Wednesday, July 8, 2009

White vs. Greenspan

Reportagem da Spiegel sobre o ex-presidente do BIS, William White, assumindo-o como nêmesis de Alan Greenspan. Há passagens interessantes como esta: "Greenspan was long a member of the BIS board of directors and was effectively White's superior. As a fervent champion of the free market, he advocated the model of minimal intervention. In his view, the role of central banks was to control inflation and price stability, as well as to clean up after burst bubbles. Because no one can know when bubbles are about to burst, he argued, it would be impossible to intervene at the right moment. In his eyes, the instrument of sharply raising interest rates to counteract market excesses routinely failed. Leaning "into the wind," he argued, was pointless. He could even cite historical proof for his thesis. Between the beginning of 1988 and the spring of 1989, the Fed raised the prime rate by three percentage points, the goal being to curtail lending by raising the cost of borrowing. The textbook conclusion was that this would be toxic to the markets, but precisely the opposite occurred: Prices continued to rise.
This supposed paradox repeated itself five years later. Once again, the Fed raised interest rates and, again, the market shot up.
These experiences only strengthened Greenspan's conviction that raising interest rates was an ineffective tool to counteract bubbles. However he never tried raising interest rates to a significantly greater degree than had previously been done, to see what would happen"
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3 comments:

marco bittencourt said...

Bolha e juros, ligação óbvia: um alimenta o outro. O que estourou esta última bolha planetária foi exatamente o exagero nos juros praticados pelo Bernanke (marinheiro de primeira viagem em mares tenebrosos), mantidos por tempo o suficiente para mandar à lona os empréstimos hipotecários indexados aos juros. Depois, .. todos sabem o que aconteceu. No final da história, com o corpo estendido no chão, veio a razão óbvia para a existência da bolha: regulação de picaretas para picaretas. A única coisa de positiva nessa crise foi que, economistas já bem instrumentalizados teoricamente e com vergonha na cara, puderam fazer as prescrições de política corretamente. A implementação da solução foi dourada pelos políticos. De qualquer forma, a crise já está se dissipando, como se pode observar pelas estatísticas do PIB e da arrecadação tributária
um abraço SB
MB

Anonymous said...

BOLHA OU FURUNCULO ??....

Anonymous said...

só apertando, hermano, pra saber!