then China could employ a number of schemes to clandestinely further reduce its total exposure to the dollar, using its secret reserves, all the while maintaining safety for the official reserves. Note Fang Shangpu's recent statement to the Wall Street Journal regarding how carefully, and with what foresight, China manages its reserve holdings:

"Since the subprime crisis evolved into the international financial crisis in September last year, we have executed the central authorities' plans to cope with the international financial crisis and launched the emergency response mechanism. We have closely followed developments, made timely adjustments to risk management, taken decisive and forward-looking measures to evaluate and remove risks ... "

Chinese officials have been painfully aware, for several years now, of the increasing risks of too great an exposure to the dollar. It simply isn't believable that their level of prudence and foresight in this regard was so low as to allow them to fail to formulate and execute strategies designed to limit that exposure to safer levels
than is presently assumed in the West. But if China has indeed prudently and deliberately structured its official reserves (now totaling $1.95 trillion) to be much less exposed to the dollar than is assumed in the West, while off-loading the riskier, dollar-denominated assets into its secret reserves, how might it propose to use those secret reserves to further decrease its exposure to the dollar?

Conversion into resource reserves
Enter China's resource buys. Several Chinese experts have been saying that China needs to spend a significant portion of its dollar-denominated reserves on hard assets, thereby further reducing its exposure to the dollar. It certainly appears that China is embarking upon just such a strategy.

According to research by Rachel Ziemba of RGE Monitor, in the first two months of 2009 alone China has already confirmed such

deals for hard assets worth a total of over $50 billion [2]. Clearly, China is just now opening its global strategy of pursuing such resource buys at a time when the prices of hard assets are extremely attractive and many more such buys are in the offing. This is made evident by the recent February 23, 2009 report by China Daily which stated the following:

As part of the National Energy Administration's three-year plan for the oil and gas industry, the government is considering setting up a fund to support firms in their pursuit of foreign mergers and acquisitions, the report said.

Fang Shangpu, deputy director of SAFE, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said earlier this week that more measures will be introduced to support firms seeking to expand overseas.

Veteran analyst Han Xiaoping said the time is now ripe for China to convert some of its capital reserves into resource reserves, as global oil prices have fallen 70% since last year, to about $40 a barrel. [Italics added]

"We shouldn't miss this opportunity to use our foreign exchange reserves to build up our oil stocks," he said.

Jiang Jiemin, chairman of PetroChina, said recently: "The low share prices of some global resource companies provide us with some fresh opportunities."

RGE Monitor's Ziemba says the resource buys are a smart move now because they decrease the role of increasingly uncertain financial assets such as Treasuries, which now carry little profit appeal and diminishing appeal as safe stores of wealth, and increase the role of hard assets, which now carry an ever greater profit potential and a mounting appeal as safe stores of wealth: "For China, these investments seem to be a relatively efficient way to use its financial resources given the likely long-term appreciation of resource prices and uncertainty about financial assets."

Ziemba, in response to questions e-mailed to her, also alerts us to watch for forthcoming details about the currencies employed in China's resource buys. If these deals are being transacted largely in dollars, then she notes that there will likely be no negative near-term effect upon the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. But if they are arranged outside of the dollar, it might well serve to undermine the dollar's international role to some extent.

However, it should be noted that almost no matter what currencies these resource buys are being transacted in, there does exist a potential negative impact for the dollar itself further down this path. How so?

Obviously, with China's uncomfortably large present exposure to the dollar, it is in its interests to concentrate on converting much of the dollar-denominated portion of its secret reserves into resources reserves. In other words, China will undoubtedly spend dollars, whether directly or indirectly, to fund its resource buys. But it must do so in a largely opaque manner that leaves little, if any trace in official data such as the US Treasury's TIC report. It will also be likely to be a net buyer of Treasuries, though nowhere near its 2008 pace, or else refrain from selling significant amounts of Treasuries, while it clandestinely reduces its exposure to the dollar. Otherwise, its actions could spark a dollar panic.

Increased buying of Treasuries by US citizens and investors, and by various foreign investors other than China, as the global crisis rapidly deepens and increases risk aversion, may likely take significant pressure off of China to soak up the huge issuance of new sovereign US debt now getting underway. That will help to provide breathing room for China to address its problem of reducing exposure to the dollar.

Whether China will approach the problem with a scheme of swaps amongst its various state-controlled entities and wealthy private Chinese investors, or by some other nearly opaque means, probably cannot be determined with any certainty at present. But it has undoubtedly worked out the problem of clandestinely converting significant sums of its dollar-denominated financial assets into hard assets without dumping Treasuries and triggering a dollar panic.

It is most unlikely, therefore, that its actions in this regard will be sufficiently proved before it has already succeeded in accomplishing its goals. Furthermore, since resource prices are now very attractive, China will certainly expand and accelerate its resource buys while prices remain attractive, converting ever-larger sums of its dollar-denominated reserves into resource reserves.

If China averaged a conversion of only $35 billion per month from dollars into resources, it could convert the entire $450 billion in little more than 12 months' time. Hence, I predict that the next eight to 15 months will provide China with sufficient time to bring its total exposure to the dollar much more in line with its strategic goals.

What about the problem of dealing with any ongoing accumulation of dollars? A number of analysts note that China's trade surplus is worsening even in the global slowdown because, while China's exports are falling, its imports are falling much faster. However, Chinese officials have made clear that they will use their reserve holdings to bolster imports, and that measure should alleviate China's need to accumulate large sums of dollars and other currencies in order to keep the yuan stable.

China is extremely unlikely, therefore, to accumulate dollars at anywhere near the rate at which it did in 2008. China is also funding its domestic stimulus package designed to spur domestic consumption. All these measures denote a much wiser use of its huge reserves and a steadily decreasing focus on the dollar. All in all, China looks set to weather the storm quite well in spite of some significant hardships along the way.

Summarizing the escalating risks of a dollar crisis
The bubble in US Treasuries is getting increasingly massive and unstable with each week that passes. Deepening global risk aversion is keeping investors lined up, so far, to buy Treasuries - especially short-dated ones. And the deepening economic crisis in the US is moving its own citizens to join in the buying spree.

If the Treasuries bubble persists for much longer, and especially if it continues to mount, the massive and dangerous distortions in the global financial system and the Treasuries-induced strangulation of its credit markets will only become more severe, likely leading to a meltdown somewhere in the emerging markets, one of whose effects will almost certainly spread to engulf the severely weakened Western European and US financial sectors and plunge particularly the US economy into a deep depression, with potent negative effects upon the dollar.

Such an eventuality will tend to force global investors to evaluate the safe-haven appeal of the dollar based much more on the fundamentals of the US economy, and that will portend a stampede out of the dollar and a potentially chaotic bursting of the massive Treasuries bubble. Hence, even if the US finds buyers for its huge sums of new sovereign debt now beginning to flood the markets, the picture does not look good for the dollar beyond the short term.

Obviously, if the US reaches the point where it fails to find sufficient buyers for its new flood of Treasuries, that will also become a perilous situation for the dollar and for the huge Treasuries bubble, which will almost certainly burst as global investors seek better stores of wealth in hard assets, following the lead of China's central bank.

Either way, the US is engaged in the implementation of extremely risky and potent inflationary, dollar-debasing policies, making a loss of global confidence in the dollar in the short to medium term a virtual certainty. Even if the massive spending does restore economic growth, the US economy is likely to remain very weak for some time. That will make it extremely difficult for the US Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy to fight off the inevitable and potent inflation that will result from today's shortsighted policies.

When the Fed attempts to tighten, the US economy will likely be plunged into a second-round recession or depression, with obviously awful effects upon the dollar. But if the Fed fails to tighten sufficiently and quickly, runaway inflation will ravage the currency anyway.

Prudent, forward-looking Chinese officials have clearly assessed the entire situation as one demanding careful but swift action to ensure that its huge reserves are not imperiled by what has obviously become an untenable global rush into an unstable and perilous dollar bubble.

Hence, China's central bank is enacting with a sense of urgency prudent measures, both explicit and clandestine, to significantly decrease exposure to the dollar. If the details of such measures should become sufficiently public and should attract undue global attention before China accomplishes its goals, a dollar panic might be triggered.

This risk, though perhaps not major, does exist nonetheless, and it is significantly increasing as China undertakes new measures that might attract undue and unwanted global attention. However, it is also likely that China will enjoy cover and gain breathing space to enact its prudent measures while much of the rest of the world continues to rush into the bubble.

Notes
1. See "China's Record Demand for Treasuries in 2008", by Brad Setser, The Council on Foreign Relations.
2. See "China's Resource Buys" by Rachel Ziemba, RGE Monitor.

W Joseph Stroupe is a strategic forecasting expert and editor of Global Events Magazine online at www.globaleventsmagazine.com

(Copyright 2009 Global Events Magazine, All Rights Reserved.)
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16 oct; el" milagro" peruano, idl - ------------29 jul entrevista a gonzalo garcia

Gerardo Saravia(http://www.revistaideele.com/node/570)

* Los gráficos han sido tomados del economista Waldo Mendoza.

De tanto hablar del milagro económico peruano, finalmente se ha concretado, pero no exactamente en los términos de blindaje ante la crisis con el que el Presidente encandiló nuestros oídos a comienzos de este año.

Ni siquiera (a pesar de los pronósticos oficiales) podremos, en el epílogo de la crisis mundial, contar a nuestro país entre los que mejor performance lograron. A estas alturas, el cuento de “Perú país refugio de capitales” mejor ni contarlo.

Con la caída de diez a cero puntos en el PBI, el milagro anunciado se convirtió en la pesadilla del soñador. Estamos entre los países que han sufrido la caída más brutal de su producción en lo que va del año. ¿De la región? Qué va: del mundo.

Bajo cero

Sin duda, a fin de año no faltarán los titulares con cuadros comparativos que anunciarán, festivos, que hemos crecido más que nuestros vecinos y lejanos. En esas condiciones, habrá que aclarar la diferencia entre un país que crecía a 4% y ha caído a menos 2% y uno que crecía a 9% y ha caído a cero o uno.

El terremoto de 8 puntos abajo en escala García no va a significar una hecatombe económica como la de los años 1980, pero sí revela la vulnerabilidad de nuestra economía. No era tan fuerte como nos habían contado. O, lo que es peor, no hemos sabido administrar nuestras fuerzas.

No existe acá afán alguno de endilgarle al Gobierno culpas externas. Está claro que la crisis la importamos, y que no existía maniobra macro ni micro capaz de evitar que se presentara en el país. El pecado consistió precisamente en pretender negar lo evidente, no hacer nada o hacerlo a destiempo.

¿El resultado?: una caída brutal del PBI que ha llevado al aparato productivo a la recesión desde hace dos trimestres. Sin embargo, el Gobierno persiste en el error de negarlo.

El impacto económico de la crisis en el país se expresa, según el economista Bruno Seminario, por tres canales: inversión minera, manufactura y servicios.

“Esta crisis ha afectado la rentabilidad de la minería. Los flujos de inversión directa extranjera en el último trimestre del año pasado pasaron de 7.000 millones de dólares a cero. Luego se recuperaron un poco. Los nuevos proyectos de inversión se han cortado.”

La industria textil ha caído en un 50%, como la producción agroindustrial: no han podido vender sus productos al exterior y tampoco los pudieron colocar acá. Lo mismo ha ocurrido en otras ramas. Los economistas llaman a esto “reducción de inventarios”. Es decir, las industrias acumularon una serie de productos que no llegaron a vender y han tenido que reducir sus tasas de producción.

En el sector construcción construcción, una catapulta económica, se ha registrado un incremento mínimo de la inversión pública (ésta representa, en total, un 10% del PBI) y un decrecimiento de la privada, que es la principal en el sector.

Lamentablemente, esta información no son quejas de llorones y pesimistas como zarandeó el despacho gubernamental a inicios de año. Son cifras oficiales, obtenidas de fuentes oficiales, confundidas y clandestinas entre los encriptados informes del BCR y el INEI.

A pesar de la cáustica ineptitud de nuestros conductores económicos, hay aspectos de nuestra economía que se mantienen fuertes debido al abultado crecimiento de años anteriores. El sistema bancario, por ejemplo. Las últimas grandes crisis nacionales dejaron como saldo muchos bancos muertos y los demás heridos o absorbidos. En este caso se han mantenido indemnes.

El sector Comercio sigue siendo un misterio. De acuerdo con la rebúsqueda oficial, se aprecia un incremento, lo que parecería contradictorio con esta etapa de crisis. No es lógico encontrar que toda la industria caiga de porrazo y que el sector comercial no solo se mantenga sino que crezca.

Bruno Seminario cree encontrar la razón en el cambio de metodología: “En el sector comercial no se sabe bien lo que está pasando; si se midiera con la metodología antigua, estaría cayendo en 7%. El sector está compuesto tanto por el grupo de tiendas pequeñas y bodegas como por los grandes centros comerciales. Ahora las encuestas captan solo las ventas de las empresas grandes. El problema es que ahora estas grandes tiendas se están expandiendo a sectores donde antes estaban las pequeñas. Por ejemplo, si alguien antes compraba en tiendas chicas, ahora lo hace en las grandes, y las estadísticas muestran ese incremento como si fuera una expansión general del comercio”.

Bien dicen que existe la verdad, la mentira y las estadísticas.

Ensayo sobre la ceguera

Ante esta recatafila de malas noticias, es inevitable preguntar qué se hizo mal. El economista Waldo Mendoza, aquel que vaticinara crecimiento cero para este año y que se ganó a pulso la ira oficial, intenta dibujarnos el asunto de una manera muy poco auspiciosa para quienes pensaban que García había aprendido la lección de no meterse en temas para los que está negado.

“Pese a todas las fortalezas que decíamos tener, el comportamiento de la economía ha sido muy similar al de 1997-1998 (la última gran crisis). En 1997 la economía crecía 7%, y en 1998 nos caímos 1%. Este año crecíamos al 10% y probablemente llegaremos a cero. La responsabilidad básica es de la política macroeconómica. Debe ser la primera vez en la historia que contábamos con todos los recursos para enfrentar la crisis. En 1998 no teníamos divisas; esta vez sí, y muchas. En 1998 los bancos estaban frágiles: un pequeño sacudón los tumbaba y de hecho los tumbó; esta vez están sólidos. En 1998 teníamos déficit fiscal y no podíamos hacer una política fiscal contracíclica; esta vez sí la tenemos. Todo esto nos hace pensar que hay algo que no hemos hecho bien.”

Otra oportunidad perdida. No estábamos curados.

La búsqueda de culpables no es muy productiva en lo inmediato, pero debería ser aleccionadora. Veamos cómo funciona la cosa: la política macroeconómica es responsabilidad del Ministerio de Economía y del BCR. Cuando se da un episodio de crisis, estas instituciones son las encargadas de tomar las medidas para contrarrestarlo o, al menos, amortiguarlo.

Como impedir la crisis era imposible, lo que sí se podía era morigerar sus efectos. La receta para estos casos no es un enigma egipcio: se trata, más bien, de una fórmula universal. El BCR baja los intereses y el Ministerio de Economía expande el gasto fiscal. A eso también se le conoce como una política contracíclica: cuando el mercado se contrae, el Estado expande su inversión y baja los intereses; cuando el mercado se expande, el Estado contrae el gasto.

A las dos instituciones se les critica que no hayan tomado las medidas a tiempo.

En el caso del BCR hay opiniones encontradas. Si bien se le achaca haber bajado los encajes y los intereses cuando la crisis ya era muy profunda, Seminario sostiene que hizo bien en esperar que se estabilizara la situación del quebrado Lehman Brothers, para que la medida tuviera efecto en un mejor terreno.

En lo que sí todos coinciden es en la parsimonia con la que actuó el Ministerio de Economía. Rigurosamente errática. Cuando la crisis era inminente y todos vaticinaban contracción mundial, acá seguíamos festejando nuestro inflamado PBI. Cuando la mayoría de gobiernos del mundo decidieron hacer una política fiscal expansiva, aquí Valdivieso —entonces ministro de Economía— redujo inexplicablemente el gasto fiscal. Cuando la crisis nos golpeó en la cara a inicios de año, se decía que creceríamos 6,5%. Al final terminaron despidiendo al Mago Valdivieso y el Puma Carranza reingresó a la cancha, pero quiso meter los goles a último minuto, cuando ya perdíamos por goleada. ¿Demasiado boys estos chicagos? ¿O le hacían demasiado caso al capitán del equipo?

Waldo Mendoza no puede entender cómo gente capacitada pudo cometer yerros tan grandes. “Tenemos un BCR con gente sofisticada; tenemos un Ministerio de Economía con gente sofisticada que se creyó el discurso gubernamental que estamos blindados si se dice que estamos blindados. ¿Para qué hacer algo?”.

Es difícil imaginar a nuestro Presidente tomando distancia de las grandes decisiones. Su notoria tendencia es más bien a meter la cuchara en todo, y no nos referimos a su fisonomía. Bueno, también.

El problema es que cuando el Presidente decía que la economía peruana estaba blindada y que íbamos a ser refugio del capital extranjero, era porque realmente se lo creía. Y el Gobierno actuó de acuerdo con esta peregrina idea.

Lo cierto es que este año, de lo único que fuimos refugio fue de dos ex ministros bolivianos acusados de violar derechos humanos, y de que la inversión extranjera se fue hasta nuevo aviso, más rápido que volando.

Un lector desavisado podrá advertir que no siente la crisis. Que la gente sigue comprando igual y que sigue llenando las tiendas. Y puede tener razón, lo que, sin embargo, no significa que la crisis no exista. La peculiaridad de esta crisis es que ha atacado directamente a la médula del aparato productivo pero no ha producido inflación.

Según Bruno Seminario, la crisis no se siente globalmente en el país porque los perjudicados están muy sectorizados: “Solo la gente que se ha quedado sin trabajo ha visto reducidos sus ingresos. No es como antes, cuando todos se quedaban sin ingresos porque o subía el tipo de cambio o subían todos los precios, producto de la inflación, y eso afectaba a todo el mundo. Ahora se afecta únicamente a una parte de la población, y eso determina cierta estabilidad en la demanda de servicios”. Sin embargo, si la crisis continúa y no nos recuperamos, ella seguirá afectando la cadena productiva y podría llegar a todos, ya que el Estado no tiene la capacidad de sostener indefinidamente el gasto fiscal que contenga la crisis.

Para ello hay dos cosas que debemos considerar: el desenvolvimiento de la crisis internacional, y… que estamos en recesión.

No se lo digas a nadie

Aunque el Gobierno lo ha querido negar en todos sus silencios, de acuerdo con la nomenclatura internacional, el Perú se encuentra en recesión desde principios de año. Es el único país que no ha querido admitirlo. Aquí también se presenta el truquito de las estadísticas.

Para que un país se declare en recesión debe haber tenido, en dos trimestres seguidos, un crecimiento por debajo de cero. El Gobierno argumenta que en el primer trimestre de este año crecimos 0,9% y, por lo tanto, no estamos en recesión. Pero así no se mide el PBI en este mundo. Existe una forma seria de medir el PBI, que se llama “medición estacionalizada”. Mejor que lo explique Waldo Mendoza:

“Por ejemplo, en agricultura la producción de papa en mayo y junio siempre será mayor que en agosto. Entonces, para tener una visión real de la producción se desestacionalizan las cifras, lo que implica usar determinadas formas económicas como las que utilizan los macroeconomistas. De esa manera se mide el PBI en todo el mundo desarrollado.

“Si uno mira las cifras desestacionalizadas en el Perú, descubre que estamos en recesión desde el último trimestre del año pasado, y no hay hasta ahora ningún documento oficial que lo reconozca. Claro: cuando uno reconoce que está enfermo, aplica las medidas correspondientes. Somos el único país que tiene vergüenza de admitir que está en recesión”.

Lo que suceda en adelante con nuestro país va a seguir dependiendo de cómo se esclarezca el panorama mundial. La buena noticia es que la crisis parece haber tocado fondo y la recuperación se empezará a notar en los próximos meses. El problema va a ser cuán lenta o rápida puede ser, como advierte Mendoza:

“Al parecer, las tasas desestacionalizadas del cuarto trimestre en los Estados Unidos, Japón y Alemania van a ser positivas. Casi todos coinciden en que la recuperación ya empieza, pero también en que esa recuperación va a ser lenta, por diversos motivos. En el caso norteamericano, porque su Gobierno, para salir de la crisis, se ha puesto a gastar como loco; por eso su déficit fiscal debe estar en 8 o 9% de su PBI. Como esa cifra es insostenible, los próximos años los norteamericanos van a buscar desaparecer ese déficit cobrando impuestos. No hay otro método. Entonces el consumo privado no va a poder reactivarse en ese país, como estábamos acostumbrados. En Europa va a ser lo mismo, y éstas son las locomotoras del mundo. Si Europa y los Estados Unidos van a tener un crecimiento modesto, ¿como podrá crecer China sostenidamente? Así como en la caída, en la recuperación también los efectos son lentos”.

Quizá sea mejor curarse en salud. Pero el Gobierno, a pesar de la elocuencia de los números, parece que no termina de curarse de entusiasmitis y ha decidido que ya no es necesario seguir expandiendo el gasto fiscal. En el último presupuesto más bien se observa una reducción para las regiones. El ex vicepresidente del BCR, Óscar Dancourt, observa que en un contexto negativo esta contracción podría ser bastante dañina:

“Hay actuar de manera preventiva, pero para eso necesitas un diagnóstico exacto, y no se sabe qué va a pasar con la economía mundial. El Ministro ha dicho que ya no se necesitarían más impulsos fiscales, pero la recesión se puede extender hasta el 2010. Y para eso hay que comprar un seguro, que consiste en seguir con una política fiscal expansiva. En cambio, si no se concreta, se cortan esos programas”.

El Gobierno apuesta todas sus fichas a una eminente recuperación de la economía, sin tener en cuenta lo larga y lenta que puede ser.

Como corolario de las infelices cifras que coronan la macroeconomía peruana, puede decirse que el consejo de oro lo tienen las abuelas: decir la verdad, aunque duela. Lo recomienda hasta el sentido común: el primer paso para combatir una enfermedad es reconocer que se la tiene.

El presidente García tenía en esta crisis económica la oportunidad de su vida para revindicarse como estadista; pero ha demostrado, una vez más, que la economía no es su fuerte.

A diferencia de los años 80, esta vez tenía todo a su favor. Pero nuevamente desaprovechó la oportunidad. El 0% de crecimiento que nos acecha este año y la caída en nueve puntos del PBI hablan lindo de un Presidente peleado con los números y, hace mucho, también con la verdad.

------------------

entrevista 29 julio; discurso sin bases reales, la primera

>Un discurso optimista que se estrella contra la contundencia de las cifras. Para el economista Gonzalo García, el discurso por 28 de julio del presidente Alan García fue decepcionante, pues en ningún momento tocó temas urgentes como el aumento de los salarios y las pensiones, además de proyectar una recuperación importante de nuestra economía, cuando las cifras nos señalan lo contrario.

“Habla de una mejora de nuestra situación gracias a los TLC, cuando los datos nos hablan de importantes caídas de nuestras importaciones y exportaciones. Habla de recuperación, cuando el PBI ha pasado de un resultado positivo de 14% en junio del año pasado, a ubicarse ahora en -2%. Estos datos nos hablan que literalmente estamos yendo para atrás. Este gobierno ha traído por tierra 90 meses de crecimiento sostenido. Y es que, al parecer, el discurso y los sueños del presidente García están cada vez más alejados de la realidad”, sostuvo.

Sobre la propuesta presidencial de centralizar el plan anticrisis en el desarrollo de infraestructura comercial y productiva, Gonzalo García sostuvo que esta propuesta es una clara muestra de este distanciamiento entre las cifras y el pensamiento de García. “Se apoyan en la inversión privada, cuando ha pasado de un pico de crecimiento de 28% en 2008 a una caída de - 1.1% en el primer trimestre; y en el caso de la inversión publica, la misma no ha llegado ni a la quinta parte. Se ha ido de bruces, en ese sentido”, sostuvo.

GONZALO GARCIA: CONTRA EL PESIMISMO, PREVISION Y PERSPECTIVA

“Contra el pesimismo

Previsión y perspectiva”,

Antonio Gramsci

QUO VADIS 2009?

Escribe: Gonzalo García Núñez, especial para

Le Monde Diplomatique Peru, Julio 2009

El gobierno ha destruido la trayectoria de muchos años consecutivos de crecimiento. Por eso las encuestas develan que su popularidad colisiona con las expectativas ciudadanas. De allí la importancia de saber lo que nos espera en el segundo semestre del 2009.

El decrecimiento mundial interanual será -1.4% durante el año responden las optimistas previsiones del FMI de DSK[1].

Perú bate un record de puenting (caída libre) del crecimiento: De tasas cercanas al 14% cae - 2% entre junio 2008 y mayo 2009, según datos de INEI.

Por eso, cero vaticinan los economistas más serios, ninguno más allá del 2% para el 2009.

Algunos voluntaristas creen que ya estamos en el “fondo del pozo” y que, en adelante, el mundo (y nosotros con el) rebotará hacia una tibia expansión en U o en L para el 2010.[2]

Otros presagios infieren que la trayectoria será mas bien una WWW, arranque y parada, stop and go, Roubini dixit.[3] También hay los ilusos. La fe del carbonero. Si se puede! [4]

Lo único que si se puede asegurar es que la crisis acabará. ¿Cuando y como? Nadie sabe con certeza.

CRISIS CON SANGRE ENTRA

En lo que hay un consenso es en el carácter inédito de la actual crisis:

1º Sensu contrario, la crisis partió del centro hacia la periferia. Pero hoy la recesión y la deflación son globales, salvo China e India, desacelerados.

Al fin de este primer semestre ambos cunden en los EE UU. La depresión se cierne negativamente sobre la Eurozona (15 millones desempleados). También la estagnación afecta a los debutantes países capitalistas de Europa del Este, muerde las otrora rollizas reservas internacionales de la Rusia.

Antes hizo trizas a la helada Islandia, le despoja de todo encanto a la neo liberalizada Irlanda, noquea a los Estados baltos, y en las antípodas, pela a los países de la ASEAN.

La deprime no escatima a las plantas exportadoras del Japón industrial -aun cuando hay signos de esperanzada reactivación- i lentifica el crecimiento de los países-factoría del Asia.

(Casi) nadie se salva de los efectos de la crisis en este valle de lágrimas. Realmente mundial, la peor en años, nacida de las entrañas mismas del sistema global. Marx vive.[5]

2º Abate el comercio de mercancías y servicios. La tendencia a la constitución de un mercado mundial único encuentra sus límites. Pascal Lamy, secretario de la OMC estima que la caída del flujo de bienes y servicios será de -12.2%. . Concuerda el desplome de los índices de flete marítimo (báltica dry index) y de la carga aérea desde el tercer trimestre 2008.

3º Profundiza la desvalorización de los mercados financieros, depreciando acciones, bonos, derivados, índices, instrumentos cambiarios y forex, las divisas claves y en especial, el dólar agujereado.[6]

El estallido de la “burbuja subprime” dejó, además, un mercado hipotecario maltrecho. Y por propagación -hacia arriba- destruyó el mercado de seguros, reaseguros y garantías y en el downstream, desató una crisis de confianza.

La crítica situación de los mercados modificó el curso y sentido de la inversión productiva internacional.

Hubo un claro reflujo inversionista hacia tierras matrices. Por ahora se refugian en un pensativo wait&see pese a la espectacular recuperación de algunas bolsas.

4º. Ha obligado a la mayor intervención publica que se recuerde con fines de reestructuración bancaria (Planes Brown, Paulson, Geithner,..) y, en general, de los fatigados intermediarios financieros.

La corrección del G20 anuncia el “pinchazo” a las espectaculares burbujas bursátiles, el sinceramiento del dólar, el freno a la incontenible alza de algunas materias primas-refugio.

La agenda incluye, coda, el desbloqueo de las negociaciones comerciales internacionales de la ronda Doha ante la inviabilidad de las políticas de subsidio y de protección vigentes.

Queda pendiente el rol de la crisis en el alisamiento de los desbalances mundiales. Hay que dar solución al gigantesco déficit fiscal (-12.7% PBI) de los EE. UU y el problema del masivo endeudamiento externo que desnivela balanza de cuenta corriente gringa.

5º Las perturbaciones se manifiestan en el mercado mundial de materias primas, petróleo, gas y derivados, bienes salario y alimentos que forman el primer piso de los circuitos productivos internacionalizados y deslocalizados.

Los precios de los metales-commodities como el cobre (“el salario de Chile”, Salvador Allende) han oscilado violentamente, a merced de la especulación financiera. ((Jefferies commodities index). El petróleo fue usado por los operadores como activo de protección al riesgo sistémico. Si hay reactivación gatillará la inflación.

6º La transmisión de la crisis financiera al sector real, el “contagio” quebró segmentos enteros del “fordismo” (Automotriz, General Motors, piezas y partes...). Produjo la ruptura de las líneas de abastecimiento de las transnacionalizadas actividades productivas y el cambio en el patrón de localización de la planta como de transito de los trabajadores emigrantes.

Y se ha agravado la crisis de realización de las mercancías y servicios en los mercados. Al aplanarse el consumo, crecen inventarios y se ralentizan las ventas de maquinaria y equipo.

El corolario del contagio es la destrucción de millones de empleos calificados que difícilmente volverán.

7º La necesidad de un altísimo grado de coordinación de políticas, superior al G8, G20, BRICS o de la institucionalidad de Bretton Woods. A problema global, gobernanza global, sugiere Attali.

¿Para que? Secar las masivas emisiones de papeles, calendarizar la resorción de los medios de pago creados para facilitar liquidez, el desinfle de amenazas mediatas de los mercados bursátiles y la atenuación de la volatilidad entre monedas soberanas. Agregue freno a las peligrosas devaluaciones competitivas o de cierres unilaterales de mercado (buy american, cómprale al Perú.) como barreras al comercio. De otra forma, la inflación acecha.

8º Hay un vertiginoso incremento de la deuda mundial, sobretodo la de los EE.UU., y un peligroso desorden monetario. Nadie duda del impacto de un dólar “flojo” en el mercado de deuda y de los activos financieros. Por lo demás, el supply Chain de Chimerica[7] crea una gigantesca acumulación de reservas cambiarias ($2 billones) en China de la que pende el futuro de la nueva moneda de reserva mundial.

9º. El fracaso de la autorregulación de los mercados. Emergen, afortunadamente, nuevos conceptos, diseños y políticas económicas proactivas fundadas en renovados paradigmas sobre la asimetría de la información, la selección adversa, la teoría de juegos y el análisis de las fallas de funcionamiento de los mercados. Significa que el Estado es útil y que junto a los agentes principales produce medidas regulatorias de los mercados. Por fin.

- Queda pendiente la purga: activos financieros malolientes, pirámides Ponzi-Madoff, fondos de pensiones gitanos, secretosos hedge funds, los BCCI del S.XXI. Deshacer la malla del shadow finance (finanzas en la sombras, desregulada) y hasta extinguir los “paraísos tributarios”, pedidos por el G20-(Londres, abril 2009).

Numerosos trabajos hacen conocer mejor este retrato de la crisis. Facilitan el examen de las salidas posibles en el corto plazo para los países como el Perú.[8]

CONTRA EL PESIMISMO, PREVISION

Para enfrentar esta magna crisis, el Perú requiere una política contracíclica potente.

Quiere decir el uso sincronizado de instrumentos que compensen la caída de la demanda.

Se trata de sostener el nivel de actividad mediante el estimulo de la demanda interna.

¿Para que? Preservar el consumo y defender el empleo, la producción, el ahorro e inversión de las empresas, los ingresos de los exportadores, fortalecer las cuentas públicas, auspiciar el desarrollo de los mercados internos y la construcción de la infraestructura física.

También usar medios eficaces para compensar el déficit en cuenta corriente y la defensa de la posición de cambio del instituto emisor. En fin, contrarrestar los factores desequilibrantes y jerarquizados que provoca la erosión de la demanda agregada.

Para ello se necesitan instrumentos de intervención.

¿Los hay? Si, muy sofisticados.

Las herramientas de política monetaria están disponibles. Fueron construidas y adaptadas por el equipo del Profesor Dancourt[9] y fue asumido por el BCRP desde los primeros días del 2002.[10]

Usa la tasa de interés de referencia como instrumento de la autoridad monetaria, un protocolo de seguimiento cambiario, propio de una economía parcialmente dolarizada, un modelo de previsión para gestionar el programa de inflación objetivo (inflation targeting) que propone escenarios y algunos elementos teóricos de la gestión de portafolios en riesgo.

La política fiscal se funda en el resultado fiscal estructural, la implantación de indicadores lideres, estabilizadores automáticos y autonomía creciente del Estado frente al endeudamiento externo.[11]

La curva de referencia del mercado de bonos del tesoro, formada mediante un programa creador de mercados, es otro instrumento que orienta el financiamiento de la inversión en soles y la formación del mercado secundario de papeles.

Pero lo que importa es que nadie puede alegar carencia de instrumentos.

De su aplicación eficaz depende el resultado del 2009. Contra el pesimismo, previsión y perspectiva.

[1] FMI, Perspectives de l´économie mondiale, aperçu des projections, 8 Juillet 2009.

[2] Tim Geithner declara: « La plupart des prévisionnistes tablent sur une amélioration des indicateurs aux Etats-Unis dès le quatrième trimestre », les Echos, Paris, 18.07.09., Larry Summers: “La economía de Estados Unidos estuvo "al borde de una catástrofe" en enero, pero ha logrado progresos "sustanciales" desde entonces, principal, asesor económico de la Casa Blanca, Washington, EFE, 17.07.09

[3] N. Roubini, RGE Monitor, July 2009.

[4] Las modestas cifras de ejecución de la inversión pública develan una paradójica aunque no infrecuente contradicción entre la fe y la obra. Una por exceso, la otra por defecto. La crisis no se vence por decreto. Menos aun por una virtud cardinal si la inversión es insuficiente: apenas 22% del presupuesto en el primer semestre, Portal del MEF, 18 de julio 2009

[5] Grundrisse der kritrik der politischen okonomie, ed. francesa, Anthropos, Paris,1967

[6] Los balances semestrales de las empresas cotizadas en bolsas internacionales arrojan perdidas pero su cotización en bolsa sube aunque todavía no recuperan sus niveles de antaño. ¿Burbuja?

[7] China y América, alusión irónica al enlazado sistema que los une en la producción y el consumo, el financiamiento y el tipo de cambio.

[8] Aglietta, Michel, Macroeconomie financière, La Découverte, Paris, 2008 ; Del mismo autor, La crise, Michalon, Paris, 2009 ; Attali, Jacques, la crise et âpres, Fayard, Paris, 2009 ; Conseil d´Analyse Economique, Artus Patrick et alii, La crise des subprimes, la documentation française, Paris, 2008. Ver también: Greenspan, Alan, Le temps des turbulences, JC Lattes, Paris 2007. Y los trabajos de Blanchard, Orlean, Pastre, Cohen, Lordon, Benassy-Querré, Pisani, Cristian de Boissieu, Borrelly, CEPII, OFCE, ISMEA..

[9] Regla de Taylor que acepta los efectos de un régimen bimonetario.

[10] Los resultados fueron: Inflación inferior a 1.5%; 7.5% crecimiento en el 2006; 60 meses ininterrumpidos de expansión; gran acumulación de reservas y un tipo de cambio real de equilibrio levemente positivo.

[11] Al que contribuyeron los profesores Burneo, Jiménez, Mendoza y Schydlowsky, entre otros. La economía despejo un importante saldo de las cuentas fiscales, permitió una mayor autonomía al Estado por la paulatina e inexorable amortización de la deuda externa y el crecimiento de la deuda interna en soles.

Gonzalo Garcia-ENTREVISTA CONCEDIDA AL IDL- 28.10.2008: suerte del gabinete

¿Por qué cree que Alan García optó por la audaz jugada de nombrar a Yehude Simon primer ministro? Sobrevivencia. Los petro audios fueron el golpe de gracia a un gabinete gastado y agobiado por la corrupción. La erosión de la popularidad presidencial había decaído de 62% a menos de 20% entre agosto 2006 y septiembre 2008, lejos de Lula (80%) en Brasil o de Correa en Ecuador. Hay un rechazo de la población al programa de gobierno de la innecesaria coalición del alanismo con los ultra neoliberales. La fatiga de la gente con los magros resultados alcanzados a la fecha es evidente. Inclusive sonaron tambores de revocatoria fuera de Lima. De haber proseguido, la gobernanza del país se iba al despeñadero. Al precipicio de una crisis de gobernabilidad. De modo que el nombramiento del Dr. YSM encarna la voluntad presidencial de sobrevivir al liquidado programa neoliberal de los dos primeros años que lo ha remunerado con una pérdida de 43 puntos en las encuestas. Es también una señal de amiste urgente para las regiones a las que el MEF había clavado contra la pared en la elaboración del presupuesto y se preparaban para exigir un presupuesto alternativo. ¿Qué cree que pretende el gobierno que logre Simon? Un paraguas transitorio mientras reacomoda la carga. Es una salida al fracaso de la táctica de la mecedora para enfrentar los problemas regionales. Pero esta claro que durara poco después de los sucesos de Moquegua, Tacna, Cajamarca y San Martín. Y es una respuesta al derrumbe planetario del edificio ideológico del neoliberalismo. De ese artefacto no queda ni un ladrillo. Basta con leer las declaraciones de Greenspan (“me equivoque”) o a las muy recientes de Mario Vargas Llosa en Barcelona. Ambos han tenido la hidalguía intelectual de reconocer sus errores de apreciación sobre el modelo neoliberal. El gobernante aprovechara la imagen dialogante del Presidente del Consejo de Ministros. Claro que la crisis mundial y sus canales de contagio lo pueden llevar rápido a un endurecimiento que a nadie conviene. Hay una derecha musculosa que amenaza con la violencia e incita al gobierno a la represión del movimiento social ahora que la crisis ha triturado su rollo justificatorio y se ha quedado sin referentes. Es también una señal adversa para el fujimontesinismo supérstite que aspira a salvar a su jefe mediante alianzas tácticas con el gobierno alanista, caso de las elecciones parlamentarias en que ejerce la vicepresidencia y hace pesar los votos de su grupo legislativo. ¿Qué opciones tiene el mismo Yehude Simon? Durar. ¿Cómo le está yendo estos primeros días? Paro la hemorragia de las encuestas. Pero el panorama futuro es confuso. Hay los tráficos de los pozos petroleros, la construcción de hospitales, las compras de medicamentos, el otorgamiento de bosques madereros, concesiones mineras y petroleras, la gigantesca perdida de las AFPS, el VRAE. Habrá que esperar su mensaje ante el congreso para saber como piensa encarar estos temas sin que lo muerda el perro del hortelano. YSM se hace acompañar por algunas personalidades de trayectoria expectante en los ministerios sociales. Pero tiene plomo en las alas en los ministerios claves. En el organigrama de su despacho parecería que le han impuesto algunos personajes vinculados a truculentos “salvatajes” de bancos quebrados, el affaire de las reservas internacionales en el BCCI y cuestionados negocios con el dinero público. Después del escándalo de los petroaudios, debiera curarse en salud. ¿Cómo ve los próximos escenarios posibles a corto plazo? Seamos un poco maniqueos, el mejor escenario posible y el peor escenario posible. La crisis mundial traerá la deflación y la recesion. Se describe hoy como un escenario con retorno en V, caída fuerte y rebote vigoroso. Otros piensan que la crisis será en L, caída fuerte y estagnación, al estilo de Japón en que la recesion duro diez años. O en U, lento retorno después de un tiempo en el fondo del purgatorio. Eventualmente en WWW, caídas y rebotes, caídas y rebotes, el motor no arranca. Sarkozy, el presidente francés, supone en ese caso el riesgo de un ciclo de revoluciones políticas a escala planetaria. De esos escenarios, en el primero, YSM aparecería como salvador. Todos los demás lo harían regresar a Chiclayo. ------------------- GONZALO GARCIA, PERU ESTA EN RECESION, entrevista 24 junio 09,LP Gonzalo García sostiene que hay crisis para rato y que el plan de estímulo está mal diseñado y retrasado. PERU ESTA EN RECESION Resalta necesidad de reasignar los recursos no utilizados para afrontar urgencias. Frente a un escenario de recesión, en el que el ministro Carranza busca seguir pintando el mejor de los panoramas proyectando que en el segundo trimestre se debe tocar fondo en la desaceleración de la economía nacional, y previendo que en el tercer y cuarto trimestre habrá un crecimiento importante en el país; Gonzalo García sostiene que sin un verdadero plan contracíclico (en que el gobierno apoye a los agentes económicos) decrecerá la demanda global y la inversión en los próximos meses. -¿Está de acuerdo con las proyecciones ministeriales? -No. El Perú está en recesión desde marzo 2009- dos trimestres consecutivos de decrecimiento del PBI desestacionalizado- y en deflación- a la fecha, cinco meses consecutivos de caída del Índice de precios -¿Es cierto que lo peor de la crisis culmina en el segundo trimestre y de ahí vienen tiempos de crecimiento? - Seminario, Matuk, Mendoza, Roca, Alarco, Jiménez coinciden que las cifras de la recesión, usando los datos y la metodología previa del INEI, serian aun mayores en el periodo ya transcurrido. Con el actual desmanejo tenemos crisis para rato. -¿Cómo ve el avance de la crisis financiera en el país? -Inexorable. Sin un verdadero plan contracíclico decrecerá la demanda global, la inversión y hay riesgo de mayor fuga de capitales. Los acuerdos entre el gobierno y los grupos económicos transnacionales- los decretos legislativos- han colisionado con el interés general y de las comunidades más empobrecidas. Cabe una revisión de sus compromisos, corregirlos y adaptarlos al clima social que prevalece en el país para evitar mayor crisis financiera. -La medida gubernamental de reasignar recursos a los proyectos más retrasados y hacia los distritos más populosos del país, ¿no se trabaría debido a la poca capacidad de gestión de los funcionarios públicos? -El Plan de Estímulo Económico, mal diseñado y peor ejecutado, viene retrasado. Ahora les urge reasignar recursos no-utilizados. La urgencia social crece: el índice de consumo de calorías baja, friaje andino y la gripe porcina avanzan, la pobreza solo decrece en las hojas de cálculo. No es un problema de funcionarios. El año pasado, la inversión publica se expandió, lo que indica que el problema radica en la lenidad de las decisiones políticas. -Diferentes sectores piden al gobierno medidas complementarias al PEE para atenuar el impacto de la crisis financiera, ¿qué otras medidas deben implementarse? ¿El PEE está bien orientado? -Cierto. Reclaman medidas compensatorias frente a la crisis y el TLC. Urge rediseñar el paquete reactivador a partir del multiplicador del gasto fiscal, políticas sociales redistributivas, una canasta de consumo popular garantizada, alentar el empleo temporal y aligerar el peso impositivo a los menos afluentes.

Economia: luz roja;entrevista a gonzalo garcia en La Primera del 280409

YA ESTA AQUI En la siguiente entrevista, el ingeniero y economista Gonzalo García hace un descarnado diagnóstico de la crisis económica y analiza, desde una perspectiva crítica, las medidas tomadas por el gobierno. El ex director del Banco Central de Reserva cuestiona severamente la gestión del ministro de Economía, Luis Carranza, y alerta que se viene una grave recesión si no se cambia la política económica y comercial, y si no se mejora la capacidad de gasto del gobierno. ¿Cuál es la gravedad de la crisis económica en el Perú? -Se estima que el impacto de la crisis en la economía peruana llegará a 13,7 por ciento del PBI, que es de 140 mil millones de dólares. Las exportaciones bajarán de alrededor de 35 mil millones de dólares el 2008 a 23 mil millones en el 2009. Las importaciones han caído más de 30 por ciento. Las remesas enviadas por los peruanos que viven en el exterior caerán este año entre un mínimo de 390 millones de dólares hasta 1,900 millones de dólares. Se han suspendido varios proyectos de inversión extranjera, la que caerá 1,1 por ciento. Este año se van a perder unos 225 mil empleos. -Las cifras muestran un panorama sombrío. -Viendo el gráfico de la economía peruana es evidente que nos estamos yendo al fondo del pozo. La crisis está destruyendo noventa meses de crecimiento económico. En seis meses este gobierno ha tirado por la ventana lo que habíamos acumulado en siete años…

-¿Pero la caída del crecimiento es culpa de este gobierno o es consecuencia de la crisis mundial? -Es una combinación de ambos factores. Se advirtió reiteradas veces de la gravedad de lo que se venía, se le dijo al gobierno que gaste para que haya inversión y consumo, pero el gobierno dio una respuesta frívola e inconsistente, lo que ha tenido como resultado esta caída del crecimiento a casi cero. -¿Haber acelerado el crecimiento hasta llegar a cerca del diez por ciento el año pasado ha agravado la crisis? -Así es. El gobierno debió haber modulado el crecimiento a un nivel del siete por ciento, pero en lugar de eso lo lanzó a 150 kilómetros por hora y ahora el carro se está desbarrancando. El gobierno ha tenido una política de corto plazo de acelerar el crecimiento, sabiendo que eso generaría consecuencias negativas a mediano plazo, pero esperaba que la crisis estalle en unos años, cuando ellos ya no estén en el poder, y sea el próximo gobierno el que pague la factura. Pero con la crisis mundial la bomba estalló antes de lo que habían calculado. -¿Es una ilusión del presidente García pensar que el Perú puede ser un refugio para los inversionistas? -Eso es una tontería que está al nivel de la locura. -¿Y decir que el Perú no será muy afectado por la crisis es otra locura? -Durante mucho tiempo se dijo que estábamos blindados, pero estamos viendo que no es así. La crisis recién está comenzando. En los últimos seis meses del año sentiremos con mayor fuerza su impacto. -¿Qué medidas debe tomar el gobierno para disminuir la gravedad de ese impacto? -Hay que proteger el mercado interno, como están haciendo todos los países. Es suicida la actual política de bajar los aranceles y firmar Tratados de Libre Comercio. Es fundamental la inversión en obras de infraestructura de pequeña y mediana dimensión para defender los empleos y los salarios. Se debe mejorar la capacidad de consumo de la población, dándoles mayores ingresos a los trabajadores. -¿La liberación de las CTS es una buena medida para impulsar el consumo interno? -Eso es una cortina de humo. Estimulará el consumo solamente por una vez y su impacto será diminuto. -¿Y cuál será el impacto de la exoneración del pago de aportaciones sociales a las gratificaciones? -Tendrá un impacto positivo en la economía porque liberará como 400 millones de soles. Pero ese impacto será temporal. Está archiprobado por todas las políticas keynesianas que en una etapa de crisis el único modo de reconstituir el mercado es aumentando los sueldos… -¿Pero en medio de esta crisis es posible aumentar los sueldos? -En los últimos años las utilidades han crecido una barbaridad, pero los sueldos han subido muy poco. El Estado no sabe qué hacer con el dinero que no gasta. Y la industria privada para vender necesita que la gente pueda comprar. Bajando el interés referencial, que ahora está en cinco por ciento, a cerca del uno por ciento, como está en casi todos los países, se abarataría el crédito y eso le daría a la industria las condiciones para que expanda su capacidad productiva y así pueda aumentar sueldos. -¿Cuáles serán los sectores más golpeados por la crisis? -El sector textil, donde las ventas ya han caído 63 por ciento y la pérdida de empleos es muy importante; la industria del calzado; la agroindustria y las Pymes, particularmente las que trabajan vinculadas a la construcción, donde hay una caída muy fuerte. -¿Cuánto caerá el crecimiento económico este año? -El crecimiento del PBI ha bajado de 12,9 por ciento en el pico del 2008, a 0,19 por ciento en febrero de este año. Si esto sigue así, lo más optimista es pensar que el crecimiento estará alrededor de cero… -El FMI pronostica un crecimiento de 3,5 por ciento para nuestro país este año. En octubre de 2008, el FMI decía que el 2009 el Perú iba a crecer 6,9 por ciento; ahora ha bajado su cálculo de crecimiento a la mitad. Creo que lo más probable es que dentro de tres meses el FMI vuelva a bajar su pronóstico de crecimiento para el Perú. Si el programa anticrisis funciona, el crecimiento para este año será de cero, pero si no funciona podemos caer a menos cinco por ciento. -¿Y está funcionando o no el programa anticrisis? -Hasta ahora ese programa es un fracaso rotundo. Para fines de marzo el Estado debió haber ejecutado el 25 por ciento de los recursos destinados para inversión pública este año, pero la ejecución es de solamente el nueve por ciento. El nivel de gasto en sectores claves está por debajo del cinco por ciento. En el sector Salud y en los programas sociales se ha gastado menos del uno por ciento. Eso es una vergüenza. -¿Por qué el gobierno tiene tan poca capacidad para gastar lo presupuestado? -Por ineficacia administrativa y por la corrupción. Sacan a licitación la construcción de hospitales o la compra de ambulancias, por citar dos ejemplos, y se descubre un manejo deshonesto, por lo que las licitaciones se deben anular. -Su evaluación sobre el manejo económico del gobierno no deja espacio para el optimismo. -Si no se cambia la política económica y no se mejora la capacidad de gasto del gobierno, los pronósticos son pesimistas, porque la recesión será muy fuerte. “Gestión de Carranza es catastrófica” -¿Cómo evalúa la gestión del ministro de Economía, Luis Carranza? -Es una gestión catastrófica. Su primer fracaso fue el shock de inversiones. En esta segunda gestión ha fracasado con el programa anticrisis de estímulo económico. El ministro Carranza no tiene la capacidad para manejar una política económica. Ha llevado la economía al suelo. Su equipo impide que se movilice el gasto público. En el Congreso se ha descubierto un número impresionante de fondos que el gobierno crea, les asigna recursos y luego nunca se emite el decreto con el reglamento para usar esos fondos, y después con ese mismo dinero se plantean nuevos fondos. Es un truco para evitar gastar. -¿Cuál es la intención de evitar gastar el dinero que se tiene? -Existe la plata, están los proyectos, pero no se gasta. Eso es inexplicable, salvo que haya un intento de boicotear al gobierno desde dentro del propio gobierno… -¿Quiénes podrían querer boicotear al gobierno desde dentro? -Contraer el Estado en plena crisis es invitar a que la tensión social aumente. No me extrañaría que algunos quieran frenar la acción del Estado para agudizar la crisis y crear un caos en momentos que se puede ver el tema del indulto a Fujimori... -¿Usted cree que hay un complot fujimorista al interior del gobierno para agravar la crisis? -No encuentro otra explicación a esta política de frenar el gasto público. No olvidemos que el primer y segundo vicepresidentes de la República son fujimoristas, que en el Banco Central de Reserva está José Chlimper, que ha sido ministro de Fujimori. El ministro Carranza está estrechamente vinculado al Grupo Brescia, que junto con el Grupo Romero fueron parte de la columna vertebral económica del gobierno de Fujimori. Aquí puede haber una operación política compleja para intentar favorecer a Fujimori agravando la crisis, porque eso abre las puertas al autoritarismo, lo que favorecería a Fujimori. Entrevista: Carlos Noriega en diario La Primera, Lima.

entrevista a gonzalo garcia en La Primera del 28-oct-2008

Ingeniero, Economista, ex director del Banco Central de Reserva y actual director del Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas y Económicas de París, Gonzalo García analiza los efectos que tendrá la crisis económica mundial en el Perú y opina sobre lo que debería hacerse para contener su impacto. Crítico del plan anticrisis del gobierno, García cuestiona el retorno de Luis Carranza al Ministerio de Economía y advierte que el Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC) con Estados Unidos, que entrará en vigencia en una semana, tendrá efectos devastadores sobre la industria nacional y el agro. En la siguiente entrevista también se refiere al nivel de corrupción en el gobierno

¿Qué se puede esperar de Luis Carranza en su regreso al Ministerio de Economía para enfrentar la crisis mundial?

Se puede esperar muy poco. Carranza va a tener un sentido de mayor obediencia al presidente García del que tenía Valdivieso. En su gestión anterior, Carranza se montó en la ola de la bonanza económica, pero hizo cosas muy desafortunadas, como bajar los aranceles, lo que ha afectado a la industria nacional, y fracasó en el shock de inversiones. Poco antes de dejar el cargo y semanas antes de la crisis mundial y el desplome de los precios internacionales de nuestras materias primas, Carranza dijo que estábamos en un ciclo económico de crecimiento de los precios de las materias primas que iba a durar quince años, lo que indica que tiene el título de economista, pero no la ve. Está claro que Carranza no entiende lo que pasa en la economía internacional.

¿Por qué cree que el gobierno ha recurrido nuevamente a Carranza?

Hay versiones de que varios economistas fueron consultados y nadie quiso aceptar el cargo. Creo que el gobierno vuelve a recurrir a Carranza porque no tenía otra alternativa. Más temprano que tarde hay que pensar qué economista debería reemplazar a Carranza para manejar una crisis de esta envergadura.

¿Cuánto va afectar la crisis mundial al Perú?

Este año será catastrófico. La situación económica mundial se sigue agravando. Se viene un proceso de deflación mundial, lo que significa que los precios caerán por debajo del costo de producción, y una recesión que ya está operando en el mundo. La crisis mundial producirá en el Perú una caída vertical de las exportaciones, de los ingresos tributarios del gobierno y de los recursos que reciben las regiones por canon. Se viene la quiebra de muchas empresas, aumento del desempleo y una disminución en los ingresos de la población, proceso que ya está en marcha.

¿El plan anticrisis elaborado por Valdivieso y que Carranza dice que mantendrá servirá para contrarrestar los efectos de la crisis?

Ese plan anticrisis va a servir de muy poco. Más del 45 por ciento de los 10 mil millones de soles destinados a inversiones en este plan ya estaba en el presupuesto del 2009, y el saldo adicional es la ejecución del gasto presupuestado y no ejecutado en el 2008. Como dice el historiador Antonio Zapata, al igual que en el caso de la república de los consignatarios del guano y del salitre el gobierno no supo aprovechar el momento de bonanza en el que crecieron los precios de las materias primas, como los minerales, para generar los fondos que ahora servirían para enfrentar la crisis mundial. Todos los países, sin ir muy lejos Bolivia y Ecuador, tienen normas de impuestos a las sobreganancias, y eso les ha permitido recuperar excedentes que ahora en tiempos de crisis les sirven para mantener cierto equilibrio.

¿El TLC con Estados Unidos va ayudar a superar la crisis económica, como asegura el gobierno, o, más bien, va agravar sus efectos?
Es probable que algún nicho de exportación se beneficie, pero para la mayor parte de la economía el TLC va a tener un efecto negativo. Frente a la crisis se necesita fortalecer y proteger el mercado interno para evitar el cierre de empresas y el desempleo, y con el TLC los productos norteamericanos ingresarán al mercado peruano sin pagar aranceles afectando a la industria nacional. Las cuatro industrias principales, que son textiles, agroindustria, calzado y algunas industrias metálicas, van a quebrar, generando desempleo. También afectará seriamente a la pequeña industria, que no podrá competir con la industria norteamericana para, por ejemplo, venderle al Estado, y agravará la crisis en el agro, que no podrá competir con los productos subsidiados que vendrán de Estados Unidos. El TLC incrementará el desbalance externo, producto del aumento de las importaciones y la baja de los ingresos por exportaciones, lo que aumentará el riesgo de que el país consuma en corto tiempo sus divisas.

¿Con Obama en la presidencia de Estados Unidos cambia el escenario del TLC?

Obama tendrá una política de defensa de la producción norteamericana y de cierre de sus mercados para apoyar a sus industrias. En ese contexto, el TLC queda desvalido.

¿Qué debería hacer el gobierno para enfrentar la crisis económica?
Una medida inmediata es fortalecer el mercado interno y para eso hay que defender la industria nacional para proteger el empleo y aumentar los sueldos para mantener el poder adquisitivo perdido por la inflación. Incluso los sueldos deben aumentarse por encima de la inflación…

En este momento de crisis, ¿es factible aumentar los sueldos?
Sí es posible. Los sueldos deben aumentarse al ritmo del incremento de la productividad de la economía. En promedio las utilidades han subido en treinta por ciento, pero los sueldos no han subido nada. Otra medida para enfrentar la crisis es invertir en obras públicas…

Pero el plan anticrisis no tiene como eje, precisamente, hacer inversión en obras de infraestructura?
Eso es en lo declarativo, pero en la realidad eso no se está haciendo. Hay que desarrollar empresas mixtas privado-públicas para hacer obras de infraestructura. Hay que hacer carreteras que vinculen los mercados. Eso no se ha hecho y lo poco que se ha hecho está rodeado de una aureola de corrupción. Otras medidas que se pueden tomar son diferenciar el IGV, para que no pague el mismo impuesto quien compra, por ejemplo, un reloj de lujo y quien compra un kilo de yucas; apoyar directamente circuitos productivos que benefician a los sectores más pobres y, como estrategia de soberanía y seguridad alimentaria, apoyar la producción de alimentos populares, como la papa. La real salida a la crisis pasa por un cambio en la política económica para fortalecer el mercado interno y desarrollar una nueva lógica productiva, que promueva una producción diversificada, con materias primas, industria y energía, y aliente la ciencia, la tecnología y las inversiones que generen valor agregado. Para eso se requiere otro gobierno.

Hay una corrupción desbordada

Cuál es el nivel de corrupción en el manejo económico del gobierno?
En este gobierno el manejo económico está infectado de corrupción. Ahora hay escándalos de corrupción, como los contratos petroleros, el “chuponeo”, las licitaciones para comprar ambulancias, pero cuando se terminen de destapar vamos a descubrir el grado de infección que hay en el gobierno por la corrupción. Hay una corrupción desbordada y están comenzando a aparecer lógicas de mafia.

Cuáles son esas lógicas de mafia?
Por ejemplo, en el caso de las invasiones. Ahora parece que el Estado resucita para regular las invasiones y desalojar a los invasores, pero lo que pasa en realidad es que el Estado desaloja solamente a quienes no pagan los cupos. A los que pagan no les pasa nada.

¿El Estado está funcionando como fuerza de choque de las mafias que cobran cupos a los invasores?
Así es. En las invasiones hay gente vinculada al gobierno, como los gobernadores, que organizan a los invasores, a quienes mientras paguen los cupos no les pasa nada. El gobierno premia al militante amigo dándole la capacidad de hacer este tipo de actividades. Esto va gangrenando al Estado. El nivel de corrupción está aumentando de manera vertiginosa y llega a los más altos niveles de la administración del Estado.

En este contexto de aumento de la corrupción, qué efectos tiene la decisión del Congreso de exculpar a los ministros involucrados en la corrupción vinculada a los “petroaudios” y a Fortunato Canaán?
Esa decisión es un pésimo ejemplo para la población. Si ante estos hechos de corrupción evidentes, que todos hemos escuchado por televisión, no pasa nada, lo que se está haciendo es una invitación abierta a la corrupción.

Carlos Noriega
-----------------------------------------
Entrevista

RIESGO PAIS

La economía peruana está en luz ámbar

De acuerdo al reporte del ministerio de economía, que evalúa el impacto de la crisis. Riesgo país está muy cerca de la luz roja, según monitoreo del MEF. Ingresos corrientes y tributarios del gobierno ya están en rojo.

Beatriz Jiménez,PERIODISTA DE la republica

Durante la reunión a puerta cerrada que mantuvo la Comisión Intersectorial Anticrisis instalada ayer, el ministerio de Economía repartió a las autoridades asistentes un reporte que mide el impacto de la crisis en 2009.

Este reporte, al que pudo acceder La República, trata de resumir la situación económica actual a través de una especie de “semáforo de la crisis”. En vista de las cifras manejadas, el gobierno reconoce en este documento que la economía está en luz ámbar.

“No se trata de asustar a la población, sino de tener la precaución del caso”, declaró el viceministro de Economía Eduardo Morón, autor del reporte. “Se trata de un termómetro que nos permite alertar tempranamente y tomar decisiones de manera oportuna”, explicó.

Cifras en rojo

Las cuentas fiscales son valoradas por el gobierno en luz roja, ya que se encuentran en niveles superiores a la señal de alerta. “ La recaudación se anticipa como negativa debido a la bajada del precio de los minerales (en luz ámbar) y de la actividad económica”, señala Morón.

Según el ex presidente del Banco de Reserva Gonzalo García Núñez, el desbalance en la recaudación de impuestos de Personas Jurídicas se debe, principalmente, a que las mineras han comenzado a no pagar tributos fruto de la bajada del precio del cobre y otros metales.

Alerta amarilla

El riesgo país, un índice internacional que mide el grado de “peligro” que entraña un país para las inversiones extranjeras, se multiplicó por 2 respecto al promedio mantenido de 2004 a 2008.

El otro hecho que constata el documento es que las exportaciones peruanas se han reducido a la mitad en el último trimestre del año, mientras que las importaciones han crecido exponencialmente.

“Dado que hemos tenido un boom en inversiones era natural el crecimiento de las importaciones de maquinaria especial”, justifica el viceministro.

Frente a esta situación de déficit de la balanza comercial se alzan las voces para restaurar los aranceles existentes en 2007.
“Es necesario tomar medidas temporales que eleven los aranceles para una mejor defensa del mercado interno”, señala García Núñez.

Ante esta alerta, el economista Humberto Campodónico considera necesario que el gobierno informe de las respuestas económicas que aplicará para revertir la situación.

“El gobierno ha entendido con claridad que una crisis internacional fuerte nos afectará, que se acabó la época de las vacas gordas y empieza la de las vacas flacas”, opinó, y agregó que hoy es necesario que dé a conocer las respuestas económicas a estas cifras en rojo.

Al igual que García Núñez, Campodónico consideró que una respuesta necesaria es subir los aranceles para disminuir el alza de las importaciones.

Datos

Crecimiento. A pesar de la crisis , la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) estimó que en 2009 Perú, con una expansión del 5%, será el país dela región que más crecerá.

Reservas. Perú tiene casi 31 mil millones de dólares en reservas. Esta cifra es la más alta de la región. En el reporte del MEF, la luz roja está en los 15 mil millones. “Perú está sobreasegurado”, dice Morón, aunque reconoce que las reservas disminuirán este año. “Podríamos perder la mitad y aún estaríamos cerca del nivel de países como Chile o Brasil”.

SECCION Crisis monetaria: US/EURO, dolar vs otras monedas

17. TASAS DE INTERES Peru

Evolucion del dolar contra el euro

16. tipo de cambio sol/dolar-consulta del dia

V. SECCION: M. PRIMAS

1. SECCION:materias primas en linea:precios

2. PRECIOS MATERIAS PRIMAS

3. PRIX DU CUIVRE

4. ARGENT/SILVER/PLATA

5. GOLD/OR/ORO

6. precio zinc

7. prix du plomb

8. nickel price

9. prix du petrole

10. PRIX essence

petrole on line

azucar

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The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini

ENTREVISTAS TV CRISIS GLOBAL

Etiquetas

Peru:crisis impacto regional arequipa,raul mauro

Temas CRISIS FINANCIERA GLOBAL

canciones de GRACIAS A LA VIDA !

ETIQUETAS alfabetico

Translate

¿QUIEN SOY? qui suis-je? who am I?

II SECCION:LEER DIARIOS DEL MUNDO

clima&sexto sentido

PROTECCION

BLOGS ECO

SECCION:LINKS DE COYUNTURA ECONOMICA

Entradas populares

ROUBINI: COMIENZA CRISIS INTERVIEW BLOOMBERG, 15 JULY , USA FORECAST 17 JULY

Comentario del dia A DIA AGOS-OCT2009

Comentario del dia-setiembre-diciembre

17 set la crise, attali et les echos

obama nobel: pourquoi

nobel economia 2009

20 JULIO: XAVIER SANTISO: OCDE SOBRE LA CRISIS Y AMERICA LATINA 2009

OCDE: POLITICA FISCAL ANTICICLICA EN AL?:2008

14 juillet: la prise de la bastille

INEI: PERU NIVEL PBI CAE

INDICE DE PERU EN WALL STREET

PERU: encuestas IOPUCP

la gran recesion avanza

PERU: datos macro ultimos, bseminario/nalva

16 oct; el" milagro" peruano, idl - ------------29 jul entrevista a gonzalo garcia

GONZALO GARCIA: CONTRA EL PESIMISMO, PREVISION Y PERSPECTIVA

Gonzalo Garcia-ENTREVISTA CONCEDIDA AL IDL- 28.10.2008: suerte del gabinete

Economia: luz roja;entrevista a gonzalo garcia en La Primera del 280409

entrevista a gonzalo garcia en La Primera del 28-oct-2008

BOTON A MIS PRESENTACIONES&OTROS

III SECCION : CRISIS ON LINE

ABRIL-mayo 09: RECESION GLOBAL, caen precios

ventas minoristas USA decaen

USA;ventas agosto en gdes almacenes

inflacion latinoamericana

GENERAL MOTORS

datos de las Crisis economicas comparadas

PBI PERU: caida de 12 A 0.19%

exportaciones caen casi mitad

importaciones peruanas caen

Gobierno: ingresos caen

Peru: EMPLEO segmentado

INDICADORES de actividad economica

Peru: Ejecucion presupuestal limitada