Politica economica: governo toma choque de realidade com relatorio do FED - Editorial Estadao

O Fed e as fraquezas do Brasil

13 de fevereiro de 2014 | 2h 11

Editorial O Estado de S.Paulo

Verdadeira ou falsa, a imagem do Brasil como um dos emergentes mais vulneráveis à turbulência econômica internacional foi autenticada pelo banco central mais poderoso do mundo, o Federal Reserve (Fed), dos Estados Unidos. A vulnerabilidade brasileira, classificada como só inferior à da Turquia, foi exposta sem atenuantes no relatório semestral de política monetária entregue na terça-feira ao Congresso americano. A entrega coincidiu com o primeiro depoimento da nova presidente do Fed, Janet Yellen, perante a Comissão de Serviços Financeiros da Câmara dos Representantes. Na parte sobre a política do Fed, o discurso e o relatório funcionaram como calmantes para os mercados. O Fed continuará apoiando a recuperação econômica e a elevação do emprego e os estímulos serão retirados, como até agora, gradualmente e com base nos indicadores de atividade, prometeu Yellen. No essencial, foi uma repetição das falas do antecessor, Ben Bernanke. Em todo o mundo a reação a esse anúncio foi muito boa - muito melhor que a reação de Brasília aos comentários sobre a situação brasileira.

O comitê responsável pela moeda e pelo crédito, assegurou a nova chefe do Fed, permanecerá empenhado em cumprir o duplo mandato da instituição - cuidar da inflação, por enquanto muito baixa, e buscar ao mesmo tempo o maior nível de emprego compatível com a estabilidade geral dos preços. Os juros, nesse quadro, devem permanecer próximos de zero ainda por longo tempo, depois de abandonada a injeção mensal de dinheiro nos mercados. A primeira redução, no começo do ano, foi de US$ 85 bilhões para US$ 75 bilhões. A segunda, anunciada há poucos dias, diminuirá o volume para US$ 65 bilhões. As seguintes dependerão de novos dados sobre a economia.

O relatório semestral do Fed contém análises do quadro americano e do cenário global e uma prestação de contas da política adotada e de seus efeitos. Desde quando Bernanke anunciou, no ano passado, o plano de redução dos estímulos, investidores e especuladores em todo o mundo tentaram ajustar-se às mudanças previstas. A expectativa de uma oferta menos ampla de dólares mexeu com os fluxos de capitais em todo o mundo e valorizou a moeda americana.

Alguns países foram especialmente atingidos e a desvalorização de suas moedas foi mais acentuada. No balanço apresentado no relatório do Fed, o Brasil foi um dos mais severamente afetados nas duas fases da turbulência - logo depois de anunciado o plano de mudança, no ano passado, e no início de 2014, quando começou de fato a redução dos estímulos.

A avaliação apresentada no documento foi baseada em um índice composto de seis variáveis. O saldo em conta corrente, a dívida pública, a evolução do crédito ao setor privado nos últimos cinco anos e o volume de reservas são apresentados como porcentagens do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB). A dívida externa é comparada com as exportações. Além disso, considera-se a inflação nos últimos três anos. A análise mostra uma relação entre as maiores desvalorizações e os piores índices de vulnerabilidade calculados a partir daqueles elementos.

Não se trata de uma avaliação baseada em vagas impressões ou em critérios estritamente subjetivos. A fragilidade do Brasil é perceptível sem muito esforço em vários desses indicadores, como a rápida expansão do crédito, o aumento da dívida pública bruta e a inflação acima dos padrões internacionais. Os autores do estudo citaram medidas tomadas em vários países a partir do ano passado, como a elevação dos juros e a adoção de reformas. Isso enfraquece os argumentos da direção do Banco Central do Brasil em reclamação dirigida ao pessoal do Fed.

Mesmo com alguma possível injustiça, a avaliação contida no relatório pode produzir efeitos e, além disso, coincide com a opinião de operadores do mercado e de especialistas em análise de risco de crédito. Por seus muitos desacertos e por seu voluntarismo, o governo brasileiro comprometeu sua credibilidade e expôs o País ao risco de julgamentos como o dos técnicos do Fed. Não adianta reclamar. A imagem só será melhorada com medidas sérias e com a reconquista da credibilidade.

Miseria do keynesianismo americano - David Stockman (NYT)

Ao final, entrevista, link para o livro do autor e mais informações.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

State-Wrecked: The corruption of capitalism in America
David A. Stockman
The New York Times, Opinion, Sunday, March 31, 2013

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.

Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.

Then came Lyndon B. Johnson’s “guns and butter” excesses, which were intensified over one perfidious weekend at Camp David, Md., in 1971, when Richard M. Nixon essentially defaulted on the nation’s debt obligations by finally ending the convertibility of gold to the dollar. That one act — arguably a sin graver than Watergate — meant the end of national financial discipline and the start of a four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit. In effect, America underwent an internal leveraged buyout, raising our ratio of total debt (public and private) to economic output to about 3.6 from its historic level of about 1.6. Hence the $30 trillion in excess debt (more than half the total debt, $56 trillion) that hangs over the American economy today.

This explosion of borrowing was the stepchild of the floating-money contraption deposited in the Nixon White House by Milton Friedman, the supposed hero of free-market economics who in fact sowed the seed for a never-ending expansion of the money supply. The Fed, which celebrates its centenary this year, fueled a roaring inflation in goods and commodities during the 1970s that was brought under control only by the iron resolve of Paul A. Volcker, its chairman from 1979 to 1987.

Under his successor, the lapsed hero Alan Greenspan, the Fed dropped Friedman’s penurious rules for monetary expansion, keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash. What became known as the “Greenspan put” — the implicit assumption that the Fed would step in if asset prices dropped, as they did after the 1987 stock-market crash — was reinforced by the Fed’s unforgivable 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

That Mr. Greenspan’s loose monetary policies didn’t set off inflation was only because domestic prices for goods and labor were crushed by the huge flow of imports from the factories of Asia. By offshoring America’s tradable-goods sector, the Fed kept the Consumer Price Index contained, but also permitted the excess liquidity to foster a roaring inflation in financial assets. Mr. Greenspan’s pandering incited the greatest equity boom in history, with the stock market rising fivefold between the 1987 crash and the 2000 dot-com bust.

Soon Americans stopped saving and consumed everything they earned and all they could borrow. The Asians, burned by their own 1997 financial crisis, were happy to oblige us. They — China and Japan above all — accumulated huge dollar reserves, transforming their central banks into a string of monetary roach motels where sovereign debt goes in but never comes out. We’ve been living on borrowed time — and spending Asians’ borrowed dimes.

This dynamic reinforced the Reaganite shibboleth that “deficits don’t matter” and the fact that nearly $5 trillion of the nation’s $12 trillion in “publicly held” debt is actually sequestered in the vaults of central banks. The destruction of fiscal rectitude under Ronald Reagan — one reason I resigned as his budget chief in 1985 — was the greatest of his many dramatic acts. It created a template for the Republicans’ utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge and allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy. In effect, the G.O.P. embraced Keynesianism — for the wealthy.

The explosion of the housing market, abetted by phony credit ratings, securitization shenanigans and willful malpractice by mortgage lenders, originators and brokers, has been well documented. Less known is the balance-sheet explosion among the top 10 Wall Street banks during the eight years ending in 2008. Though their tiny sliver of equity capital hardly grew, their dependence on unstable “hot money” soared as the regulatory harness the Glass-Steagall Act had wisely imposed during the Depression was totally dismantled.

Within weeks of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, Washington, with Wall Street’s gun to its head, propped up the remnants of this financial mess in a panic-stricken melee of bailouts and money-printing that is the single most shameful chapter in American financial history.

There was never a remote threat of a Great Depression 2.0 or of a financial nuclear winter, contrary to the dire warnings of Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman since 2006. The Great Fear — manifested by the stock market plunge when the House voted down the TARP bailout before caving and passing it — was purely another Wall Street concoction. Had President Bush and his Goldman Sachs adviser (a k a Treasury Secretary) Henry M. Paulson Jr. stood firm, the crisis would have burned out on its own and meted out to speculators the losses they so richly deserved. The Main Street banking system was never in serious jeopardy, ATMs were not going dark and the money market industry was not imploding.

Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example, simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent.

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.

But even Mr. Obama’s hopelessly glib policies could not match the audacity of the Fed, which dropped interest rates to zero and then digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour. Fast-money speculators have been “purchasing” giant piles of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities, almost entirely by using short-term overnight money borrowed at essentially zero cost, thanks to the Fed. Uncle Ben has lined their pockets.

If and when the Fed — which now promises to get unemployment below 6.5 percent as long as inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5 percent — even hints at shrinking its balance sheet, it will elicit a tidal wave of sell orders, because even a modest drop in bond prices would destroy the arbitrageurs’ profits. Notwithstanding Mr. Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making.

While the Fed fiddles, Congress burns. Self-titled fiscal hawks like Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, are terrified of telling the truth: that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 trillion to $20 trillion, far larger than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $7 trillion. Its latest forecast, which imagines 16.4 million new jobs in the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last 10 years, is only one of the more extreme examples of Washington’s delusions.

Even a supposedly “bold” measure — linking the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments to a different kind of inflation index — would save just $200 billion over a decade, amounting to hardly 1 percent of the problem. Mr. Ryan’s latest budget shamelessly gives Social Security and Medicare a 10-year pass, notwithstanding that a fair portion of their nearly $19 trillion cost over that decade would go to the affluent elderly. At the same time, his proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net — Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit — is another front in the G.O.P.’s war against the 99 percent.

Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today. Since our constitutional stasis rules out any prospect of a “grand bargain,” the nation’s fiscal collapse will play out incrementally, like a Greek/Cypriot tragedy, in carefully choreographed crises over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and temporary budgetary patches.

The future is bleak. The greatest construction boom in recorded history — China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years — is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.

THE state-wreck ahead is a far cry from the “Great Moderation” proclaimed in 2004 by Mr. Bernanke, who predicted that prosperity would be everlasting because the Fed had tamed the business cycle and, as late as March 2007, testified that the impact of the subprime meltdown “seems likely to be contained.” Instead of moderation, what’s at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices — a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation.

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.

All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.”
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“The Great Deformation” by David Stockman
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Deformation-Capitalism-Corrupted-Democracy/dp/1586489127

Entrevista em 2/04/2013:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6hmrk8kvE4

Debate sobre o livro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNDXC88po_I

Grato ao Fernando Ulrich pelo envio destas informações.

Como ficar multibilionario num unico dia; nao acredita?

Bem, não quero dizer que você, ou eu, possamos realizar essa proeza. Mas pode-se ter o gostinho de ver passar em suas mãos, num único dia, centenas de milhões de dólares, assim como quem não quer nada...
Basta trabalhar na "casa de ilusões" por excelência nos dias que correm: a Casa da Moeda americana, o Bureau of Engraving and Printing, encarregado de imprimir todo o dinheiro que um governo irresponsável produz para tentar enganar todos os cidadãos que ele está fazendo algo contra a crise, que ele mesmo provocou, aliás...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The new alchemists: Blank paper to greenbacks

View Photo Gallery —  At the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, each weekday, around the clock, men and women walk into the rumbling belly of the C Street building to print what the rest of us are laboring for: greenbacks.

By Theresa Vargas 

The Washington Post, September 2, 2011

William Bolden makes more money in eight hours than Donald Trump.

Combined with Oprah Winfrey.

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Combined with Beyonce and Jay-Z.

William Bolden makes more than $25 million in an 8-hour shift. He's a securities pressman at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, DC. Bolden is one of three pressmen who meticulously produce twenty dollar bills, a sheet at a time.

Bolden, a soft-spoken man who grew up on a Virginia farm, does the math one recent afternoon. If 40,000 sheets of paper travel through the machine he mans each night at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and each one carries 32 $20 bills, that’s $25,600,000. All in a single shift.

In a year, that means more than $6.6 billion will pass before his eyes. Last year, Trump, Winfrey and the expecting couple earned, according to Forbes, a combined total of about $422 million.

At the bureau, each weekday, around the clock, men and women like Bolden swipe security badges and walk into the rumbling belly of the C Street building to print what the rest of us are laboring for: Greenbacks.

“I don’t think of it as money. Right now, it’s just paper,” says Bolden, 50, standing in front of a yellow, groaning machine that is spitting out stacks of crisp, untouched bills. His eyes scan for tiny details most people wouldn’t notice, such as whether every word on the seal is readable. “Here, we’re producing a commodity that the country needs and it has to be correct.”

Bolden, a Navy veteran who worked for 16 years in the CIA’s print shop before coming to the bureau, speaks of printing with reverence. There is a thrill in that moment of creation, he says, in starting with a blank sheet and ending up with something important. “I’m proud,” he says, “that I print something that is used around the world.”

Lydia Washington, a spokeswoman for the bureau, says there are 1,892 employees between the D.C. and Texas facilities who in a day might produce $974 million. “We set a global standard in currency production,” she says. “Our currency has never been recalled or devalued.” In other words, an old dollar is worth as much as a new dollar. The bills are also strong enough to withstand 4,000 double folds — forward and backward — before they tear.

Each bill, before it reaches the Federal Reserve and eventually the public, goes through four steps at the bureau. In a room thick with the smell of ink, blank sheets of paper with embedded watermarks wait to be born into currency. A banner on the wall reads: “THE COLOR of MONEY $TART$ HERE.” And nearby shelves are labeled with the hues that will go into the bills: “lavender,” “azure,” and “cherry,” among others.

Workers print the back of the bills first, followed by the front. They then send them to another area for inspection. Only the ones deemed to be without flaw will reach Bolden’s section.

There, the already-tight security throughout the building is even more restrictive. Employees work behind gates that stretch from the concrete floors to the ceiling, and signs tell of the two-man rule. No one is ever alone here.

This is the final stage of the bills’ gestation, where workers make sure that the seals are printed with just the right ink density, that the serial numbers follow a precise sequence and that each bill is cut to perfection so that when a person slips it into a vending machine it’s accepted. All of this Bolden does, zipping from one end of the machine to the other with the ease acquired over seven years of experience.

But ask Bolden about his job and he will likely keep it vague. He doesn’t like to talk about what he earns — a pressman in Bolden’s position, according it a chart on the bureau’s Web site, could take home anywhere from $45.20 to $46.30 an hour — or go into detail about what he actually does.

“If anyone asks, I say I work for the Treasury Department,” Bolden says. Otherwise, he says, when you tell people you have millions of dollars within your reach every day, it often leads to the same joke — one that Oprah and Trump have likely heard in some variation: “Can you bring me a stack?”