sábado, setembro 26, 2009

524) G20 de Pittsburgh, amplo acordo economico

Group of 20 Agrees on Far-Reaching Economic Plan
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times, September 25, 2009

The leaders of the Group of 20 nations gathered at the first plenary session in Pittsburgh on Friday.

PITTSBURGH — One year after a financial crisis that began in the United States tipped the world into a severe recession, leaders from both rich countries and fast-growing powerhouses like China agreed on Friday to a far-reaching effort to revamp the economic system.

The agreements, if carried out by national governments, would lead to much tighter regulation over financial institutions, complex financial instruments and executive pay. They could also lead to big changes and more outside scrutiny over the economic strategies of individual countries, including the United States.

“We have achieved a level of tangible, global economic cooperation that we’ve never seen before,” President Obama said shortly after the summit meeting of 20 leading economies concluded here. “Our financial system will be far different and more secure than the one that failed so dramatically last year.”

The leaders pledged to rethink their economic policies in a coordinated effort to reduce the immense imbalances between export-dominated countries like China and Japan and debt-laden countries like the United States, which has long been the world’s most willing consumer.

The United States will be expected to increase its savings rate, reduce its trade deficit and address its huge budget deficit. Countries like China, Japan and Germany will be expected to reduce their dependence on exports by promoting more consumer spending and investment at home.

The ideas are not new, and there is no enforcement mechanism to penalize countries if they stick to their old habits. But for the first time ever, each country agreed to submit its policies to a “peer review” from the other governments as well as to monitoring by the International Monetary Fund.

That in itself would be a big change, given how prickly national leaders have often been toward outside criticism of their policies. American officials, who pushed for the plan during weeks of negotiations before the summit meeting, argued that governments were so shocked by the economic crisis that they were willing to rethink what was in their self-interest.

“I’m quite impressed,” said Eswar S. Prasad, an economist at Cornell University who had initially been skeptical about the proposed “framework” for stable growth. “A commitment by the U.S. to take the process seriously is a potential game-changer that would give the framework some credibility.”

The outcome was revealed the same day the leaders formally announced that discussions about global economic issues would shift permanently from the Group of 7 big industrial nations — the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Italy, Germany and Japan — to the Group of 20, which includes China, India, Brazil, South Korea and South Africa, reflecting the increased clout of fast-growing developing nations in the global economy.

The decision reflected both symbolic and practical needs. Poorer but fast-growing nations have long complained that their influence on global policy has lagged behind their economic role. As a practical matter, China and other developing countries played a central role in fighting the global downturn by undertaking aggressive stimulus programs in concert with the United States and Europe.

American officials had been negotiating with their foreign counterparts for months before the summit meeting, and the agreements endorsed on Friday were mostly pledges rather than binding commitments.

One of the most important elements of the agreement calls on the Group of 20 countries to require higher levels of capital at banks and other financial institutions. The goal is to reduce risk-taking by forcing institutions to keep bigger reserves as a buffer against unexpected losses or disruptions in credit markets.

The Group of 20 communiqué outlines a long set of principles for tougher rules, and governments pledged to develop “internationally agreed” regulations by the end of 2010.

But the communiqué includes no specific numbers on how high capital reserves should be, and there are big disagreements over that issue.

French and German banks generally have lower capital reserves than their American rivals, and European officials have complained that their banks could be at a disadvantage because they would have to set aside more money to meet new requirements. Japanese officials have warned that they need to pursue their own approach, contending that Japanese banks are inherently more conservative than American banks.

Similarly, American and French officials disagreed before the summit meeting on how to clamp down on executive pay. Officials on both sides agreed that executive bonuses contributed to the financial crisis by rewarding short-term performance without regard to longer-term risks. But French officials wanted to impose specific caps on bonuses, perhaps based on a percentage of a bank’s profits.

American and British officials thought specific caps were too rigid, and pushed for rules that would defer the payout of bonuses for several years and reduce the incentive for people to take short-term gambles. The American view prevailed, but that does not preclude governments from imposing tighter restrictions.

For all the unanswered questions, the final communiqué covered an extraordinary number of complex financial issues. The leaders agreed, for example, to devise policies by the end of 2010 for closing troubled financial institutions that were considered “too big to fail.” They also agreed on the need to regulate financial derivatives, endorsing the approach proposed by the Obama administration in its bill to overhaul the regulatory system.

They also renewed their vow to give China and other Asian nations a bigger share of the vote at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Asian countries have long complained that their stakes no longer reflect their financial contributions.

In another nod to developing countries, the leaders agreed to revive talks to reach a new global trade agreement by the end of 2010 that would, among other things, reduce barriers to agricultural exports. The goal may be optimistic: the Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm for new trade deals, and many Democrats want to see more protections rather than fewer.

The big question is whether the Group of 20 will be more effective because it includes important new players like India and Brazil, or whether it will simply be more unwieldy.

American officials acknowledged that the economic crisis crystallized priorities of countries with normally conflicting agendas in ways that occur only rarely in normal times. But they said they were betting that individual governments would see their self-interest as more tied than before to the stability of the rest of the world.

“The announcement today is more than symbolic,” said Robert M. Kimmitt, who served as deputy Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush. “The fact that leaders are turning to the strategic challenge and doing it in a coordinated way at the level of the Group of 20 is significant.”

quarta-feira, setembro 23, 2009

523) Revolução dos Cravos em Portugal (ou de 25 de Abril): 35 anos depois

O texto abaixo, de autoria do Embaixador Francisco Seixas da Costa, foi publicada em seu blog "Ou quatro coisas..."

25 de Abril - 35 Anos depois
Francisco Seixas da Costa
29 Abril 2009

Comemoraram-se, há dias, 35 anos sobre a Revolução iniciada em 25 de Abril de 1974, em Portugal. Alguém a qualificou, um dia, como a última “revolução romântica” da Europa. Sou de opinião que todas as revoluções, desde que apontem no sentido da liberdade, têm o seu lado romântico ou, pelo menos, ficam na memória popular como tal.

A Revolução do 25 de Abril, ou a Revolução dos Cravos, como ficou conhecida em França e um pouco por todo o mundo, é, em si mesma, o produto de um conjunto muito complexo de factores. Ela não se explica apenas pela conjuntura que se vivia, em 1974, em Portugal, e só pode ser bem entendida, tal como os acontecimentos que lhe sucederam, se se conhecer a génese histórica da sociedade política em que teve lugar.

Convém começar por deixar clara uma realidade por vezes não suficientemente mencionada: a Democracia, em Portugal, não é uma coisa nova, não nasceu com o 25 de Abril. A democracia foi instaurada em Portugal, num modelo idêntico ao que vigorava já em alguns países da Europa, na década de 20 do século XIX. Foi nessa altura, que corresponde em Portugal ao fim do Antigo Regime, ao fim do “absolutismo”, que a vida portuguesa iniciou o seu percurso constitucional e lançou as bases para a gestão democrática do país. De certo modo, foi a fuga da Corte portuguesa para o Brasil, onde estivera refugiada desde que o país fora invadido pelas tropas napoleónicas, em 1808, que criou o caldo de cultura que fez ruir, definitivamente, o Antigo Regime em Portugal.

Todo o século XIX foi, a partir de então, atravessado por uma tensão política muito forte, inicialmente numa guerra civil entre facções absolutistas e liberais, que mais tarde evoluiu para um confronto politicamente mais enquadrado constitucionalmente, entre monárquicos e republicanos. O peso cada vez mais preponderante das ideias liberais, o papel crescente das sociedades secretas, que tinham a instauração da República como objectivo final da sua agitação, a crise do modelo colonial português, pela perca do Brasil e pelas limitações colocadas pela Inglaterra aos planos coloniais portugueses em África e, finalmente, a notória incapacidade da corte portuguesa de enquadrar a vontade de mudança que atravessava o país – tudo isso conduziu ao golpe civil e militar que implantou a República, em 5 de Outubro de 1910.

A partir de 1910, e por 16 anos, um regime republicano de cariz parlamentar impôs-se no país. Acho interessante notar que, se descontarmos o caso muito particular e sui generis da Suiça, a República portuguesa é a segunda a nascer na Europa, depois da França. Todo esse tempo, que em Portugal se chama Primeira República, foi marcado por uma tensa polarização entre dois sectores da sociedade portuguesa.

Por um lado, um país rural e conservador, politicamente assente no poder dos caciques, que beneficiavam da incultura da população, com forte influência da Igreja católica, instituição que a República laica hostilizou desde o primeiro momento. As forças monarquicas derrotadas em 1910, em grande parte no exílio, combatiam então o novo regime e nele introduziam vagas sucessivas de instabilidade.

Do outro lado estava uma nova classe em ascensão, constituída pela pequena e média burguesias urbanas, com funcionários e comerciantes, muito permeados pelas ideias maçónicas e anti-religiosas, militantes pela laicidade e pela educação popular, que ocuparam o essencial do espaço político-partidário do novo regime.

Além disso, a República estava sob forte pressão da agitação nos meios operários – onde o anarquismo e o socialismo radical detinham uma influência crescente, fruto dos ideários revolucionários que lhes chegavam de uma Europa em ebulição.

Este complexo puzzle, que se reflectia sobre um sistema político muito dividido, desencadeou uma instabilidade quase permanente, com sucessivas quedas dos governos e algumas intentonas revolucionárias, quase sempre tendo como objectivo último a restauração da monarquia. Uma crescente agitação conservadora, desfavorável ao novo regime, começou a borbulhar no meio militar, que se mostrava descontente com a desordem nas ruas e, de certo modo, sentia a humilhação pelo modo como era lida a sua participação na fase final da Primeira Guerra Mundial.

Perante uma sociedade portuguesa aturdida, assustada pela agitação social, polarizada por uma igreja conservadora e ansiosa por um ambiente de ordem que a instabilidade republicana não conseguia garantir – muito por culpa dos seus inimigos, diga-se - um golpe militar interrompeu, em 28 de Maio de 1926, esta primeira experiência democrática feita no quadro republicano. A chegada dos militares ao poder acabou, assim, por fazer-se quase que com alguma naturalidade, seguindo exemplos em voga noutros países europeus.

A Ditadura Militar, como se auto-apelidou sem cerimónia, teve, porém, uma evolução muito mais conservadora do que alguns dos seus próprios promotores esperavam. Seguindo os modelos que faziam escola na Europa, o regime militar viria a evoluir, ao final de poucos anos, para um regime civil, o Estado Novo, que iria ser consagrado na Constituição de 1933. Nos seus princípios reflectia-se uma espécie de fascismo “soft”, acomodado entre conceitos hiper-conservadores, que misturava uma espécie de ruralismo político e de tradicionalismo moral e religioso. Nesse modelo, a economia do país, essencialmente de base agrícola e com uma muito incipiente indústria, foi enquadrada num regime para-corporativo, que procurava anular os perigos do sindicalismo, bebendo as suas bases ao modelo mussoliniano. O formato constitucional criava, assim, aquilo que qualificou de “democracia orgânica”, com uma espécie de parlamento de um só partido e um modelo novo de senado – a Câmara Corporativa.

Esse regime durou 48 anos, teve diversas fases, nomeadamente no modo como reprimiu os seus adversários e como procurou justificar-se politicamente. Mas houve padrões de comportamento de que nunca se afastou durante esses 48 anos: interdição de partidos políticos, limitação das liberdades fundamentais, prisão e frequente tortura dos activistas que se lhe opunham, polícia política feroz e censura permanente à comunicação social. Diga-se, em abono da verdade, que, mesmo nos seus auges repressivos, o grau de violência do regime sobre os seus adversários não se pode comparar ao de outros modelos autoritários europeus que lhe foram contemporâneos. Isso não evitou que, ao longo desse quase meio século, muitas centenas de pessoas tivessem sido presas, algumas por mais de duas décadas, por vezes muito para além dos períodos a que haviam sido condenadas por uma justiça política discricionária. Outras pessoas morreram por simples violência policial ou objecto de maus tratos, em alguns casos em condições penais degradantes, de que o campo de concentração do Tarrafal, nas ilhas de Cabo Verde, é o exemplo mais saliente.

A polícia política constituiu-se numa realidade omnipresente na sociedade portuguesa, as denúncias e delacções eram estimuladas, muitas pessoas eram afastadas de cargos públicos por mera avaliação política subjectiva e muitas famílias foram condenadas a sobreviver com imensas dificuldades. A vida intelectual era condicionada, o acesso ao ensino estava muito abaixo das médias europeias, as taxas de analfabetismo era muito elevadas. Apesar de, nos termos da Constituição de 1933, o regime organizar actos eleitorais com regularidade formal, as campanhas dos oposicionistas eram limitadas, sem acesso livre à comunicação social, com fraudes eleitorais sempre escandalosas. A melhor prova será, com certeza, o facto de, ao longo de todas essas décadas, nunca nenhum membro da oposição ter sido eleito para o parlamento do regime.

António de Oliveira Salazar foi o estratega e, posteriormente, o condutor desse regime que se chamou Estado Novo. Ministro das Finanças da Ditadura Militar, passou rapidamente a ídolo dos oficiais que se tinham revoltado em 1926 e, pela mão destes, veio a chegar à chefia do Governo, onde se manteve, sem interrupção, entre 1932 e 1968. Receoso do contágio do radicalismo esquerdista que se vivia em Espanha, Salazar apoiou, com sucesso, o general Franco na sua revolta contra o regime republicano, durante a Guerra Civil espanhola, entre 1936 e 1939.

Durante a II Guerra Mundial, Salazar jogou, inicialmente, de forma a não hostilizar a Alemanha e soube pressentir quando a mudança do vento passou a funcionar em favor dos Aliados. A partir de um certo momento, e depois de muito resistir, optou por conceder facilidades militares, nas ilhas dos Açores, às forças que acabaram por ser vitoriosas da guerra, na execução da política a que, sintomaticamente, chamou de “neutralidade colaborante”.

O início da Guerra Fria colocou todos os anti-comunistas – democratas ou não – do mesmo lado da barricada e, num gesto de cínica “realpolitik” por parte dos aliados, o regime autoritário português foi premiado com a sua sobrevivência. Embora, na retórica, Portugal continuasse a ser apelado a restaurar a democracia, a verdade é que Salazar nunca sofreu pressões insuportáveis para liberalizar o seu regime, o qual, no plano prático, acabava por satisfazer os interesses dos Aliados, que levaram mesmo o país a ser membro fundador da OTAN.

Porém, o regime português, tinha, dentro de si, uma fragilidade que lhe iria ser fatal.

Ele assentava, no plano ideológico, num modelo de país imperial, o qual, a partir de certo momento, se recusou a reconhecer-se como um puro modelo colonial, com todas as consequências históricas daí decorrentes. Para o Estado Novo, Portugal era uma entidade que ia “do Minho a Timor” e quem não aceitasse esse mito identitário mais não era que um simples traidor à Pátria. Ao adoptar esta doutrina como base do regime, o Portugal de Salazar não conseguiu perceber a chegada de uma mudança histórica: a nova era da autodeterminação e do fim dos impérios coloniais.

Outras potências colonizadoras europeias souberam, com maior ou menor sucesso, desenvolver uma estratégia de saída das suas colónias. Em muitos casos, essa estratégia assentou na promoção de uma burguesia local, preparada para tomar o lugar do colonizador. Porém, Portugal não podia fazer isso: o seu subdesenvolvimento europeu originou também uma espécie de “colonialismo subdesenvolvido”, sem elites preparadas para assumir o poder na transição, em colónias sujeitas à quase desertificação educativa.

Sem perceber que o sonho imperial era isso mesmo – um sonho –, o país foi obrigado, a partir de 1961, pela força de revoltas sucessivas, a ter de enfrentar guerras coloniais, as quais, por uma década, foram mesmo simultâneas em Angola, Moçambique e Guiné. Antes disso, Portugal perdera já as suas possessões na Índia, com a qual foi incapaz de gizar uma solução negociada. Por virtude destas gerras, centenas de milhares de portugueses, num país com uma população de menos de 10 milhões, passaram obrigatoriamente vários anos nas Forças Armadas, ao longo das décadas de 60 e 70, com custos pessoais, sociais e familares muito sérios.

Com a guerra, a emigração, que era uma constante cíclica do país, aumentou fortemente em direcção à Europa – de que a França foi o principal destino. Foi uma emigração que, inicialmente, era apenas de natureza económica mas que, com o passar do tempo, inclui também quantos procuravam evitar as guerras coloniais.

Salazar adoeceu em 1968 e foi substituído por Marcelo Caetano, uma figura oriunda dos quadros do regime, que se revelou incapaz de desenhar uma saída para o impasse em que o mesmo caíra. Caetano alimentou, inicialmente, um discurso liberalizante e ambíguo, que suscitou algumas esperanças, mas logo se verificou que seguia a lógica de Lampedusa: “mudar alguma coisa para que tudo continuasse na mesma”. A questão colonial, para a qual continuou sem soluções, terá sido o elemento decisivo que rigidificou o regime e que levou à sua derrota histórica.

As forças empresariais portuguesas – e é preciso dizer isto alto, de uma vez por todas – nunca tiveram, em Portugal, nem a visão nem o rasgo para se aliarem às personalidades modernizadoras que o início do período de Marcelo Caetano fizera despontar e que poderiam ter auxiliado uma evolução sem ruptura para a democracia. Nem sequer souberam aproveitar o exemplo de Espanha, onde uma nova burguesia tecnocrática soube convencer o general Franco a permitir alguma abertura, que viria a ser desenvolvida no transição política feita depois da sua morte. Os grandes grupos económicos portugueses viriam a pagar bem cara essa sua aliança objectiva com a ditadura, fruto de uma acomodação com os lucros que ganhavam, graças ao regime laboral rígido e sem liberdades que utilizavam em Portugal e, de igual modo, com a sua falta de estratégia para gerir um “phasing out” dos importantes interesses que mantinham em África.

Como acto político, e como referi no início desta palestra, a Revolução que tem lugar em 25 de Abril de 1974 acabou por ser a resultante de uma aliança cumulativa de descontentamentos de génese muito diversa. Em síntese, esse descontentamento assentava no cansaço colectivo com as guerras coloniais, nas limitações orçamentais derivadas das imensas despesas militares, na ausência de um entusiasmo popular para a defesa de um regime que se alimentava da História, na crescente consciência que o país tinha de que estava a caminhar à margem da modernidade do mundo europeu.

Entretanto, as guerras colonais haviam obrigado as Forças Armadas portuguesas a alargarem a sua base de recrutamento, formando oficiais oriundos de classes sociais cada vez mais baixas, por isso cada vez mais sensíveis às realidades criadas pela chocante dualidade social do país. Por outro lado, a necessidade de formação de quadros de comando conduziu à incorporação obrigatória nas Forças Armadas de milhares de estudantes universitários, saídos de um meio onde o ambiente de radicalismo político estava então no auge, incendiado pelas ideologias a que o Maio de 1968, aqui em França, dera ainda maior popularidade. A junção destes novos recrutas com os militares profissionais, já cansados de uma guerra sem solução política à vista, ajudou a alimentar nestes últimos uma consciência política que gerou uma crescente insatisfação face ao poder.

Inicialmente, o mal-estar militar assentava em meras razões de egoísmo corporativo, mas, pela mão hábil de alguns oficiais, ele rapidamente se converteu num movimento de sentido político. O movimento de 25 de Abril de 1974 foi, tecnicamente, um golpe de Estado militar, justificado por uma “patine” ideológica apenas democratizante, com grandes hesitações e contradições, dentre as quais a mais importante era a própria questão colonial, abordada inicialmente de forma ambígua. Mas o povo português, mobilizado pelas forças e personalidades políticas que, ao longo da ditadura, haviam combatido o regime, rapidamente soube transformar o golpe de Estado numa Revolução. O que se passou após o 25 de Abril foi uma explosão de um país que estava sem voz, uma revolta assente em vários radicalismos, os quais, ao longo dos anos de 1974 e 1975, só muito lentamente começaram a ver-se ultrapassados por forças mais moderadas.

Esta contraposição de posições não se fez, porém, sem luta e sem crises. A partir de um certo momento, ficou claro que havia dois campos bem distintos.

De um lado estavam os que optavam por um modelo democrático similar ao que vigorava em muitos países do Ocidente europeu, embora com uma roupagem socializante, os quais passaram a ser acompanhados por todas as forças conservadoras, mesmo os que se reviam no regime derrubado.

Do outro estavam diversos grupos de matriz socialista, num magma contraditório e muito conflitual entre si, que ia desde o modelo soviético ao esquerdismo maoísta, tendo ainda no meio os promotores de um “poder popular” de sentido quase anarquizante.

Todos estes grupos, sem excepção, tinham conseguido influenciar sectores das próprias Forças Armadas, o que criou um potencial muito sério para uma guerra civil. Das contradições e alianças tácticas entre estes vários grupos resultou uma situação de grande tensão, ao longo de 1975, que partiu da vaga de nacionalizações que teve lugar em 11 de Março até terminar no “putch” em 25 de Novembro, que acabou por confirmar as forças moderadas no comando do processo político.

Esse ano de 1975 foi o ano de todas as batalhas ideológicas e, de certo modo, foi o ano que encerrou as batalhas políticas mais sérias, que a sorte fez com que não tivessem transformado em batalhas militares.

“To make a long story short”, como dizem os anglo-saxónicos, que resta hoje do 25 de Abril em Portugal?

Resta uma herança política e social muito importante.

Resta um sólido regime democrático, servido por uma Constituição com um equilíbrio inter-institucional funcional, que tem evoluído e sobrevivido a todas as tensões e crises políticas.

Resta uma sociedade livre, tão livre como qualquer outra dentro da União Europeia, no que respeita à liberdade dos meios de comunicação social ou a quaisquer outras formas de expressão pública, com um sociedade civil activa e participante.

Resta uma vida económico-social que, situada embora num patamar relativamente modesto no quadro europeu ocidental, representa um país moderno, dotado de importante rede de infraestruturas e com um nível de vida que está a “anos-luz” da sociedade que a ditadura proporcionava aos portugueses em 1974.

Resta uma ampla democratização do ensino e da cultura, que atravessa crises que não estão distantes de algumas que hoje afectam a França, mas onde os índices de cobertura representam um impressionante salto face à situação de há três décadas atrás.

Resta um país com uma acção externa de grande coerência, muito activa e solidária, com uma política europeia de grande clareza, com uma relação magnífica com todas as suas antigas colónias, com uma intensa participação nas instituições multilaterais, com uma colaboração activa das suas forças militares em vários cenários de manutenção de paz.

Estamos então perante um oásis?

Não, estamos perante uma sociedade que sabe estar ainda marcada por algumas bolsas de subdesenvolvimento, com um tecido económico cuja reconversão, que já estava a ser feita sob pressão da globalização, sofre hoje as consequências da crise mundial, a qual incide de forma séria sobre uma economia aberta como é a portuguesa, com sérias consequências no emprego e no défice das contas públicas.

Este Portugal, com todos os seus problemas e dificuldades, é, contudo, um país muito diferente do que existia em 1974. Foi a Revolução de 1974 que acabou por dotar o país das intituições que, entre naturais crises e polémicas, presidem hoje à sua gestão democrática quotidiana. Por isso, em Portugal, tirando alguns saudosistas solitários, o 25 de Abril é visto globalmente como um movimento que valeu a pena.

Também por isso, julgo que os portugueses podem ter orgulho em se sentirem um povo que soube viver um tempo de grandes mudanças, no seio da instabilidade provocada pelo trauma do regresso definitivo das caravelas do império, um povo que conseguiu, apenas em algumas décadas, com a importante ajuda da Europa, gerar uma sociedade de saudável tolerância, marcada por um indiscutível sentido democrático.

Por isso, repito, valeu a pena fazer o 25 de Abril.

Tradução da palestra proferida na Casa de Portugal, na Cidade Universitária de Paris, em 29 de Abril de 2009

522) Tobin Tax, Dani Rodrik

The Tobin Tax Lives Again
Dani Rodrik
September 2009

CAMBRIDGE – Something happened in late August that I never thought I would see in my lifetime. A leading policymaker in the Anglo-American empire of finance actually came out in support of a Tobin tax – a global tax on financial transactions.

The official in question was Adair Turner, the head of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority, the country’s chief financial regulator. Turner, voicing his concerns about the size of the financial sector and its frequently obscene levels of compensation, said he thought a global tax on financial transactions might help curb both.

Such a statement would have been unthinkable in the years before the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Now, however, it is an indication of how much things have changed.

The idea of such a tax was first floated in the 1970’s by James Tobin, the Nobel laureate economist, who famously called for “throwing some sand in the wheels of international finance.” Tobin was concerned about excessive fluctuations in exchange rates. He argued that taxing short-term movements of money in and out of different currencies would curb speculation and create some maneuvering room for domestic macroeconomic management.

The idea has since become a cause-célèbre for a wide range of non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups that see in it the double virtue of cutting finance down to size and raising a big chunk of revenue for favored causes –foreign aid, vaccines, green technologies, you name it. It has also been endorsed by some French (predictably!) and other continental European leaders. But, until Turner mentioned the idea, you would not have been able to identify a single major policymaker from the United States or the UK, the world’s two leading centers of global finance, with anything nice to say about it.

The beauty of a Tobin tax is that it would discourage short-term speculation without having much adverse effect on long-term international investment decisions. Consider, for example, a tax of 0.25% applied to all cross-border financial transactions. Such a tax would instantaneously kill the intra-day trading that takes place in pursuit of profit margins much smaller than this, as well as the longer-term trades designed to exploit minute differentials across markets.

Economic activity of this kind is of doubtful social value, yet it eats up real resources in terms of human talent, computing power, and debt. So we should not mourn the demise of such trading practices.

Meanwhile, investors with longer time horizons going after significant returns would not be much deterred by the tax. So capital would still move in the right direction over the longer term. Nor would a Tobin tax stand in the way of financial markets punishing governments that grossly mismanage their economies.

Moreover, it is undeniable that such a tax would raise a great deal of money. Revenue estimates for a small tax on international currency transactions run into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The receipts would be even greater if the base is extended, as was implied by Turner, to all global financial transactions. Whatever the precise amount, it is safe to say that the numbers in question are huge – larger than, say, foreign-aid flows or any reasonable assessment of the gains from completing the Doha Round of trade negotiations.

Predictably, Turner came in for severe criticism from City of London bankers and the British Treasury. Much of that criticism misses the mark. A Tobin tax would raise the cost of short-term finance, some argued, somehow missing the point that this is in fact the very purpose of a Tobin tax.

Others argued that such a tax fails to target the underlying incentive problems in financial markets, as if we had an effective, well-proven alternative to achieve that end. It would threaten the role of London as a financial center, some complained, as if the proposal was meant to apply just in London and not globally. It can easily be evaded by relying on offshore banking centers, some pointed out, as if not all financial regulations face that very same challenge.

In any case, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington observed, there are many imaginative ways in which a Tobin tax could be made harder to dodge. Suppose, he argues, that we give finance workers who turn in their cheating bosses 10% of the receipts that the government collects. That would be quite an incentive for self-monitoring.

What the Tobin tax does not do is help with longer-term misalignments in financial markets. Such a tax would not have prevented the US-China trade imbalance. Neither would it have stopped the global saving glut from turning into a ticking time bomb for the world economy. It would not have protected European and other nations from becoming awash in toxic mortgage assets exported from the US. And it would not dissuade governments intent on pursuing unsustainable monetary and fiscal policies financed by external borrowing.

For all of these problems we will need other macroeconomic and financial remedies. But a Tobin tax is a good place to start if we want to send a strong message about the social value of the casino known as global finance.
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Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Prize. His latest book is One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

segunda-feira, setembro 21, 2009

521) Proliferacao nuclear, made in Pakistan...

Investigation: Nuclear scandal - Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan
The Sunday Times, September 20, 2009

The Pakistani scientist who passed nuclear secrets to the world’s rogue states has been muzzled by his government. In a smuggled letter, AQ Khan reveals his side of the story

It could be a scene from a film. On a winter’s evening, around 8pm, in a quiet suburban street in Amsterdam, a group of cars draw up. Agents of the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, accompanied by uniformed police, ring the bell and knock on the door of one of the houses. The occupants, an elderly couple and their unmarried daughter, are slow to come to the door. The bell-ringing becomes more insistent, the knocks sharper. When the door opens, the agents request entry but are clearly not going to take no for an answer.

The year was 2004. The raid went unreported but was part of the worldwide sweep against associates of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist and “father of the Islamic bomb”, who had just been accused of selling nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. The house belonged to one of his brothers, a retired Pakistani International Airlines manager, who lived there with his wife and daughter. The two secret agents asked the daughter for a letter she had recently received from abroad. Upstairs in her bedroom, she pulled it from a drawer. It was unopened. The agents grabbed it and told her to put on a coat and come with them.

The daughter, Kausar Khan, was taken to the local police station, although, contrary to usual practice, she was neither signed in nor signed out. The Dutch agents wanted to know why she had not opened the letter and whether she knew what was in it. She didn’t; she had merely been asked to look after it. Inside the envelope was a copy of a letter that Pakistan did not want to reach the West. The feared Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had found the letter when they searched Dr AQ Khan’s home in Islamabad. He had also passed a copy on to his daughter Dina to take to her home in London, as rumours of Khan’s “proliferation” — jargon for the dissemination of nuclear secrets — swept the world. The Pakistani ISI were furious. “Now you have got your daughter involved,” they reportedly said. “So far we have left your family alone, but don’t expect any leniency now.”

Dr Khan collapsed in sobs. Under pressure, he agreed to telephone Dina in London and ordered her to destroy the documents. He used three languages: Urdu, English and Dutch. It was code for her to obey his instructions. Dina dutifully destroyed the letter. That left the copy that was confiscated by the Dutch intelligence service in Amsterdam. I know there is at least one other copy: mine.

Just four pages long, it is an extraordinary letter, the contents of which have never been revealed before. Dated December 10, 2003, and addressed to Henny, Khan’s Dutch wife, it is handwritten, in apparent haste. It starts simply: “Darling, if the government plays any mischief with me take a tough stand.” In numbered paragraphs, it outlines Pakistan’s nuclear co-operation with China, Iran and North Korea, and also mentions Libya. It ends: “They might try to get rid of me to cover up all the things they got done by me.”

When I acquired my copy of the secret letter in 2007, I was shocked. On the third page, Khan had written: “Get in touch with Simon Henderson… and give him all the details.” He had also listed my then London address, my telephone number, fax number, mobile-phone number and the e-mail address I used at the time. It has been my luck, or fate, call it what you will, to develop a relationship with AQ Khan.

Khan became an idolised figure in Pakistan from the 1980s onwards because of his success in building a uranium-enrichment plant at Kahuta, near Islamabad. In February 2004, three years after his retirement, he was accused of proliferating nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and made a televised confession.

General Pervez Musharraf, at the time the ruler of Pakistan, pardoned Khan for his “crimes” but kept him under house arrest and largely incommunicado in Islamabad until February this year, when a court ordered his release. He was declared a “free man”, but in practice nothing changed.

His freedom lasted a day or so before international protests, mainly from the United States, locked him back up again. A few months ago, he was refused permission to attend his granddaughter’s high-school graduation. “I continue to be a prisoner,” Khan complained.In Washington, a State Department spokesman said that Khan remained a “proliferation risk” but, after being shut away for five years, that seemed hard to imagine. So why was he silenced? Was it because of what he did, or because of what he knows about Pakistan’s active role in spreading nuclear technology to some of the world’s worst regimes?

Any relationship with a source is fraught with potential difficulties. One doesn’t want to be blind to the chance of being used. Government officials and politicians in any country are seldom interested in the simple truth. They all have their particular story to tell. In this context, I am frankly amazed that Khan has chosen me to be his interlocutor with the world.

I have been writing about Pakistan ever since I arrived there in June 1977, sent by the BBC to be a stringer because the local man was considered to be under the thumb of the then prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the father of the assassinated Benazir), who had held disputed elections and was facing widespread street protests.

At the time I had never heard of AQ Khan, although, it turns out, he and his family had also lived months earlier at the same small hotel in Rawalpindi where I had lodged for a while. Pakistan was already vying to be a nuclear power and America was pressuring France to stop the sale of a reprocessing plant which would have enabled Pakistan to acquire plutonium, a nuclear explosive.

I returned to London in 1978 to join the Financial Times, and was replaced by a journalist who latched on to a bigger story: that Pakistan was building a centrifuge enrichment plant to make highly enriched uranium, the alternative route to an atomic bomb. A Dutch-trained previously unknown Pakistani scientist, Dr AQ Khan, was leading the project.My intrepid replacement went to visit Khan’s nuclear construction site at Kahuta. He also found out where Khan was living and went to his home. Khan’s security guards beat him up before he reached the front door.

The FT sent me back to Pakistan to help broker a deal whereby my replacement could leave without being prosecuted. At that point, I began my own investigations of Khan, which led to a frontpage story about his purchasing network in Britain. I doubt that either Khan or the Pakistan government was happy to see the exposé.

Even so, the first time I contacted Khan, he was civil to me. It was 1986 and he had just won, on a technicality, an appeal against a Netherlands court judgment that he had attempted to steal centrifuge secrets. Although my story was not a whitewash, it did quote him accurately, and Khan wrote to me with some more information about his case. I replied, and he reciprocated. It started a “penfriendship” that has continued for 23 years and has included two visits.

At the time, I thought Khan might make a good subject for a book. I amassed material, but never thought I had enough, and was not even sure if he was interesting enough for a biography. For his part, Khan was cautious. “When I write my autobiography, Mr Henderson, I shall ask you for your help.” It wasn’t the answer I wanted.

Frankly, in news terms, there wasn’t a great deal of interest in him, even in 1998, when Pakistan first tested its 1,500-kilometre-range Ghauri missile, a Khan-directed copy of the North Korean Nodong rocket, and went on to test two nuclear weapons. In 2001, when he turned 65, he retired. We kept in touch, but it was mostly Christmas cards.

Then, in late 2003, he became the story again. I was in London, on a bicycle ride by the River Thames, when my mobile phone rang. A voice said: “I am a friend of your friend in Pakistan.” I knew my “friend” must be Khan. The voice on the line said he had been asked to call.

My “friend’s” associates were being arrested — former colleagues at KRL, the Dr AQ Khan Research Laboratories, as the Kahuta centrifuge plant was known. I asked why. The voice said “Iran” — which was attempting to go nuclear. I asked what my friend wanted me to do with the information. The voice said I should try to publish it. It might help.I explained that I was happy to listen to what I was being told, but I needed some corroboration. I told him that my friend should call or e-mail me; he didn’t have to go through the details again. As far as I was concerned, he could just say “Merry Christmas”. I cycled home quickly and took a shower. Thirty minutes later, Khan rang from Pakistan and wished me merry Christmas.

The next few weeks were turbulent. A week or so after Khan’s call to me, Libya announced that it would abandon weapons of mass destruction. Shortly afterwards, in December 2003, The Wall Street Journal revealed that a German cargo ship called BBC China had been intercepted on its way to Libya with thousands of centrifuge components, and diverted to Italy. There was a Khan link there as well, but Khan declined my request for an interview. His “friend” called to say the time was not right and Khan was exhausted after long bouts of interrogation.

Khan was placed under house arrest on February 1, 2004, and since then he has rarely been able to leave his house. What do you do when under house arrest in Islamabad? You watch the BBC on satellite television. I knew he would. So, in 2006, when Panorama came to me saying they were making a film about Khan’s role in nuclear proliferation and would I be interviewed, the answer was simple: “Yes”. I told them that, from my knowledge of Pakistan and Khan, he could not have acted without the permission and collaboration of the government.

Khan watched the programme. After that, one thing quickly led to another. I came to know of the existence of the letter, and also learnt that its contents were known to Dutch intelligence, and also to anyone they might have passed details on to — including, in all likelihood, the British and Americans.Why were Dutch intelligence agents so keen to seize it? On the face of it, the letter’s contents are a damning indictment of a generation of Pakistan’s political and military leadership, who used Khan’s nuclear and missile skills to enhance Pakistan’s diplomacy.

It was not rocket science to work out a plausible explanation for the Dutch seizure. Bloggers will probably err on the side of more imaginative conspiracy theories, but the truth is probably simpler. After the September 11 attacks, the West in general, and the United States in particular, had to work with Pakistan to counter Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in neighbouring Afghanistan. That meant that they had to work with President Musharraf, even though he was no democrat. As part of the bargain, Pakistan’s nuclear sins also needed to be placed to one side.

As sins go, they were big: Pakistan had been spreading nuclear technology for years. The first customer for one of its enrichment plants was China — which itself had supplied Pakistan with enough highly enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs in the summer of 1982.

There it was in the letter: “We put up a centrifuge plant at Hanzhong (250km southwest of Xian).” It went on: “The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us 50kg of enriched uranium, gave us 10 tons of UF6 (natural) and 5 tons of UF6 (3%).” (UF6 is uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous feedstock for an enrichment plant.)

On Iran, the letter says: “Probably with the blessings of BB [Benazir Bhutto, who became prime minister in 1988] and [a now-retired general]… General Imtiaz [Benazir’s defence adviser, now dead] asked… me to give a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians…The names and addresses of suppliers were also given to the Iranians.”

On North Korea: “[A now-retired general] took $3million through me from the N. Koreans and asked me to give some drawings and machines.”

In late 2003, with Al-Qaeda far from vanquished in Afghanistan and Pakistan-linked centrifuge components heading towards Libya, President Musharraf was under tremendous pressure from Washington. In all likelihood, he was offered a way out: “Work with us and we will support you. Blame all the nuclear nonsense on AQ Khan.” Although Musharraf had lavished praise on Khan at a banquet in 2001, he didn’t like him personally. So the choice was simple. Khan was made a scapegoat.

Years earlier, Khan had been warned about the Pakistan army by Li Chew, the senior minister who ran China’s nuclear-weapons programme. Visiting Kahuta, Chew had said: “As long as they need the bomb, they will lick your balls. As soon as you have delivered the bomb, they will kick your balls.” In the letter to his wife, Khan rephrased things: “The bastards first used us and are now playing dirty games with us.”

George Tenet, the director of the CIA at the time of 9/11, has described Khan as “the merchant of death” and “as bad as Osama Bin Laden”. Khan has been accused of unauthorised nuclear proliferation, motivated by personal greed. On top of this, he has been depicted as overstating his contribution to Pakistan’s success in making nuclear weapons and missiles with which to threaten the whole of India.

These themes, which were repeated endlessly across the world, are now accepted as universal truths. But Khan was a government official and an adviser with ministerial status even after he retired in 2001. If his dissemination of nuclear secrets was authorised by the government, it could not be illegal and he would enjoy sovereign immunity for his actions. Pakistan is also not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), so its nuclear trades, however reprehensible, were not against international law.

Khan is adamant that he never sold nuclear secrets for personal gain. So what about the millions of dollars he reportedly made? Nothing was confiscated from him and no reported investigation turned up hidden accounts. Having planted rumours about Khan’s greed, Pakistani officials were curiously indifferent to following them through. General Musharraf told a British newspaper at the time of Khan’s arrest in 2004 that “He can keep his money”. In another interview a few months later, he said: “We don’t know where his funds are.”

But was there any money? Much was made of a “hotel”, named after Khan’s wife, Henny, built by a local tour guide with the help of money from Khan and a group of friends in Timbuktu, west Africa. It is a modest structure at best, more of a guesthouse. A weekend home at Bani Gala, outside Islamabad, where Khan went to relax, is hardly the palace that some reports have made it.

In fact, there seemed to be no money. By summer 2007, Khan was finding it difficult to make ends meet on his pension of 12,200 rupees per month (at the time about $200). After pleading with General Khalid Kidwai, the officer supervising both Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and Dr Khan, the pension was increased to $2,500 per month and there was a one-off lump-sum payment of the equivalent of $50,000. I have copies of the agreement and cheques.

As for his role in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear and missile forces, I have little doubt that Khan won the race between his KRL organisation and the official Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to develop both a nuclear bomb and a missile system, a rivalry deliberately constructed by the dictator General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s and sustained by later governments.

But there is a simple way to clarify matters. Pakistan’s system of national civilian honours is topped by the Nishan-i-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence), abbreviated as NI. A second tier of honour is the Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Crescent of Excellence), or HI. Khan was awarded the NI twice, a distinction never achieved before or since. He was also earlier awarded the HI. It is stretching one’s imagination to think that Khan could hijack the country’s honour system and the judgment of successive presidents.

Although the West continues to condemn Khan, Pakistan’s own energy to do so is fading, particularly since the departure of Musharraf in 2008. Frustrated by his house arrest and legal limbo, Khan has repeatedly this year pressed for remedy by the courts.

Khan was supposedly freed from house arrest in February, but the terms of that freedom were detailed in a secret “annexure A” of the court judgment, the final version of which Khan only saw later. One of the lines in the original draft that he was asked to sign was: “That in case Mr Simon Henderson or anyone else proceeds with the publication of any information or material anywhere in the world, I affirm that it would not be based on any input from me and I disown it.”

That line was eventually deleted and replaced with a more general prohibition about unnamed “specific media personnel”. Despite the court judgment specifying that the contents of the annexure “shall not be issued to the press or made public in any manner”, a copy reached me in the West.

Khan went back to court last month to challenge the terms of the annexure that he never accepted. Justice Ejaz Ahmed, the presiding judge at the Lahore high court, lifted all the curbs on his movement. “Dr Khan can come and go anywhere he pleases and no one should prevent him from doing this,” he ruled. “There should be no limitations.” Two days later another Pakistani court reimposed the ban.

America is pressing hard for Khan’s continued confinement. Deprived by Pakistan of the opportunity to interrogate Khan, the US is concerned that he may revive his old networks. Echoing the official view, The New York Times called this month for restrictions to remain on Khan for his “heinous role as maestro of the world’s largest nuclear black market”.

If Khan is free to travel and speak openly, there is a danger that he will give his own account of events, opening up a can of worms and complicating relations with Washington. Now his letter has been revealed, he hopes his story will be told differently.

sábado, setembro 19, 2009

520) Respondendo a Richard Posner

Richard Posner is a Suicide Pact
by David Gordon on September 10, 2009

Under Discussion:
A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression.
Richard A. Posner.
Harvard University Press (2009). 346 pages.

Richard Posner tells us that capitalism has failed, but his own book leads to an entirely different conclusion.

Posner, a noted federal appeals court judge, helped found the “law and economics” movement. This movement views law as a way to maximize economic efficiency. Because of his activities in this movement, as well as his status as a leading light of Chicago School economics, Posner acquired a reputation as a defender of the free market. Is it not big news, then, when a champion of capitalism must admit that something is wrong with capitalism?

But matters are not what they seem. Posner never was an unalloyed supporter of the free market, and his book does not show that capitalism has failed. True enough, Posner sometimes has opposed excessive government regulation, but he has never defended the free market consistently. Quite the contrary, Posner, a self-proclaimed “pragmatist,” has always readily jettisoned the free market, and a free society more generally, when he thought it necessary. In his Not a Suicide Pact, for example, he urges that even the slight possibility that we may be subject to terrorist attacks justifies massive intrusions on civil liberties.

More important than mistaken ideas about Posner, though, are mistaken ideas about capitalism, as these can lead to serious policy blunders. Posner says that capitalism has failed:

Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government’s myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep a capitalist economy from running off the rails.

Posner’s opinion goes directly against the evidence his own book provides. The crisis began, as everyone knows, as a collapse in the housing market. Investment in real estate, through complicated derivatives and other schemes, spread through the entire economy, so that problems in housing could not be contained. The result was a general crisis.

Posner rightly draws an analogy with the American economy in the 1920s:

A stock market bubble developed in the 1920s, powered by plausible optimism (the years 1924 to 1929 were ones of unprecedented economic growth) and enabled by the willingness of banks to lend on very generous terms to people who wanted to play the stock market. … The current economic emergency is similarly the outgrowth of the bursting of an investment bubble. The bubble started in housing but eventually engulfed the financial sector, becoming a credit bubble.

How then should we explain this crisis? Is it not obvious that we should look for a theory that takes depression to be the outcome of an investment bubble? Posner ignores so evident a point, surprisingly for someone often viewed by his acolytes as a veritable genius. He says, first, that we lack a good theoretical account of the origins of depressions:

At the root of the economics profession’s failure to anticipate and respond decisively to the depression is the fact that the study of depressions is not a very satisfactory branch of economics… As [Nobel Laureate] Robert Lucas has explained, discussing the Great Depression… ‘We just don’t have a decent theoretical model.’

But “we” lack such a model only if we are Chicago School followers like Lucas or Keynesians like Paul Krugman. There is another account on offer, of which Posner shows himself fitfully aware but never discusses in detail.

Instead, he concentrates almost entirely on the Keynesian and monetarist accounts, deemed by their own advocates to be theoretically unsatisfactory:

The two basic remedial approaches correspond to two theories of the cause of the great depression: the monetarist, that it was caused by the Federal Reserve’s allowing the money supply to shrink, causing deflation—and the Keynesian—that private demand for goods and services fell drastically in the wake of the stock market crash and the bank insolvencies triggered by it and that the resulting diminution in the money supply resulted from, rather than caused, the reduction in economic activity.

He barely mentions “a third causal theory ... that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920s,” even though this theory gets right, by Posner’s own showing, that both the Great Depression and our current crisis stem from investment booms. He calls this theory by name, the Austrian theory, only once in the entire book.

The essentials of the theory are readily explained. People decide how much to spend on current consumption, and how much to invest, according to their rate of time preference, that is, their preference for present over future goods. The rate of time preference, according to Ludwig von Mises, is the principal component of the rate of interest. As Mises and F. A. Hayek explained, an expansion of bank credit can push the rate of interest below the rate that people’s time preference determines. If the interest rate thus falls, investors will be induced to expand. Money is available; why should they refuse? Additionally, a boom in consumption goods may also occur. When the credit expansion ceases, as it eventually must, these investments prove incapable of being sustained. They must be liquidated, and the process of doing so is precisely the depression.

This account raises a new question: How are the banks able to expand the supply of money? The answer lies in a combination of fractional reserve banking, the ability of banks to issue money in excess of reserves deposited, with the coordination of all banks through the Federal Reserve System. This permits a bank to issue money without fear that customers of other banks, demanding redemption in a quantity too great for it to meet, will force it into insolvency. The bank knows that the system will bail it out in case of an emergency of this kind.

If one accepts the Austrian theory, Posner’s claim of a “failure of capitalism” cannot be sustained. The Federal Reserve System is hardly the product of the free market; how then can an investment boom and ensuing depression that its monetary policy makes possible be blamed on capitalism? In a free market, as Mises and Murray Rothbard have argued, money would be a commodity, probably gold, and government manipulation of the money supply could not occur.

Posner offers no arguments against this intellectually satisfying theory. Quite the contrary, he inadvertently lends it support. A common objection to the theory is that prospective investors would be reluctant to proceed, once they became aware that the Fed was attempting to fuel a boom. Would they not realize in advance that investments financed through credit expansion could not be sustained?

Posner convincingly argues that investors who take the proffered money have not been bowled over by emotional contagion but act rationally:

Emotion does play a role in the behavior of businessmen and consumers, as of all human beings, but it is not necessarily or even typically irrational. It is a form of telescoped thinking, like intuition, and it is often superior to conscious analytic procedures. ... [I]n settings of profound uncertainty, it may be impossible to do better than to assume that tomorrow will be like today. ... It is difficult to second-guess the market—before the fall the existence of a bubble could only be suspected, not confirmed.

Of course, Posner has not written this to support the Austrian theory. He is a defender of old-style Chicago School economics, which assumes that people act rationally in their self-interest. He vigorously contests behavioral economics, now fashionable and even ensconced at Chicago itself in the person of Richard Thaler, which contends that human behavior often violates the constraints of reason. But whatever his motives, Posner has done Austrian economics a considerable service!

Posner raises one objection to the Austrian theory:

To blame the government for the depression is questionable. ... [E]ven without the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy in the early 2000s there would have been enough capital, supplied by the Chinese and others, to keep interest rates low.

But there is all the difference in the world between an increase in capital investment and bank credit expansion. An increase in investment, so long as it is not financed by bank credit expansion, does not artificially lower the rate of interest in a way that leads to business collapse down the road.

The free market has not failed; it has not been tried. But what do we do now? It will come as no surprise that Posner disagrees with the Austrian remedy. As Mises and Rothbard see matters, the government should do nothing. The depression is the process by which the economy rights itself. Bad investments need to be eliminated: for the government to attempt to prop them up would initiate a new artificial boom. The necessary liquidations cannot be indefinitely postponed.

Posner sees danger in such a “hands-off” policy. Liquidation may result in, horrible dictu, deflation, that supreme evil:

As the price level declines and expectations of a further decline form, consumers may begin to hoard money, expecting it to buy more in the future. ... And investors may hoard money too, hoping to buy assets more cheaply as prices continue down. … [I]f consumers and investors hoard, credit will dry up almost completely because borrowing in a deflation is expensive even at a zero interest rate.

But Posner admits that this dire downward cycle will come to an end:

Eventually deflation will bottom out. As income shrinks, consumers will not be able to hoard cash; they will have to start spending everything they have. As spending picks up, producers will hire more workers, so incomes will rise. A virtuous cycle will be under way.

Why, then, involve the government? Posner answers that the process of market correction takes too long: “But the process of recovery will be protracted because it will begin from an extremely low level.”

The historical record does not bear out Posner here. Two recent excellent books, Tom Woods’s Meltdown and Robert Murphy’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, tell a different tale. In the period 1920-21, America went through a depression so short-lived that most people are unaware of its existence. Woods remarks:

By the middle of 1920 the downturn in production had become severe, falling by 21 percent over the following twelve months. Conditions were worse than they would be in 1930, after the first year of the Great Depression. Yet scarcely any American even knows that such a slowdown occurred. That’s probably because, compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, it was so short lived. … [T]he market was allowed to make the necessary corrections, and in no time the economy was back setting production records again.

Government intervention to help the economy recover is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful. Posner notes some of the bad consequences of the measures he nevertheless recommends:

Programs to transfer wealth are very difficult to abolish because interest groups form about them. That is why there is a danger of excess demand after the depression ends. But perhaps we can’t afford to look ahead that far. [!]

As if this were not bad enough, Posner points out that excessive government spending may overshoot the mark and lead to inflation. Would we not be better off, then, to ignore the interventionist nostrums peddled by this pragmatist-utilitarian tinkerer and take our chances with freedom?

519) Respondendo ao economista Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman escreveu um artigo no NYTimes, atacando a economia convencional e elogiando o keynesianismo.
Aqui está uma resposta aos seus argumentos por um economista convencional.
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

How did Paul Krugman get it so Wrong?
John H. Cochrane*

Many friends and colleagues have asked me what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did Economists get it so wrong?

Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s, as taught to our author in his undergraduate introductory courses. If a scientist, he might be a global-warming skeptic, an AIDS-HIV disbeliever, a creationist, a stalwart that maybe continents don’t move after all.

It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now includes “new Keyenesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to their written opinions. Even this isn’t enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them in false and embarrassing situations. He accuses us of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit paranoid.

It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.

That’s the biggest and saddest news of this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. “Irrationality” and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.

How sad.

That’s what I think, but I don’t expect you the reader to be convinced by my opinion or my reference to professional consensus. Maybe he is right. Occasionally sciences, especially social sciences, do take a wrong turn for a decade or two. I thought Keynesian economics was such a wrong turn. So let’s take a quick look at the ideas.

Krugman’s attack has two goals. First, he thinks financial markets are “inefficient,” fundamentally due to “irrational” investors, and thus prey to excessive volatility which needs government control. Second, he likes the huge “fiscal stimulus” provided by multi-trillion dollar deficits.

Efficiency.

It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.

Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and efficient marketers just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Paul knows better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. (I can overlook his mixing up the CAPM and Black-Scholes model, but not this.) There is nothing about “efficiency” that promises “stability.” “Stable” growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency. Efficient markets did not need to wait for “the memory of 1929 … gradually receding,” nor did we fail to read the newspapers in 1987. Data from the great depression has been included in practically all the tests. In fact, the great “equity premium puzzle” is that if efficient, stock markets don’t seem risky enough to deter more people from investing! Gene Fama’s PhD thesis was on “fat tails” in stock returns.

It is true and very well documented that asset prices move more than reasonable expectations of future cashflows. This might be because people are prey to bursts of irrational optimism and pessimism. It might also be because people’s willingness to take on risk varies over time, and is lower in bad economic times. As Gene Fama pointed out in 1970, these are observationally equivalent explanations. Unless you are willing to elaborate your theory to the point that it can quantitatively describe how much and when risk premiums, or waves of “optimism” and “pessimism,” can vary, you know nothing. No theory is particularly good at that right now.

Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an operational procedure for identifying bubbles, distinguishing them from rationally low risk premiums, and not crying wolf too many years in a row. Krugman rightly praises Robert Shiller for his warnings over many years that house prices might fall. But advice that we should listen to Shiller, because he got the last one right, is no more useful than previous advice from many quarters to listen to Greenspan because he got several ones right. Following the last mystic oracle until he gets one wrong, then casting him to the wolves, is not a good long-term strategy for identifying bubbles. Krugman likes Shiller because he advocates behavioral ideas, but that’s no help either. People who call themselves behavioral have just as wide a divergence of opinion as those who don’t. Are markets irrationally exuberant or irrationally depressed? It’s hard to tell.

This difficulty is no surprise. It’s the central prediction of free-market economics, as crystallized by Hayek, that no academic, bureaucrat or regulator will ever be able to fully explain market price movements. Nobody knows what “fundamental” value is. If anyone could tell what the price of tomatoes should be, let alone the price of Microsoft stock, communism would have worked.

More deeply, the economist’s job is not to “explain” market fluctuations after the fact, to give a pleasant story on the evening news about why markets went up or down. Markets up? “A wave of positive sentiment.” Markets went down? “Irrational pessimism.” ( “The risk premium must have increased” is just as empty.) Our ancestors could do that. Really, is that an improvement on “Zeus had a fight with Apollo?” Good serious behavioral economists know this, and they are circumspect in their explanatory claims so far.

But this argument takes us away from the main point. The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.

Krugman at bottom is arguing that the government should massively intervene in financial markets, and take charge of the allocation of capital. He can’t quite come out and say this, but he does say “Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets…dictate important business decisions,” and “finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a `casino.’” Well, if markets can’t be trusted to allocate capital, we don’t have to connect too many dots to imagine who Paul has in mind.

To reach this conclusion, you need evidence, experience, or any realistic hope that the alternative will be better. Remember, the SEC couldn’t even find BernieMadoff when he was handed to them on a silver platter. Think of the great job Fannie, Freddie, and Congress did in the mortgage market. Is this system going to regulate Citigroup, guide financial markets to the right price, replace the stock market, and tell our society which new products are worth investment? As David Wessel’s excellent In Fed We Trust makes perfectly clear, government regulators failed just as abysmally as private investors and economists to see the storm coming. And not from any lack of smarts.

In fact, the behavioral view gives us a new and stronger argument against regulation and control. Regulators are just as human and irrational as market participants. If bankers are, in Krugman’s words, “idiots,” then so must be the typical treasury secretary, fed chairman, and regulatory staff. They act alone or in committees, where behavioral biases are much better documented than in market settings. They are still easily captured by industries, and face politically distorted incentives.

Careful behavioralists know this, and do not quickly run from “the market got it wrong” to “the government can put it all right.” Even my most behavioral colleagues Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge” go only so far as a light libertarian paternalism, suggesting good default options on our 401(k) accounts. (And even here they’re not very clear on how the Federal Nudging Agency is going to steer clear of industry capture.) They don’t even think of jumping from irrational markets, which they believe in deeply, to Federal control of stock and house prices and allocation of capital.

Stimulus

Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”

In economics, stimulus spending ran aground on Robert Barro’s Ricardian equivalence theorem. This theorem says that debt-financed spending can’t have any effect because people, seeing the higher future taxes that must pay off the debt, will simply save more. They will buy the new government debt and leave all spending decisions unaltered. Is this theorem true? It’s a logical connection from a set of “if” to a set of “therefore.” Not even Paul can object to the connection.

Therefore, we have to examine the “ifs.” And those ifs are, as usual, obviously not true. For example, the theorem presumes lump-sum taxes, not proportional income taxes. Alas, when you take this into account we are all made poorer by deficit spending, so the multiplier is most likely negative. The theorem (like most Keynesian economics) ignores the composition of output; but surely spending money on roads rather than cars can affect the overall level.

Economists have spent a generation tossing and turning the Ricardian equivalence theorem, and assessing the likely effects of fiscal stimulus in its light, generalizing the “ifs” and figuring out the likely “therefores.” This is exactly the right way to do things. The impact of Ricardian equivalence is not that this simple abstract benchmark is literally true. The impact is that in its wake, if you want to understand the effects of government spending, you have to specify why it is false. Doing so does not lead you anywhere near old-fashioned Keynesian economics. It leads you to consider distorting taxes, how much people care about their children, how many people would like to borrow more to finance today’s consumption and so on. And when you find “market failures” that might justify a multiplier, optimal-policy analysis suggests fixing the market failures, not their exploitation by fiscal multiplier. Most “New Keynesian” analyses that add frictions don’t produce big multipliers.

This is how real thinking about stimulus actually proceeds. Nobody ever “asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment.” This is unsupportable by any serious review of professional writings, and Krugman knows it. (My own are perfectly clear on lots of possibilities for an answer that is not zero.) But thinking through this sort of thing and explaining it is much harder than just tarring your enemies with out-of-context quotes, ethical innuendo, or silly cartoons.

In fact, I propose that Krugman himself doesn’t really believe the Keynesian logic for that stimulus. I doubt he would follow that logic to its inevitable conclusions. Stimulus must have some other attraction to him.

If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar and a half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.

If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you don’t care how the money is spent. All this puffery about “infrastructure,” monitoring, wise investment, jobs “created” and so on is pointless. Keynes thought the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them up.

If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, you don’t even care if the government spending money is stolen. Actually, that would be better. Thieves have notoriously high propensities to consume.

The crash.

Krugman’s article is supposedly about how the crash and recession changed our thinking, and what economics has to say about it. The most amazing news in the whole article is that Paul Krugman has absolutely no idea about what caused the crash, what policies might have prevented it, and what policies we should adopt going forward. He seems completely unaware of the large body of work by economists who actually do know something about the banking and financial system, and have been thinking about it productively for a generation.

Here’s all he has to say: “Irrationality” caused markets to go up and then down. “Spending” then declined, for unclear reasons, possibly “irrational” as well. The sum total of his policy recommendations is for the Federal Government to spend like a drunken sailor after the fact.

Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks. A generation of economists has thought really hard about these kinds of events. Look up Diamond, Rajan, Gorton, Kashyap, Stein, and so on. They’ve thought about why there is so much short term debt, why banks run, how deposit insurance and credit guarantees help, and how they give incentives for excessive risk taking.

If we want to think about events and policies, this seems like more than a minor detail. The hard and central policy debate over the last year was how to manage this financial crisis. Now it is how to set up the incentives of banks and other financial institutions so this mess doesn’t happen again. There’s lots of good and subtle economics here that New York Times readers might like to know about. What does Krugman have to say? Zero.

Krugman doesn’t even have anything to say about the Fed. Ben Bernanke did a lot more last year than set the funds rate to zero and then go off on vacation and wait for fiscal policy to do its magic. Leaving aside the string of bailouts, the Fed started term lending to securities dealers. Then, rather than buy treasuries in exchange for reserves, it essentially sold treasuries in exchange for private debt. Though the funds rate was near zero, the Fed noticed huge commercial paper and securitized debt spreads, and intervened in those markets. There is no “the” interest rate anymore, the Fed is attempting to manage them all. Recently the Fed has started buying massive quantities of mortgage-backed securities and long-term treasury debt.

Monetary policy now has little to do with “money” vs. “bonds” with all the latter lumped together. Monetary policy has become wide-ranging financial policy. Does any of this work? What are the dangers? Can the Fed stay independent in this new role? These are the questions of our time. What does Krugman have to say? Nothing.

Krugman is trying to say that a cabal of obvious crackpots bedazzled all of macroeconomics with the beauty of their mathematics, to the point of inducing policy paralysis. Alas, that won’t stick. The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Paul’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. From the CEA to the Fed to the OMB and CBO, everyone just adds up consumer, investment and government “demand” to forecast output and uses simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s a simpleminded Keynesianism that failed.

The future of economics.

How should economics change? Krugman argues for three incompatible changes.

First, he argues for a future of economics that “recognizes flaws and frictions,” and incorporates alternative assumptions about behavior, especially towards risk-taking. To which I say, “Hello, Paul, where have you been for the last 30 years?” Macroeconomists have not spent 30 years admiring the eternal verities of Kydland and Prescott’s 1982 paper. Pretty much all we have been doing for 30 years is introducing flaws, frictions and new behaviors, especially new models of attitudes to risk, and comparing the resulting models, quantitatively, to data. The long literature on financial crises and banking which Krugmandoes not mention has also been doing exactly the same.

Second, Krugman argues that “a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town,” and “Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions.” One thing is pretty clear by now, that when economics incorporates flaws and frictions, the result will not be to rehabilitate an 80-year-old book. As Paul bemoans, the “new Keynesians” who did just what he asks, putting Keynes inspired price-stickiness into logically coherent models, ended up with something that looked a lot more like monetarism. (Actually, though this is the consensus, my own work finds that new-Keynesian economics ended up with something much different and more radical than monetarism.) A science that moves forward almost never ends up back where it started. Einstein revises Newton, but does not send you back to Aristotle. At best you can play the fun game of hunting for inspirational quotes, but that doesn’t mean that you could have known the same thing by just reading Keynes once more.

Third, and most surprising, is Krugman’s Luddite attack on mathematics; “economists as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” Models are “gussied up with fancy equations.” I’m old enough to remember when Krugman was young, working out the interactions of game theory and increasing returns in international trade for which he won the Nobel Prize, and the old guard tut-tutted “nice recreational mathematics, but not real-world at all.” He once wrote eloquently about how only math keeps your ideas straight in economics. How quickly time passes.

Again, what is the alternative? Does Krugman really think we can make progress on his – and my – agenda for economic and financial research -- understanding frictions, imperfect markets, complex human behavior, institutional rigidities – by reverting to a literary style of exposition, and abandoning the attempt to compare theories quantitatively against data? Against the worldwide tide of quantification in all fields of human endeavor (read “Moneyball”) is there any real hope that this will work in economics?

No, the problem is that we don’t have enough math. Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the “then” really does follow the “if,” which it so frequently does not if you just write prose. The challenge is how hard it is to write down explicit artificial economies with these ingredients, actually solve them, in order to see what makes them tick. Frictions are just bloody hard with the mathematical tools we have now.

The insults.

The level of personal attack in this article, and fudging of the facts to achieve it, is simply amazing.

As one little example (ok, I’m a bit sensitive), take my quotation about carpenters in Nevada. I didn’t write this. It’s a quote, taken out of context, from a bloomberg.com article, written by a reporter who I spent about 10 hours with patiently trying to explain some basics, and who also turned out only to be on a hunt for embarrassing quotes. (It’s the last time I’ll do that!) I was trying to explain how sectoral shifts contribute to unemployment. Krugman follows it by a lie -- I never asserted that “it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada.” You can’t even dredge up a quote for that monstrosity.

What’s the point? I don’t think Paul disagrees that sectoral shifts result in some unemployment, so the quote actually makes sense as economics. The only point is to make me, personally, seem heartless -- a pure, personal, calumnious attack, having nothing to do with economics.

Bob Lucas has written extensively on Keynesian and monetarist economics, sensibly and even-handedly. Krugman chooses to quote a joke, made back in 1980 at a lunch talk to some business school alumni. Really, this is on the level of the picture of Barack Obama with Bill Ayres that Sean Hannity likes to show on Fox News.

It goes on. Krugman asserts that I and others “believe” “that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment,” or that we “argued that price fluctuations and shocks to demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle.” These are just gross distortions, unsupported by any documentation, let alone professional writing. And Krugman knows better. All economic models are simplified to exhibit one point; we all understand the real world is more complicated; and his job is supposed to be to explain that to lay readers. It would be no different than if someone were to look up Paul’s early work which assumed away transport costs and claim “Paul Krugman believes ocean shipping is free, how stupid” in the Wall Street Journal.

The idea that any of us do what we do because we’re paid off by fancy Wall Street salaries or cushy sabbaticals at Hoover is just ridiculous. (If Krugman knew anything about hedge funds he’d know that believing in efficient markets disqualifies you for employment. Nobody wants a guy who thinks you can’t make any money trading!) Given Krugman’s speaking fees, it’s a surprising first stone for him to cast.

Apparently, salacious prose, innuendo, calumny, and selective quotation from media aren’t enough: Krugman added cartoons to try to make opponents look silly. The Lucas-Blanchard-Bernanke conspiratorial cocktail party celebrating the end of recessions is a silly fiction. So is their despondent gloom on reading “recession” in the paper. Nobody at a conference looks like Dr. Pangloss with wild hair and a suit from the 1800s. (OK, Randy Wright has the hair, but not the suit.) Keynes did not reappear at the NBER to be booed as an “outsider.” Why are you allowed to make things up in pictures that wouldn’t pass even the Times’ weak fact-checking in words?

Well, perhaps we got off easy. This all was mild compared to Krugman’s vicious obituary of Milton Friedman in the New York Review of Books. But most of all, Paul isn’t doing his job. He’s supposed to read, explain, and criticize things economists write, and real professional writing, not interviews, opeds and blog posts. At a minimum, this style leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Krugman isn’t reading real economics anymore.

How did Krugman get it so wrong?

So what is Krugman up to? Why become a denier, a skeptic, an apologist for 70 year old ideas, replete with well-known logical fallacies, a pariah? Why publish an essentially personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list that now includes practically every professional economist? Why publish an incoherent vision for the future of economics?

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Krugman isn’t trying to be an economist, he is trying to be a partisan, political opinion writer. This is not an insult. I read George Will, Charles Krauthnammer and Frank Rich with equal pleasure even when I disagree with them. Krugman wants to be Rush Limbaugh of the Left.

Alas, to Krugman, as to far too many ex-economists in partisan debates, economics is not a quest for understanding. It is a set of debating points to argue for policies that one has adopted for partisan political purposes. “Stimulus” is just marketing to sell Congressmen and voters on a package of government spending priorities that you want for political reasons. It’s not a proposition to be explained, understood, taken seriously to its logical limits, or reflective of market failures that should be addressed directly.

Why argue for a nonsensical future for economics? Well, again, if you don’t regard economics as a science, a discipline that ought to result in quantitative matches to data, a discipline that requires crystal-clear logical connections between the “if” and the “then,” if the point of economics is merely to provide marketing and propaganda for politically-motivated policy, then his writing does make sense. It makes sense to appeal to some future economics – not yet worked out, even verbally – to disdain quantification and comparison to data, and to appeal to the authority of ancient books as interpreted you, their lone remaining apostle.

Most of all, this is the only reason I can come up with to understand why Krugman wants to write personal attacks on those who disagree with him. I like it when people disagree with me, and take time to read my work and criticize it. At worst I learn how to position it better. At best, I discover I was wrong and learn something. I send a polite thank you note.

Krugman wants people to swallow his arguments whole from his authority, without demanding logic, or evidence. Those who disagree with him, alas, are pretty smart and have pretty good arguments if you bother to read them. So, he tries to discredit them with personal attacks.

This is the political sphere, not the intellectual one. Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend this has anything to do with economics, or actual truth about how the world works or could be made a better place.

*University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Many colleagues and friends helped, but I don’t want to name them for obvious reasons. Krugman fans: Please don’t bother emailing me to tell me what a jerk I am. I will update this occasionally, so please pass on the link rather than the document, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/#news.

quinta-feira, setembro 17, 2009

518) Entrevista a revista francesa sobre o Brasil

Um jornalista francês, de origem portuguêsa, contatou-me, dias atrás, para que eu lhe respondesse um questionário sobre o Brasil de hoje, sua economia, a situação social e, especialmente, o presidente.
Como sempre, respondi sinceramente, sem travas na língua, pois como é o meu hábito, costumo dizer, e escrever, o que penso.
Quem não gostar pode escrever para comentar, expondo argumentos, não xingamentos...

Entretien sur le président Lula
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
(www.pralmeida.org; pralmeida@mac.com)
Interview à un journaliste français, Vincent Paes
Pour le magazine Décideurs
(revue d’affaires)

1) Lors des meetings syndicalistes, les prises de parole de Lula était toujours très attendues. Qu'est-ce qui fait de lui un si bon orateur ?
PRA : Le président brésilien Lula a une rhétorique très convaincante : il possède comme peu de gens une très forte capacité à se communiquer en langage simple, directe, avec des images vives et des références familières, très proche de la compréhension moyenne des Brésiliens des couches populaires. C’est un communicateur par excellence. Lula a un fort instinct pour se faire comprendre des gens très humbles, car il a recours à des lieux communs mais qui sont très prisés du point de vue de la semi logique et des raisonnements simplistes des milieux populaires. De plus il sait s’adapter au public du moment, soit une rencontre de banquiers, soit une assemblée de syndicalistes : dans ce dernier cas, il n’hésitait pas, à son époque de leader syndical, à recourir à un langage prétendument de confrontation, quitte, plus tard, lors des négociations avec les industriels, à ce montrer compréhensif, prêt à trouver une solution de compromis. Il a aussi très vite appris à manipuler la presse – dont les reporters, très mal rémunérés, sont plutôt de gauche – en la laissant faire croire qu’il était le symbole du renouveau syndical, peu accommodatif et se présentant comme l’alternative au très vieux syndicalisme de situation, soumis au jeu des patrons de l`industrie.
Il était très facile, lors de l’inflation galopante, de demander des augmentations « réelles » de salaire, en sachant que, par après, les industriels allaient repasser les coûts à l’ensemble de la population, par le renchérissement des prix. C’était ce que l’on pourrait appeler le « pacte pervers », le même qui a conduit l’Angleterre à la décadence économique par le biais d’une spirale de salaires et des prix qui a détruit les possibilités de croissance. Le langage agressif de Lula à l’encontre des patrons lui a conquis un public fidèle, en même temps qu’il garantissait aux militaires et aux élites que son radicalisme de façade était nécessaire pour tenir les soupapes de sécurité en place : c’était lui ou les communistes, disait-il. En même temps, il savait diviser ses collègues du syndicat et se montrer en rassembleur, la même tactique qu’il allait employer plus tard, lors de la construction de l’appareil central dans son parti.

2) Beaucoup de membres de son ancien syndicat lui ont reproché de s'être rapproché de la droite au fur et à mesure des élections présidentielles. En passant de syndicaliste à homme politique, pensez-vous que Lula ait renié ses convictions initiales ?
PRA : Pour affirmer cela, il faudrait supposer que ses convictions initiales étaient clairement de gauches, ou socialistes tout court. Or, il est douteux que Lula ait été, un jour, un vrai homme de gauche ou un socialiste rationnel, c’est-à-dire, un esprit cohérent, dirigé vers un programme progressiste typique de la gauche anti-capitaliste. Il y avait beaucoup de théâtre dans les initiatives et les discours de Lula ; somme toute, il y avait un espace ouvert, à la fin du régime militaire et pendant la transition vers la démocratie, pour un parti de gauche non communiste, et non compromis avec l`ancien syndicalisme, vendu à l’État et aux patrons. De plus, l`ancienne gauche qui s’était essayée à la lutte armée devait se recycler dans l’activité légale, sans compter l’énorme base sociale des communautés ecclésiales de base, de l’Église progressiste, qui toutes les deux cherchaient un instrument nouveau d’action politique. Lula a été leur leader providentiel, volontiers de « gauche », comme il faudrait, et plutôt pragmatique comme il s’avérait nécessaire. Cela a été une longue journée de construction de son instrument de lutte politique, avec des compagnons de route qui se sont soumis volontairement au nouveau leader charismatique, jusqu'à en devenir des dépendants complets de son succès populaire.
Il est aussi tout à fait faux de dire que Lula s’est rapproché de la droite, car ce sont les patrons de l’industrie et de la presse qui se sont rapprochés de lui quand ceux-ci ont senti que le vent de la politique partisane avait tourné en faveur du nouveau leader populaire. Le pragmatisme et l’accommodation ont vaincu des deux cotés. Mais il est plutôt vrai que, pour gagner aux urnes en 2002, Lula a modéré son discours, mais cela seulement pour gagner la classe moyenne plus conservatrice, car le grand patronat – y compris les grands banquiers – il l’avait déjà gagné. Ce n’était donc pas une question de convictions, mais d’opportunisme politique.

3) Les politiques économiques qu'il a mises en place sont plutôt de droite. Au contraire, Bolsa familia a marqué une véritable rupture dans la politique sociale du Brésil. Comment expliquez vous cet écart ?
PRA : Lula a été assez malin pour comprendre que la politique économique de ses compagnons de gauche – soit les « developpementalistes » à la Cnuced, soit les keynésiens radicaux des universités publiques – était proprement schizophrénique, et qu’elle conduirait, si appliqué dans un Brésil décidemment capitaliste, à un désastre comparable à celui d’Allende au Chili, avec inflation galopante, fuite des capitaux et instabilité politique. Il a été donc très sage de continuer la même politique, non de droite, mais tout simplement de stabilisation, qui avait été mise en place par son prédécesseur, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ancien ministre des affaires étrangères et de l’économie, qui a su, lui aussi, opérer un virage pragmatique de ses anciennes conceptions plutôt farfelues sur la théorie de la dépendance vers la responsabilité fiscale, l’équilibre des budgets et le sérieux monétaire.
Il est par ailleurs tout à fait faux de dire que le Bolsa Familia a représenté « une véritable rupture dans la politique sociale du Brésil ». Les premiers programmes sociaux de Lula, le Faim Zéro, le Premier Emploi, ainsi que d’autres, ont été des véritables désastres, menés par des amateurs, tous les deux vite écartés, les programmes et ses responsables. Le Bolsa Familia représente, en fait, une récupération d’anciens programmes sectoriels mis en place par Fernando Henrique Cardoso et surtout par sa femme, l’anthropologue Ruth Cardoso : le Communauté Solidaire, le Bourse École, les tickets d’alimentation, de gaz, les transferts directs par des assistantes sociales travaillant dans des municipes situés au bas de l’échelle de l’Indice de Développement Humain, enfin, tout un ensemble de programmes sociaux, parfois dispersés, mais ayant toujours la préoccupation de trouver une « porte de sortie » à des gens démunis de presque tout, sauf un peu de dignité.
Ce que Lula et son équipe « sociale » ont fait a été de rassembler tous ces programmes dans un programme « monstre », heureusement appelé Bolsa Familia, mais qui se révèle être, en fait, un très bon expédient électoral : de plus, il ne possède pas, ou pas assez, des contreparties importantes comme le contrôle de la fréquentation scolaire comme c’était le cas pour la Bourse École, strictement lié aux performances de l’enfant à l’enseignement, ce qui laissait espérer un progrès familier dans le moyen terme. Le Bolsa Familia c’est tout simplement une carte magnétique qui convertit des citoyens auparavant travailleurs en dépendants eternels de l’administration publique, une masse de manœuvre qui peut se révéler utile lors des périodes électorales. Elle crée, en plus, deux problèmes graves au point de vue social et du travail : les gens en possession de cette carte magnétique préfèrent se maintenir éloignés du marché de travail formel – pour ne pas perdre le droit de gagner sans travailler, y compris en tant qu’agriculteurs de subsistance, car ils peuvent acheter leurs aliments à l’épicier du village, lui approvisionné par la grande agriculture commerciale – ce qui pose la question du chômage structurel – comme le manque de travailleurs manuels pour certaines cultures à la zone rurale ou pour le travail domestique dans les villes – et, plus grave encore, le manque à gagner de la sécurité sociale (qui devra toujours payer aux bénéficiaires de la Bolsa Familia au moment de leur retraite).
S’il y a un écart, donc, c’est entre les politiques sociales responsables de l’ancienne administration Cardoso, et les politiques d’assistance directe, à caractère électoral et créant une armée de dépendants, de l’administration Lula. Par ailleurs, c’est précisément la politique économique, non pas de droite, mais tout simplement responsable, héritée de l’administration Cardoso, qui a permis de sauvegarder le pouvoir d’achat des plus pauvres, ceux-là même qui auparavant subissaient les effets affreux de l’inflation, le mécanisme principal de concentration de revenu au Brésil. Lula a été, au moins, suffisamment conscient pour éviter l’aventure des politiques distributives, soit disant de gauche, qui a conduit d’autres dirigeants populistes au désastre économique.

4) Ces politiques ont-elles permis de réduire les inégalités et la pauvreté au Brésil ?
PRA : Les facteurs le plus importants qui ont permis de réduire les formidables écarts de revenu au Brésil ont été, dans l’ordre de leur impact sur la distribution des revenu, les suivants : 1) la fin de l’inflation excessive, avec le Plan Réal, introduit par Cardoso, en 1994, et qui a eu des effets immédiats dans le rétrécissement de ces écarts ; 2) les investissements sociaux – éducation, santé, assainissement de base, infrastructure et d’autres – maintenus à des niveaux satisfaisants pendant les années 1990, même au milieu de la crise économique ; 3) les réseaux d’assistance et de prévoyance sociale, y compris, la sécurité universelle (même pour ceux qui n’ont jamais contribué au programme général), avec au moins un salaire minimal, corrigé toujours de l’inflation annuelle ; 4) les programmes sociaux, c’est-à-dire, les transferts directs en cash, introduits de manière modérée par Cardoso et largement disséminés par Lula, pour des motifs plutôt électoraux, mais qui ont, cela est clair, permis aussi de réduire la pauvreté extrême (mais très faiblement l’inégalité, il faut le dire).
S’il faut rendre à César ce qui est de César, il faut donc reconnaître que Cardoso a autant de mérite, sinon plus, que Lula, dans la réduction de la pauvreté et l’inégalité, mais évidemment sans l’énorme machine publicitaire mouvementée par Lula et ses compagnons de parti, relayés de manière inconsciente para la presse brésilienne de gauche et par la presse internationale, très mal informée des réalités brésiliennes.

5) Comment se porte l'économie brésilienne ? A-t-elle les moyens de s'imposer au niveau international ?
PRA : L’économie brésilienne se porte plutôt bien, grâce, il faut le reconnaître tout de suite, à la continuité des mêmes politiques que sous Cardoso, sous Lula élargie et bénéficiée par le plus important essor de l’économie internationale, entre 2002 et 2008, depuis l’épuisement des « trente glorieuses » au moment des chocs du pétrole. Le Brésil s’est plutôt laissé « acheter » qu’il n’a vendu sur les marchés internationaux, car ses exportations – surtout celles de matières premières, avec des prix au sommet depuis des décennies de baisse – ont plus augmenté en valeur qu’en volume. Aussi, la stabilité conquise auparavant – et pas déraillée par Lula, il faut lui reconnaître cet exploit, remarquable en vue des recettes bizarres servies par ses amis de gauche – a permis d’attirer des capitaux d’investissements et des emprunts internationaux à des taux de risque (spreads) jamais vus au Brésil (ce qui s’explique aussi par l’énorme liquidité internationale, poussée en grande mesure par la voracité consommatrice des Etats-Unis et son financement chinois, ce qui est absolument la même chose).
Mais, tout en étant situé aux dix premières places de l’économie mondiale, le Brésil ne semble pas prêt, encore, pour s’imposer au niveau international : il lui manque, pour cela, une monnaie librement convertible, ainsi qu’un ensemble d’autres moyens d’action pour appuyer un effort réel de coopération internationale (y compris au niveau de l’outil militaire). Mais ce qui manque le plus, en fait, c’est un changement complet de perspective dans la manière d’approcher les réalités internationales : malgré tout son développement industriel et ses progrès scientifiques, le Brésil continue à se classifier en tant que « pays en développement » et à demande un statut égal aux pays les plus pauvres, c’est-à-dire, le traitement préférentiel et plus favorable pour ces pays. Cela semble peu compatible avec un statut de puissance moyenne sur le théâtre international.

6) Selon vous, Lula a-t-il réussi à donner une image positive du Brésil, en termes économiques et politiques, à l'international ?
PRA : Certainement, et cela est dû, en partie à son caractère jovial et sympathique, très simple – bien qu’en partie fabriqué – et d’autre part à l’enchantement de la presse internationale et les moyens de communication – et des leaders do G7, aussi – qui aiment voir en lui l’histoire idéale du self made man venu de très bas et qui a réussi malgré toutes les difficultés de la vie. C’est une très belle histoire, mais aussi alimentée par un puissant service de publicité qui consomme littéralement des millions pour donner cet image d’un « président du peuple », un travailleur comme tous les autres (ce que Lula n’est plus, depuis très longtemps). Nonobstant, il faut reconnaître que Lula sait s’imposer naturellement, même si certaines causes ne sont pas toujours du « bon côté » (par exemple, son appui aux régimes soit disant gauchistes, dont certains sont des parfaites dictatures).

7) Lula arrive bientôt à la fin de son second mandat. Selon vous, le bilan est-il positif? Qu'a-t-il apporté au Brésil ?
PRA : Comme toujours, il faut séparer le mythe, ou la fiction servie par les publicitaires du gouvernement, de la réalité économique et sociale. Le Brésil est-il mieux aujourd’hui qu’il y a sept ou huit ans auparavant ? : vraisemblablement, mais cela est dû, en grande partie, aux politiques classifiés comme « de droite » – stabilité monétaire, responsabilité fiscale, taux de change flottant – héritées de la période précédente, mais aussi au bon sens de Lula, de ne suivre les recommandations assez louches de son parti et des « intellectuels gramsciens » de l’académie – il ne s’est pas laissé tenter, par exemple, par un appel facile à des émissions irresponsables, le contrôle des capitaux, la manipulation de l’échange, le protectionnisme exagéré ou le recours à l’endettement – bien qu’on ne peut laisser de remarquer une forte rechute dans l’exacerbation du pouvoir d’État (avec création de nombreuses entreprises publiques et le démesure administrative de presque 40 ministères et secrétariats d’État. Lula fait beaucoup des discours, tout le temps, comme s’il était en campagne permanente, et l’accent démagogique tend chaque fois à l’emporter sur le didactique.
Lula a respecté l’autonomie de la Banque Centrale – même s’il n’a pas concédé la véritable indépendance – mais il l’a fait moins par conviction que par nécessité, ayant appris – avec tant de défaites de la gauche de par le monde – qu’il ne faut jouer avec la stabilité monétaire. Tout en n’ayant pas amélioré l’ambiance pour les négoces au Brésil – qui reste dans les dernières positions du Doing Business de la Banque Mondiale – il n’a pas non plus chassé l’investisseur étranger, comme tant de ses collègues en Amérique du Sud. Moins brillant, l’assaut d’absolument toutes les instances de l’État, dans tous les niveaux, par un raz-de-marée de militants du parti de Lula, très peu compétents mais avides de salaires et autres chances d’augmentation du patrimoine personnel. Encore plus préoccupant, l’expansion constante et régulière des dépenses de l’État – déjà à un niveau de pays développé (38% du PIB) pour un revenu par tête six fois moindre – et le maintien d’un système de tributs irrationnel et très lourd. Le Brésil est un champion mondial en tributs et en bureaucratie fiscale.
Finalement, même si on lui crédite l’amélioration de la distribution du revenu – avec un élargissement des classes C et D –, cela a été opéré par une ponction accrue, sous la forme d’impôts, sur la classe moyenne et les entreprises ; pire, la Bolsa Familia semble être plutôt une stratégie électorale, n’a pas des portes de sorties très claires et risque de créer une armée d’assistés semblable à la population argentine – plus de 44 millions de personnes – qui risque de provoquer un très fort impact négatif sur les marchés du travail et les comptes de la prévoyance sociale. Sur le plan fiscal, l’héritage de Lula risque, ainsi, d’être très lourd. Un dernier legs négatif c’est le démantèlement de l’indépendance du pouvoir législatif, car le pouvoir exécutif a littéralement « acheté » l’appui des parlementaires à des projets.
Si l’on pense, par contre, à la présence accrue du Brésil sur la scène internationale, il ne faut pas oublier qu’elle résulte beaucoup plus du dynamisme de ses hommes d`affaires et entrepreneurs, et seulement en partie à la diplomatie présidentielle. Elle est due, aussi, au conservatisme de la Banque Centrale, beaucoup plus qu’aux recommandations des « économistes » du Parti des Travailleurs.

8) Lula ne pourra pas se représenter pour un troisième mandat. Pensez-vous que son parti pourra l'emporter de nouveau ?
PRA : Difficilement, tant il reste dépendant du succès politique de son unique leader jusqu’aujourd’hui. Lula, d’ailleurs, n’a rien fait pour agrandir le PT, ayant commandé personnellement des alliances électorales avec les pires oligarques du passé, ceux là même que le PT accusait de corruption et pratiques néfastes par le passé. Bien sur, ayant noyauté complètement l’État, le PT commande beaucoup de ressources officielles pour exagérer dans la publicité, ce qu’il a fait tout le temps depuis le début du gouvernement Lula. Surtout, la charte électorale du PT a été complètement modifiée depuis lors, en quittant les zones urbaines à population scolarisée vers les régions les plus arriérées du pays, avec des électeurs ramassés dans les contingents d’assistés, justement. Cela est tout le contraire du message traditionnel du PT, hypothétiquement ouvrier et socialiste, et qui doit maintenant occuper les espaces des vieux colonels oligarques qui dominaient des analphabètes soumis à la logique de l`assistance populiste. Déjà aux dernières élections, le PT s’est vu réduit aux états (un seul) et municipalités les plus périphériques et pauvres, et presque pas de capitales des états ou des villes plus importantes.
En conclusion, même si Lula réussit à élire son successeur – en mobilisant tout son prestige personnel et toutes les ressources de l’État – il est peu probable que le PT réussisse à inverser son profil tout à fait contraire à ses racines ouvrières et urbaines d’il y a trente ans.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasilia, 09.09.2009