Bancos americanos estão nadando em dinheiro - The Economist

 Matéria parcialmente transcrita abaixo. Primeiro meu comentário geral, não necessariamente sobre a matéria, que trata apenas do “não-sistema” financeiro:

Não são só os bancos americanos que têm muito dinheiro (que não é deles, obviamente, embora tenham altos lucros também); os bancos chineses estão regurgitando de dinheiro, assim como todos os demais bancos bem administrados. O mundo está nadando em dinheiro (parte disso fumaça, ou seja, bolha inflacionária criada pelo governos), nunca houve tanta riqueza no mundo, e mesmo com o estouro inevitável de algumas bolhas, a riqueza, as fortunas ou o dinheiro (são coisas diferentes), vão continuar se acumulando e aumentando. Tudo isso é mal distribuído? Não acredito: descontando roubo e corrupção, a maior parte é fruto do trabalho honesto, das oportunidades criadas por governos eficientes e um bocado de sorte. Os socialistas da vida vão melhorar a distribuição, os Pikettys vão tornar o mundo melhor? Não, apenas vão reduzir o ritmo da acumulação, que, ainda que desigual, acaba contemplando a todos e a cada um. 

A mais nobre missão dos economistas — como de todo cidadão consciente — não deveria ser a de empobrecer os muito ricos, e sim a de enriquecer os mais pobres.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

America’s banks have too much cash

Abundant liquidity is meant to help markets. It might soon cause trouble

Finance & economicsThe Economist, Mar 20th 2021 edition

Mar 18th 2021

When bond markets seized up in the spring of 2020 the problem was a shortage of cash. A global dash for dollars caused bond yields, which move inversely to prices, to spike. It sent the greenback soaring in currency markets. And it caused trading in Treasuries, usually the world’s most liquid market, almost to dry up. Today the opposite problem looms: a surfeit of money. It stems from the Federal Reserve’s response to last year’s crisis. The central bank calmed markets by buying vast quantities of bonds with newly created cash, and has continued its purchases, at a current pace of at least $120bn a month. The abundance of dollars is causing headaches for banks and investors.

A central bank buying a bond for cash sounds like a simple swap of asset for asset. In fact it often swells the banking system. When the Fed buys assets in the secondary market, say from a pension fund, it cannot pay the fund with the electronic money it creates, because only banks can hold these so-called “reserves”. Instead, the fund gets a newly created deposit at its bank, and the bank gets the newly created reserve at the Fed. The bank ends up bigger, with a new liability and a new asset. The same thing also happens when a bank buys freshly issued debt at a Treasury auction, then sells it to the Fed. When the government spends the funds it has raised, such as by sending cheques to households or paying its staff, the banking system grows.

(...)

Cachorros, diplomatas, bancos, EUA: um problema singular...

Recolhido numa matéria de imprensa, por uma agência que tem ampla aceitação e credibilidade entre países em desenvolvimento.
Cachorros sofrem, imerecidamente, discriminação, em certos edifícios, basicamente por problemas de limpeza e para não assustar outras pessoas.
Não se tinha notícia, até aqui, que diplomatas pudessem sofrer as mesmas dificuldades.
Vejamos a matéria primeiro:

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 2014 (IPS) - Addressing a closed-door meeting of the Group of 77 (G77) developing countries last week, a visibly angry Latin American delegate recounted the growing new hostility towards foreign diplomats in New York city.

In some residential buildings, he said, there were covert signs conveying an unfriendly message: “Pets and diplomats not welcome.”

It is bad enough for U.N. diplomats to be lumped together in the company of dogs and cats in the city’s high-rise buildings, he bluntly told delegates, but now “the banking sector is treating us as criminals.”

At a meeting of the 132-member G77, the largest single coalition of developing countries, speaker after speaker lambasted banks in the city for selectively cutting off the banking system from the diplomatic community, describing the action as “outrageous”.

Their anger was directed mostly at JP Morgan Chase (formerly Chemical bank) which was once considered part of the U.N. family – and a preferred bank by most diplomats – and at one time housed in the secretariat building.

Chase also handles most of the accounts and money transfers of the United Nations and its agencies, running into billions of dollars.

The U.S. treasury apparently has informed all banks that every single transaction of some 70 “blacklisted” U.N. diplomatic missions, and even individual diplomats, be meticulously reported back to Washington (perhaps as part of a monitoring system to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing).

The banks have responded that such an elaborate exercise is administratively expensive and cumbersome. So as a convenient alternative, they have closed down, or are in the process of closing down, all accounts, shutting out the diplomatic community in New York.

As one diplomat warned, if this situation continues, “we may have to request cash in diplomatic pouches from our home countries, and bank our money under mattresses.”

(...)

When the dispute first erupted in 2011, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations sent a letter sent to all member states in which it said that JP Morgan Chase is a private sector bank and its decisions are made for 'business reasons alone'.

"The government of the United States has no authority to force banks to continue to serve their customers or to open or close any accounts," it said.

Comento agora: 

A delegação americana não deveria ter dito que as decisões dos bancos são tomadas apenas por razões comerciais. Deveria ter ficado com apenas a primeira parte: o governo americano não se mete nas decisões comerciais, privadas, de bancos privados.

Quanto aos prédios que anunciam que "diplomatas não são bem-vindos", devem existir razões.

Quem sabe os diplomatas discriminados não organizam manifestações pacíficas em frente a tais prédios.

Eventualmente com cachorros...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida  

Capitalistas brasileiros invadindo a Florida...

Gostaria de saber o que pensariam disto os teóricos da "dependência" e aqueles papagaios de pirata, ou seja, os repetidores do marxismo vulgar no Brasil:

Brazilian, Spanish Buyers Inject New Life into Florida's Community Banks
From the Editors of American Banker

There is a definite yin and yang to Florida banking these days.
The state's banking market is still seriously impaired, but foreign banks are increasingly attracted to it for the same reason ˜ and their arrival may feed the turnaround.
Buyers from Brazil and Spain have aggressively sought out community banks in Florida because of the historically low prices, the expansion of its international business and the inflow of foreign cash. Foreign banks need ways to diversify beyond their own troubled economies.

Inimigos do capital financeiro: nao apenas no Brasil

Não é só no Brasil que os supostos defensores da "economia popular" e inimigos do "capital financeiro internacional" tentam limitar e estrangular esses banqueiros gananciosos e outros especuladores financeiros.
Nos EUA, também, a demagogia e o populismo inconsequente tentam, por vezes, destruir ou desmantelar essa perna importante do capitalismo americano que são os serviços financeiros, com medidas regulatórias ou, em todo caso, limitativas de sua ação.
Cabe recordar que 70% do PIB americano é feito de serviços, não de indústria manufatureira ou de agricultura -- ridiculamente pequena, a despeito do lobbby gigantesco que captura recursos dos contribuintes -- e que o setor financeiro representa uma boa parte não apenas do PIB mas sobretudo da interface internacional do capitalismo americano.
Tentar cortar suas pernas e braços, portanto, representaria algo como tentar amarrar o Gulliver financeiro pelos liliputtianos do Congresso. Nem sempre isso é bem sucedido, como revela esta nota dos porta-vozes da Febraban americana:

From the Editors of American Banker

Senate Rejects Measure to Cap Size of Banks
WASHINGTON — After more delays and partisan fighting late Thursday over whether and how to proceed on financial reform, the Senate rejected 61 to 33 a populist amendment that would have forced the break up of the nation's biggest banks.
The measure from Democrats Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Ted Kaufman of Delaware would have placed a hard cap on banks of 10% of the nation's insured deposits. It would have limited a bank's nondeposit liabilities at 2% of the national gross domestic product. That cap would have been 3% for financial institutions that do not own a bank.
Had the provision been adopted and made it into law, these limits would have forced the largest institutions to shrink in size to roughly where they were a decade ago.