O tamanho da crise econômica da China - Paul Krugman (NYT, OESP)

O Brasil seria mais impactado por uma crise chinesa do que os EUA (pouco) ou o Japão e a Alemanha, que vendem muito para a China. Ou seja, o Brasil é um perdedor se a China entrar em recessão. 

O tamanho da crise econômica da China

Paul Krugman

O Estado de S. Paulo | Internacional

30 de agosto de 2023

Paul Krugman 

É colunista e ganhador do prêmio Nobel de Economia de 2008

The New York Times

Graças à baixa exposição da economia dos EUA, é difícil que problemas chineses se tornem globais

O efeito da crise seria maior em países que vendem mais para a China, como Alemanha e Japão

A s agruras econômicas dos anos pós-pandêmicos têm ocasionado intensos debates intelectuais e sobre políticas. Algo com que quase todos concordam, porém, é que a crise póscovid se assemelha pouco à crise financeira de 2008. Mas a China – segunda maior economia do planeta – parece balançar à beira de uma crise muito parecida.

Eu não confio no meu próprio entendimento sobre a China para julgar se o país vive seu momento Minsky, o ponto em que todos de repente se dão conta de que uma dívida insustentável é, de fato, insustentável. E, de fato, duvido que alguém ? incluindo as autoridades chinesas ? saiba responder a essa questão.

Mas acho que somos capazes de responder a uma pergunta mais condicional: se a China realmente passa por uma crise em estilo 2008, ela transbordará para o restante do mundo? E a resposta é clara: não. Por maior que seja a economia chinesa, os EUA estão pouco expostos aos problemas chineses. Antes de chegar aí, contudo, falemos sobre por que a China de 2023 se assemelha às economias americana e europeia de 2008.

BOLHA. A crise de 2008 foi ocasionada pelo estouro de uma bolha imobiliária transatlântica. Os efeitos foram amplificados por perturbações financeiras, especialmente o colapso dos ditos "shadow banks" – instituições que agiam clandestinamente como bancos, criando riscos de uma corrida bancária, mas prescindindo de regulamentações e de redes de segurança.

E agora chega a China, com um setor imobiliário ainda mais inchado que o dos países ocidentais em 2008. A China também tem um atribulado setor de "shadow banking", além de problemas peculiares, como dívidas enormes de governos locais.

A boa notícia é que a China não é a Argentina ou a Grécia, que deviam quantias imensas a credores estrangeiros. A dívida em questão aqui é de dinheiro que a China deve para si mesma. E deveria ser possível, em princípio, para o governo nacional resolver a crise por meio de alguma combinação entre resgates de devedores e abatimentos para credores.

Mas o governo da China tem competência para gerir o tipo de reestruturação financeira? As autoridades chinesas têm determinação ou clareza intelectual para fazer o que é necessário? Eu me preocupo especialmente com a segunda questão.

A China precisa substituir o investimento imobiliário insustentável por maior demanda de consumo. Mas alguns relatos sugerem que autoridades chinesas mais graduadas continuam suspeitas em relação a gastos de consumo "supérfluos" e resistem à ideia de "dar poder para os indivíduos tomarem mais decisões a respeito de como gastar seu dinheiro".

E não é nada tranquilizador o fato de as autoridades chinesas estarem respondendo à possível crise pressionando os bancos para emprestar mais, basicamente continuando a política que levou a China à situação em que ela se encontra.

EXPOSIÇÃO. Portanto, a China poderá entrar em crise. Se entrar, como isso afetará os EUA? A resposta, até onde eu consigo perceber, é que a exposição dos americanos a uma possível crise chinesa é surpreendentemente pequena.

Quanto os EUA têm investido na China? O investimento direto é de US$ 215 bilhões. Investimentos em carteira – ações e obrigações –, pouco mais de US$ 300 bilhões. Então, estamos falando de um total de US$ 515 bilhões.

Este número pode parecer grande, mas, para uma economia enorme, não é. Considerem uma comparação. Neste momento, há muitas preocupações a respeito do setor imobiliário comercial dos EUA, especialmente em relação aos prédios de escritórios ? que provavelmente encaram uma redução permanente na demanda em virtude do aumento do trabalho remoto. Os prédios de escritórios dos EUA valem hoje US$ 2,6 trilhões, aproximadamente cinco vezes mais que o nosso investimento total na China.

Por que uma economia tão grande atraiu tão pouco investimento dos EUA? Basicamente, porque, dadas as arbitrariedades das políticas chinesas, muitos possíveis investidores temem a possibilidade de a China se tornar uma armadilha: você consegue entrar, mas não consegue sair.

Mas o que dizer da China enquanto mercado? A China é uma importante jogadora no comércio mundial, mas não compra muito dos EUA – apenas US$ 150 bilhões, em 2022, menos de 1% do nosso PIB. Portanto, uma crise não surtiria muito efeito direto na demanda por produtos americanos.

O efeito seria maior em países que vendem mais para a China, como Alemanha e Japão, e algo poderia ricochetear nos EUA por meio das vendas a esses países. Mas o efeito geral ainda seria pequeno.

DIFERENÇAS. 

Uma crise poderia até surtir um pequeno efeito positivo nos EUA, porque reduziria a demanda por matérias-primas, especialmente petróleo, o que reduziria a inflação. Nada disso significa que devamos aplaudir a possibilidade de uma recessão chinesa ou tripudiar sobre os problemas de outro país.

Mesmo que por razões puramente egoístas, devemos nos preocupar com o que o regime chinês poderá fazer para distrair a atenção de seus cidadãos dos problemas domésticos. Mas, em termos econômicos, parece que estamos diante de uma possível crise interna na China, não de um evento global em estilo 2008. 

TRADUÇÃO DE GUILHERME RUSS

O debate sobre as desigualdades do capitalismo: Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty - YouTube (2015)

Um video de 2015, mas importante pelo seu tema, não tanto pelos participantes. A despeito de dois Prêmios Nobel, não os considero grandes economistas, pela exata razão de que são mais ideólogos do que economistas. O tema é central na obra do francês, mas acho que seu socialismo como prescrição prejudica suas boas teses sobre a concentração de renda.
O que identifica os três, a despeito de especialidades diferentes na economia, é a desconfiança dos mercados e a confiança que os três devotam ao Estado como "corretor das desigualdades".
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si4iyyJDa7c

Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz: The Genius of Economics

Publicado em 6 de mar de 2015

Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent,” wrote Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Krugman and his fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (author of The Great Divide) join Piketty to discuss the genius of economics.

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Krugman: o keynesiano das causas erradas (mais que a media...)

Paul Krugman ganhou seu Prêmio Nobel supostamente por seus trabalhos em comércio internacional. Seria melhor que ficasse nessa área, pois como comentarista de jornal, ele virou um homem de causas erradas.
Os keynesianos de vez em quando acertam umas e outras: Krugman tem errado todas.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

November 3, 2013

Those Depressing Germans

By PAUL KRUGMAN

German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel’s cellphone. What has them enraged now is one (long) paragraph in a U.S. Treasury report on foreign economic and currency policies. In that paragraph Treasury argues that Germany’s huge surplus on current account — a broad measure of the trade balance — is harmful, creating “a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.”

The Germans angrily pronounced this argument “incomprehensible.” “There are no imbalances in Germany which require a correction of our growth-friendly economic and fiscal policy,” declared a spokesman for the nation’s finance ministry.

But Treasury was right, and the German reaction was disturbing. For one thing, it was an indicator of the continuing refusal of policy makers in Germany, in Europe more broadly and for that matter around the world to face up to the nature of our economic problems. For another, it demonstrated Germany’s unfortunate tendency to respond to any criticism of its economic policies with cries of victimization.

First, the facts. Remember the China syndrome, in which Asia’s largest economy kept running enormous trade surpluses thanks to an undervalued currency? Well, China is still running surpluses, but they have declined. Meanwhile, Germany has taken China’s place: Last year Germany, not China, ran the world’s biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany’s surplus was more than twice as large as China’s.

Now, it’s true that Germany has been running big surpluses for almost a decade. At first, however, these surpluses were matched by large deficits in southern Europe, financed by large inflows of German capital. Europe as a whole continued to have roughly balanced trade.

Then came the crisis, and flows of capital to Europe’s periphery collapsed. The debtor nations were forced — in part at Germany’s insistence — into harsh austerity, which eliminated their trade deficits. But something went wrong. The narrowing of trade imbalances should have been symmetric, with Germany’s surpluses shrinking along with the debtors’ deficits. Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.

This was a very bad thing for Europe, because Germany’s failure to adjust magnified the cost of austerity. Take Spain, the biggest deficit country before the crisis. It was inevitable that Spain would face lean years as it learned to live within its means. It was not, however, inevitable that Spanish unemployment would be almost 27 percent, and youth unemployment almost 57 percent. And Germany’s immovability was an important contributor to Spain’s pain.

It has also been a bad thing for the rest of the world. It’s simply arithmetic: Since southern Europe has been forced to end its deficits while Germany hasn’t reduced its surplus, Europe as a whole is running large trade surpluses, helping to keep the world economy depressed.

German officials, as we’ve seen, respond to all of this with angry declarations that German policy has been impeccable. Sorry, but this (a) doesn’t matter and (b) isn’t true.

Why it doesn’t matter: Five years after the fall of Lehman, the world economy is still depressed, suffering from a persistent shortage of demand. In this environment, a country that runs a trade surplus is, to use the old phrase, beggaring its neighbors. It’s diverting spending away from their goods and services to its own, and thereby taking away jobs. It doesn’t matter whether it’s doing this maliciously or with the best of intentions, it’s doing it all the same.

Furthermore, as it happens, Germany isn’t blameless. It shares a currency with its neighbors, greatly benefiting German exporters, who get to price their goods in a weak euro instead of what would surely have been a soaring Deutsche mark. Yet Germany has failed to deliver on its side of the bargain: To avoid a European depression, it needed to spend more as its neighbors were forced to spend less, and it hasn’t done that.

German officials won’t, of course, accept any of this. They consider their country a shining role model, to be emulated by all, and the awkward fact that we can’t all run gigantic trade surpluses simply doesn’t register.

And the thing is, it’s not just the Germans. Germany’s trade surplus is damaging for the same reason cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits in America destroys jobs — and Republican politicians are about as receptive as German officials to anyone who tries to point out their error. In the sixth year of a global economic crisis whose essence is that there isn’t enough spending, many policy makers still don’t get it. And it looks as if they never will.

O colunista de humor Paul Krugman - William L. Anderson

Krugman’s Adventures in Fairyland by William L. Anderson  Mise Daily, November 23, 2013 After studying and teaching Keynesian economics for 30 years, I conclude that the “sophisticated” Keynes­ians really do believe in magic and fairy dust. Lots of fairy dust. It may seem odd that this Aus­trian economist refers to fairies, but I got the term from Paul Krugman. According to Krugman, too many people place false hopes in what he calls the “Confidence Fairy,” a creature created as a retort to economist Robert Higgs’s concept of “regime uncertainty.” Higgs coined that expression in a 1997 paper on the Great Depression in which he claimed that uncertainty caused by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a major factor in the Great Depression being so very, very long. Nonsense, writes Krugman. Investors are not waiting for governments to “get their financial houses in order” and protect private property. Instead, he claims, investors are waiting for governments to spend in order to create enough “aggregate demand” in the economy to bring about new investments and, one hopes, full employment. According to Higgs, the “humor columnist for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, has recently taken to defending his vulgar Keynesianism against its critics by accusing them of making arguments that rely on the existence of a ‘confidence fairy.’ By this mockery,” Higgs says, “Krugman seeks to dismiss the critics as unscientific blockheads, in contrast to his own supreme status as a Nobel Prize-winning economic scientist.” It seems, however, that Krugman and the Keynesians have manufactured some fairies of their own: the Debt Fairy and the Inflation Fairy. These two creatures may not carry bags of fairy dust, but they might as well, given that their “tools” of using government debt and printing money to “revitalize” the economy have the same scientific credibility. Let us first examine the Debt Fairy. According to the Keynesians, the U.S. economy (as well as the economies of Europe and Japan) languishes in a “liquidity trap.” This is a condition in which interest rates are near-zero and people hoard money instead of spending it. Lowering interest rates obviously won’t spur more business borrowing, so it is up to the government to take advantage of the low rates and borrow (and borrow). If governments issue enough debt, argue Debt Fairy True Believers, the econ­omy will gain “traction” as government spending, through the power of pixie dust, fuels a recovery. Governments spend, businesses magically gain confidence, and then they spend and invest. (At this point, we are apparently supposed to just overlook the fact that the Keynesians are saying that we need the Debt Fairy to resurrect the Keynesian version of the Confidence Fairy.) The Inflation Fairy also plays an important role, according to Keynesians, for if bona fide inflation can take hold in the econ­omy and people watch their money lose value, then they will spend more of their savings. In turn, this destruction of savings will, through the power of Keynesian sorcery, revive the econ­omy. Thus inflation undermines what Keynesians call the “Para­dox of Thrift,” a theory that says if a lot of people withhold some present consumption in order to save for future con­sumption, the economy quickly will implode and ultimately will slip into a Liquidity Trap in which no one will spend anything. These fairies can work their magic if (and only if) one condition exists: factors of production are homogeneous, which means that government spending will enable all lines of production simultaneously. The actual record of the boom-and-bust cycle, however, tells a different story. It seems that the Debt and Inflation Fairies enable booms along certain lines of production (such as housing during the past decade), but as everyone knows, the fairy dust lost its magical powers and the booms collapsed into recessions. Austrians such as Mises and Rothbard have well under­stood what Keynesians do not: the structures of produc­tion within an economy are heterogeneous and can be distorted by government intervention through inflation and massive borrowing. Far from being creatures that can “save” an economy, the Debt Fairy and the Inflation Fairy are the architects of economic disaster. Despite Keynesian protestations that the U.S. and European governments are engaged in “austerity,” the twin fairies are active on both continents. The fairy dust they are sprinkling on the economy, however, is more akin to sprinkling ricin on humans. In the end, the good fairies turn into witches. Note: The views expressed in Daily Articles on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. Comment on this article. When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. William Anderson, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, teaches economics at Frostburg State University. Send him mail. See William L. Anderson's article archives.

A Franca, os krugmanianos e o desastre econômico - carta ao NYTimes

Os krugmanianos do primeiro mundo, nos EUA e na Europa, são keynesianos da nova síntese, nada a ver com os nossos keynesianos de botequim.
Este leitor do NYTimes reclama do tremendo equívoco do Paul Krugman, colunista do NYTimes (que quase não leio, tantas são as bobagens que ele não cansa de repetir), que achava que a França fez bem em não aplicar um "ajuste fiscal" rigoroso, pois isso iria, segundo ele, penalizar os mais pobres.
Ora, o problema da França é que ela não consegue criar empregos, e vem perdendo empregos aceleradamente, justamente por ter um regime inviável para as empresas.
O Brasil, aliás, vai pelo menos caminho, mas os nossos keynesianos são muito piores...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

LETTERS

France’s Problem Isn’t ‘Deficit Scolds’

The New York Times, November 15, 2013

Reading Paul Krugman’s column “The plot against France” (Opinion, Nov. 12), I could feel your French readers choking on their croissants. Many of us have appreciated his campaign against “deficit scolds” in Washington. But he just lost us all. “France,” he writes, “has committed the unforgivable sin of being fiscally responsible without inflicting pain on the poor and unlucky.”

No, the truth is that the unemployment rate — more than 11 percent — is so high largely because the taxes, social charges and over-regulation imposed on employers by successive governments make creating jobs in France a near impossibility.

David Woods La Bastidonne, France

Monopolistas de fato e a extracao de renda dos consumidores - Paul Krugman

The New York Times, August 25, 2013

The Decline of E-Empires

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Steve Ballmer’s surprise announcement that he will be resigning as Microsoft’s C.E.O. has set off a huge flood of commentary. Being neither a tech geek nor a management guru, I can’t add much on those fronts. I do, however, think I know a bit about economics, and I also read a lot of history. So the Ballmer announcement has me thinking about network externalities and Ibn Khaldun. And thinking about these things, I’d argue, can help ensure that we draw the right lessons from this particular corporate upheaval.

First, about network externalities: Consider the state of the computer industry circa 2000, when Microsoft’s share price hit its peak and the company seemed utterly dominant. Remember the T-shirts depicting Bill Gates as a Borg (part of the hive mind from “Star Trek”), with the legend, “Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated”? Remember when Microsoft was at the center of concerns about antitrust enforcement?

The odd thing was that nobody seemed to like Microsoft’s products. By all accounts, Apple computers were better than PCs using Windows as their operating system. Yet the vast majority of desktop and laptop computers ran Windows. Why?

The answer, basically, is that everyone used Windows because everyone used Windows. If you had a Windows PC and wanted help, you could ask the guy in the next cubicle, or the tech people downstairs, and have a very good chance of getting the answer you needed. Software was designed to run on PCs; peripheral devices were designed to work with PCs.

That’s network externalities in action, and it made Microsoft a monopolist.

The story of how that state of affairs arose is tangled, but I don’t think it’s too unfair to say that Apple mistakenly believed that ordinary buyers would value its superior quality as much as its own people did. So it charged premium prices, and by the time it realized how many people were choosing cheaper machines that weren’t insanely great but did the job, Microsoft’s dominance was locked in.

Now, any such discussion brings out the Apple faithful, who insist that anything Windows can do Apple can do better and that only idiots buy PCs. They may be right. But it doesn’t matter, because there are many such idiots, myself included. And Windows still dominates the personal computer market.

The trouble for Microsoft came with the rise of new devices whose importance it famously failed to grasp. “There’s no chance,” declared Mr. Ballmer in 2007, “that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

How could Microsoft have been so blind? Here’s where Ibn Khaldun comes in. He was a 14th-century Islamic philosopher who basically invented what we would now call the social sciences. And one insight he had, based on the history of his native North Africa, was that there was a rhythm to the rise and fall of dynasties.

Desert tribesmen, he argued, always have more courage and social cohesion than settled, civilized folk, so every once in a while they will sweep in and conquer lands whose rulers have become corrupt and complacent. They create a new dynasty — and, over time, become corrupt and complacent themselves, ready to be overrun by a new set of barbarians.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to apply this story to Microsoft, a company that did so well with its operating-system monopoly that it lost focus, while Apple — still wandering in the wilderness after all those years — was alert to new opportunities. And so the barbarians swept in from the desert.

Sometimes, by the way, barbarians are invited in by a domestic faction seeking a shake-up. This may be what’s happening at Yahoo:Marissa Mayer doesn’t look much like a fierce Bedouin chieftain, but she’s arguably filling the same functional role.

Anyway, the funny thing is that Apple’s position in mobile devices now bears a strong resemblance to Microsoft’s former position in operating systems. True, Apple produces high-quality products. But they are, by most accounts, little if any better than those of rivals, while selling at premium prices.

So why do people buy them? Network externalities: lots of other people use iWhatevers, there are more apps for iOS than for other systems, so Apple becomes the safe and easy choice. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Is there a policy moral here? Let me make at least a negative case: Even though Microsoft did not, in fact, end up taking over the world, those antitrust concerns weren’t misplaced. Microsoft was a monopolist, it did extract a lot of monopoly rents, and it did inhibit innovation. Creative destruction means that monopolies aren’t forever, but it doesn’t mean that they’re harmless while they last. This was true for Microsoft yesterday; it may be true for Apple, or Google, or someone not yet on our radar, tomorrow.

China: the Great Crash - Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Hitting China’s Wall

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The New York Times: July 18, 2013

All economic data are best viewed as a peculiarly boring genre of science fiction, but Chinese data are even more fictional than most. Add a secretive government, a controlled press, and the sheer size of the country, and it’s harder to figure out what’s really happening in China than it is in any other major economy.

Yet the signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble. We’re not talking about some minor setback along the way, but something more fundamental. The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall, and the only question now is just how bad the crash will be.

Start with the data, unreliable as they may be. What immediately jumps out at you when you compare China with almost any other economy, aside from its rapid growth, is the lopsided balance between consumption and investment. All successful economies devote part of their current income to investment rather than consumption, so as to expand their future ability to consume. China, however, seems to invest only to expand its future ability to invest even more. America, admittedly on the high side,devotes 70 percent of its gross domestic product to consumption; for China, the number is only half that high, while almost half of G.D.P. is invested.

How is that even possible? What keeps consumption so low, and how have the Chinese been able to invest so much without (until now) running into sharply diminishing returns? The answers are the subject of intense controversy. The story that makes the most sense to me, however, rests on an old insight by the economist W. Arthur Lewis, who argued that countries in the early stages of economic development typically have a small modern sector alongside a large traditional sector containing huge amounts of “surplus labor” — underemployed peasants making at best a marginal contribution to overall economic output.

The existence of this surplus labor, in turn, has two effects. First, for a while such countries can invest heavily in new factories, construction, and so on without running into diminishing returns, because they can keep drawing in new labor from the countryside. Second, competition from this reserve army of surplus labor keeps wages low even as the economy grows richer. Indeed, the main thing holding down Chinese consumption seems to be that Chinese families never see much of the income being generated by the country’s economic growth. Some of that income flows to a politically connected elite; but much of it simply stays bottled up in businesses, many of them state-owned enterprises.

It’s all very peculiar by our standards, but it worked for several decades. Now, however, China has hit the “Lewis point” — to put it crudely, it’s running out of surplus peasants.

That should be a good thing. Wages are rising; finally, ordinary Chinese are starting to share in the fruits of growth. But it also means that the Chinese economy is suddenly faced with the need for drastic “rebalancing” — the jargon phrase of the moment. Investment is now running into sharply diminishing returns and is going to drop drastically no matter what the government does; consumer spending must rise dramatically to take its place. The question is whether this can happen fast enough to avoid a nasty slump.

And the answer, increasingly, seems to be no. The need for rebalancing has been obvious for years, but China just kept putting off the necessary changes, instead boosting the economy by keeping the currency undervalued and flooding it with cheap credit. (Since someone is going to raise this issue: no, this bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s policies here.) These measures postponed the day of reckoning, but also ensured that this day would be even harder when it finally came. And now it has arrived.

How big a deal is this for the rest of us? At market values — which is what matters for the global outlook — China’s economy is still only modestly bigger than Japan’s; it’s around half the size of either the U.S. or the European Union. So it’s big but not huge, and, in ordinary times, the world could probably take China’s troubles in stride.

Unfortunately, these aren’t ordinary times: China is hitting its Lewis point at the same time that Western economies are going through their “Minsky moment,” the point when overextended private borrowers all try to pull back at the same time, and in so doing provoke a general slump. China’s new woes are the last thing the rest of us needed.

No doubt many readers are feeling some intellectual whiplash. Just the other day we were afraid of the Chinese. Now we’re afraid for them. But our situation has not improved.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 19, 2013, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Hitting China’s Wall.

Krugman: um keynesiano insolvente, 2 - onde a porca torce o rabo...

...e onde todas as fraudes se revelam.
O keynesianismo, realmente, é uma fraude, e encontra-se insolvente intelectualmente, mas ainda tem muitos adeptos de par le monde, sobretudo no Brasil, onde existem keynesianos até em botequins, ou sobretudo de botequim, onde eles bebem para esquecer que a teoria, na prática, é outra, e onde uma Associação Keynesiana tem menos de dez anos de criação.
O que não deixa de representar uma nova confirmação da teorida de Millor Fernandes que dizia que quando as ideias ficam bem velhinhas elas se mudam para o Brasi...
Gostaram?
Mas essa história da falência do Krugman é muito melhor.
Os austríacos devem estar rolando de rir, o pessoal de Chicago, então, deve estar dizendo:
"Bem feito, bem feito! Que mandou acreditar nas baboseiras do feiticeiro de Cambridge?"
Também acho: Keynes, desde os anos 1920, percebeu que a sua velha Inglaterra estava falida, e começou a conceber -- conspirar seria um verbo mais exato -- uma teoria para que seu país não fosse completamente à falência e tivesse de passar a viver de caridade pública, ou seja, da ajuda dos americanos.
Em Bretton Woods, por exemplo, ele estava desesperado atrás de uma tia rica, que pagasse o cartão de crédito da Inglaterra, e achava ter encontrado nos EUA. Mas, essa tia rica simplesmente cortou o cartão de crédito do sobrinho falimentar, e obrigou-o a passar a pão e água (e limitado unicamente a comida inglesa, argh!). Foi assim que a Inglaterra, desafiando o próprio FMI, desvalorizou a libra ilegalmente, em mais de 25% logo depois.
Pois o Paul Krugman está desesperado atrás de uma tia rica.
Quem será que vai vir em seu soccorro? Não será o Chapolim, com certeza.
Tem de ser alguém capaz de movimentar a máquina de dinheiro, como o Ben Bernanke, os cheiques do petróleo, algum cartel da cocaína...
Enfim, alguma solução tem de ser encontrada.
Vamos ver o que dizem da matéria do Daily Currant.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Paul Krugman’s phony bankruptcy: a history

Posted by Erik Wemple on Washington Post Blogs, March 11, 2013 at 4:55 pm

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. (Scott Eells/Bloomberg)

Toni Straka lives in Vienna, Austria. He’s the 48-year-old founder and publisher of the Prudent Investor blog, the subtitle of which reads, “CHRONICLING THE GLOBAL DEBT EXCESS SINCE 2005.” A recent piece from the Austrian magazine Format caught Straka’s attention — it spoke of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
That’s a slam-dunk post for Straka. “This is the birthplace of Austrian economics,” says Straka. “It was just too good of a story that the prototypical Keynesian follower, Krugman, had declared bankruptcy. That was just too saucy a story for us.”
That’s not to say Straka didn’t check Google. He did, and found not a lot of hits for the story. “They have a scoop,” he concluded, before putting the story on Prudent Investor.
Prudent Investor — “one of the early and few warners about the U.S. housing bubble,” Straka says — has some reach. “I’m being syndicated and aggregated in more feeds than I could remember,” Straka says. One of the feeds that pulls in the Prudent Investor is knit together by a California company named Financial Content, which delivers stock quotes and financial information and news to its clients’ websites. And one of those clients is Boston.com, a portal that presents content from the Boston Globe.
Wing Yu, the CEO of Financial Content, says that his people generate absolutely no news, no content. They merely grab it, wrangle it and push it onto websites. “We’re strictly a tech company,” Yu says. “We don’t have any editorial oversight.”
No editorial oversight, sure. Editorial impact? Absolutely: The Prudent Investor posting on Krugman made its way through the Financial Content feed and onto Boston.com. Once there, it sucked in all the juices of integrity and credibility stored up over the decades by the Boston Globe. So people believed the posting that indicated Krugman had gone bankrupt.
Or, at the very least, Breitbart.com believed the posting that Krugman had gone bankrupt. It swallowed the story and republished it, laughing the whole way. “Apparently this Keynesian thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.” This, from the duped Breitbart.com writer:

Larry O'Connor @LarryOConnor

I trusted http://Boston.com  as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!

12:30 PM - 11 Mar 13

The notion that some automated news feed, unregulated by local editorial brains, would just filter onto Boston.com appeared to offend Boston Globe Editor Brian McGrory, who earlier today told the Erik Wemple Blog: “The idea that we’d have a partner on our site is actually news to me,” referring to Financial Content. He pledged to “address our relationship with that vendor.”

The Krugman-bankrupt thing, of course, is a joke that comes courtesy of the Daily Currant, a satire site. Not long ago, the Daily Currant made headlines for similar reasons with a different story, as the Washington Post passed along a satirical post that Sarah Palin had signed on as a commentator with Al Jazeera.
Is hoodwinking some sap at a media organization the reigning objective at Daily Currant? Nah, says founder Daniel Barkeley. “The goal is to write satire that’s close to the truth,” says Barkeley, noting that he models his stuff after mockumentaries such as “The Office.” “They hew very close to reality yet they’re supposed to be funny.”
Barkeley, 28, produces the Daily Currant with the help of just a single freelancer. Material for his riffs, he says, comes from his reading diet, which consists of the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Economist and the like. “I just try to satirize the things that I read,” says Barkeley, which results in joke-posts that are a bit higher brow than the offerings from The Onion, he says.
The elevated-brow content in the Krugman piece comes right here:

The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth.

References to Portuguese wine and English cloth weren’t plucked from a comedic riff. David Ricardo, the great English political economist, cited those two products in laying out the theory of comparative advantage, which would become a philosophical pillar of free trade. Krugman’s bio is thick on the economics of international trade.
“The idea that he would rack up a bill on Portuguese wine and English cloth is the giveaway,” says Barkeley. A giveaway that the folks at Breitbart.com and Prudent Investor somehow failed to spot, to the eternal embarrassment of their university economics professors.
Journos’ failure to pick up on a nicely threaded comparative-advantage joke resulted in all kinds of Internet violence: Straka reports having pulled his piece within an hour of its posting; Boston.com went nuts trying to track down people who could actually take the Krugman thing off of its site; and Breitbart.com took down its piece. And! Format magazine published this stunning notice in red ink at the top of its aggregated story:

Österreich steht noch, den Euro gibt’s auch noch – doch der Ökonom und Euro-Schwarzmaler Paul Krugman schlittert in den Privatkonkurs, nachdem der Versuch, einen Ausweg aus den Schulden zu finden, gescheitert ist, berichtet “The Daily Currant”.

UPDATE: It’s the footer of the Format story that actually attempts to correct things. It reads:
Die Quelle dieser “Nachricht” ist das Satire-Magazin “The Daily Currant”, der Wahrheitsgehalt der Meldung entsprechend gering.

Krugman: um keynesiano insolvente, 1 (mas isso parece redundancia...)

Pois não é que aconteceu?!
O homem ganhou UM MILHÃO DE DÓLARES de Prêmio Nobel, dos suecos, e em lugar de fazer um investimento sólido, com algum austríaco, foi logo comprar um apartamento de luxo em Manhattan! Onde já se viu, para um acadêmico que atacava os ricos e os famosos?
Será por isso que ele passava todo o seu tempo, no New York Times, reclamando dos republicanos, e pedindo para o Ben Bernanke soltar mais dinheiro para ajudar na recuperação da economia, será que era tudo motivado por sua catastrófica situação pessoal?
Pode ser. Em todo caso, declarando falência, ele vai ter de passar todas as suas contas, inclusive de cartão de crédito, sob supervisão de algum economista republicano, que raiva hem?!
Dá para acreditar que ele foi tão néscio assim?
Precisamos seguir  essa história...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Paul Krugman Declares Personal Bankruptcy
The Daily Currant, March 06, 2013

Economist and columnist Paul Krugman declared personal bankruptcy, following a failed attempt to spend his way out of debt.

In a Chapter 13 filing to the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, lawyers for Krugman listed $7,346,000 in debts versus $33,000 in assets.

The majority of his debts are related to mortgage financing on a $8.7 million apartment in lower Manhattan, but the list also includes $621,537 in credit card debt and $33,642 in store financing at famed jeweler Tiffanys and Co.

The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth

Rather than tighten his belt and pay the sums back, the pseudo-Keynesian economist decided to "stimulate" his way to a personal recovery by investing in expenses he hoped would one day boost his income.

Cockroaches and Creditors
Between 2004 and 2007 Krugman splurged on expensive cars, clothes, and travel in hopes that the new lifestyle would convince his bosses at the New York Times to give him a giant raise.

"They say always dress for the job you want," Krugman explains. "So I thought maybe if I showed up in $70,000 Alexander Amosu suits they would give me ownership of part of the company. If I had only been granted a sliver of the New York Times Co., I could have paid everything back."

Even after he realized an equity stake was not going to happen, Krugman continued to spend wildly hoping his bling and media appearances would increase demand for his personal brand and lift his book sales.

His biggest mistake came in 2007, when at the height of the financial bubble he decided to invest in high-end real estate in New York City. His multi-million dollar apartment lost 40 percent of its value just months after its purchase, and has been underwater ever since.

"You'd think a Nobel Prize winning economist could recognize a housing bubble," says Herman Minsky, a retired television executive who purchased Krugman's home at a huge discount. "But hey, I'm not complaining."

Conscience of a Fraud
Krugman, a renowned trade economist, joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2000. Since the start of the financial crisis he as used the platform to argue vociferously for what he terms Keynesian deficit spending.

However, Keynes did not advocate using debt financing to stimulate the economy. Rather, he argued that government should save in the good times and spend in the bad.

Through his lawyer, Bertil Ohlin, Krugman explains that despite his travails with spending and debt in his personal finances, he stands by his pseudo-Keynesian policies.

"I still defend my analysis that on the macroeconomic level sovereign debt crises can be fixed by increasing government borrowing to lift aggregate demand. I admit, however, that on the microeconomic level this strategy has failed spectacularly."