O mundo ainda não fez tudo para evitar que se repita o drama do Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers collapse: was capitalism to blame? / The Guardian.

O mundo ainda não fez tudo para evitar que se repita o drama do Lehman Brothers

Por José Manuel Rocha

14/09/2013 in Público

Faz amanhã cinco anos que o banco norte-americano abriu falência, mas as intenções de mudar as regras são limitadas

O mundo mudou muito desde que, há cinco anos, o banco norte-americano Lehman Brothers foi condenado à insolvência. As ondas de choque que se seguiram geraram uma depressão de que muitas economias ainda não recuperaram totalmente (a dos Estados Unidos, inclusive). Mas será que a lição do Lehman serviu para criar um ambiente regulatório que evite situações semelhantes no futuro? Aí, os avanços são ainda muito marginais.

As recentes perdas em operações de alto risco declaradas pelo banco JP Morgan, no caso que ficou conhecido como "a baleia de Londres", mostram que, apesar das boas intenções de muitos responsáveis políticos, a força do sistema financeiro continua a bloquear a entrada em vigor de muitos instrumentos legislativos que foram prometidos para evitar que houvesse bancos "demasiado grandes para cair", com o consequente risco para a totalidade do sistema.
Como dizia, esta semana, o editor de Economia da BBC, Robert Peston, o que foi feito foi mais "uma higienização do sistema existente e não uma mudança estrutural".
No seguimento da falência do Lehman Brothers, faz amanhã cinco anos, os contribuintes norte-americanos foram chamados a contribuir com 700 mil milhões de dólares para evitar o colapso do sistema bancário. Seguiu-se um gesto idêntico no Reino Unido para acudir a instituições financeiras que também se julgava intocáveis. Até em Portugal, os casos BPN e BPP vieram revelar as fragilidades de supervisão que acabaram por reverter em perdas para o erário público.
Passados cinco anos, há alguns avanços na criação de condições para que o passado não se repita, mas numa escala que é, ainda, muito limitada. Nos Estados Unidos, onde rebentou a crise, o plano legislativo elaborado pelos congressistas Barney Frank e Cristopher Dodd ainda só foi passado a lei numa parte ínfima do conjunto de propostas apresentadas - precisamente as que têm consequências mais brandas para os bancos.
É certo que os bancos norte-americanos têm, agora, níveis de capital muito mais exigentes, que os deixa mais protegidos face a situações de risco, mas um dos pontos centrais do plano Dodd-Frank, de separação de águas entre a banca de retalho e a banca de investimento - para impedir que o dinheiro dos depositantes seja aplicado em operações de risco -, ainda não foi por diante.
Um outro dado positivo resulta do facto de muitas instituições se terem desfeito de activos que não constituíam o seu objecto central de negócio.
Este movimento acabou por gerar uma completa reviravolta no top 10da banca mundial, com a China a assumir um maior protagonismo. Antes da crise, o HSBC liderava a lista, com um nível de capital de cem mil milhões de dólares e nos "dez mais" havia apenas duas instituições chinesas. Hoje, há quatro bancos da China neste ranking e a liderança também pertence à maior potência, a Ásia.
O escândalo dos bónus milionários dos banqueiros e dos seus traders (corretores) foi atenuado nos primeiros anos após a crise, mas no início do ano o The Wall Street Journal fez contas e titulou que, a este nível, se regressou ao business as usual. Mais grave ainda, os prémios de desempenho continuam a ser calculados na banca de investimento, todos os trimestres, o que pressiona os responsáveis a apostarem em resultados de curto prazo, que envolve mais riscos.
Do lado europeu, a crise teve um lado positivo, ao obrigar os bancos a reforçarem os seus níveis de capital e ao procederem a uma limpeza dos livros com base em novas regras, mais prudentes, de condução dos negócios.
A Comissão Europeia também decidiu avançar com a designada união bancária, que visa generalizar mecanismos únicos para exercer a função regulatória e de supervisão do sector. Mas, também aqui, acertar posições tem sido uma tarefa difícil, porque há países, nomeadamente a Alemanha, que não querem ver os seus bancos perderem a protecção nacional.
Ainda neste campo, recentemente, levantaram-se novos obstáculos à criação da chamada "taxa Tobin", uma colecta sobre as transacções financeiras que serviria para o sistema pagar parte das ajudas públicas que os Estados canalizaram na sequência da crise económica e financeira que eclodiu em 2008.
Esta semana, o Nobel da Economia Paul Krugman lembrava que as sequelas da crise aberta pela falência do Lehman Brothers mostraram respostas distintas nos Estados Unidos e na Europa. Na maior potência económica do mundo, e mesmo que tenha sido insuficiente, o plano de estímulo económico de Barack Obama "deteve a aterragem forçada da economia em 2009". Já a experiência europeia de contra-estímulos - as duras reduções de gasto impostas às nações devedoras - "provocou uma grave contracção económica", lembra Krugman.

Lehman Brothers collapse: Alan Greenspan testifies on Capitol Hill in 2008. The former Federal Reserve chairman told Congress that he had 'found a flaw'in the ideology that self-interest would protect society from the financial system’s excesses. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters/REUTERS

Lehman Brothers collapse: was capitalism to blame?

The near-meltdown in 2008 was a failure of contemporary economic models' understanding of the role and functioning of financial markets

Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg

theguardian.com, Friday 13 September 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/13/lehman-brothers-was-capitalism-to-blame

Until six days before Lehman Brothers collapsed five years ago, the ratings agency Standard & Poor's maintained the firm's investment-grade rating of "A". Moody's waited even longer, downgrading Lehman one business day before it collapsed. How could reputable ratings agencies – and investment banks – misjudge things so badly?

Regulators, bankers, and rating agencies bear much of the blame for the crisis. But the near-meltdown was not so much a failure of capitalism as it was a failure of contemporary economic models' understanding of the role and functioning of financial markets – and, more broadly, instability – in capitalist economies.

These models provided the supposedly scientific underpinning for policy decisions and financial innovations that made the worst crisis since the Great Depression much more likely, if not inevitable. After Lehman's collapse, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified before the US Congress that he had "found a flaw" in the ideology that self-interest would protect society from the financial system's excesses. But the damage had already been done.

That belief can be traced to prevailing economic theory concerning the causes of asset-price instability – a theory that accounts for risk and asset-price fluctuations as if the future followed mechanically from the past. Contemporary economists' mechanical models imply that self-interested market participants would not bid housing and other asset prices to clearly excessive levels in the run-up to the crisis. Consequently, such excessive fluctuations have been viewed as a symptom of market participants' irrationality.

This flawed assumption – that self-interested decisions can be adequately portrayed with mechanical rules – underpinned the creation of synthetic financial instruments and legitimised, on supposedly scientific grounds, their marketing to pension funds and other financial institutions around the world. Remarkably, emerging economies with relatively less developed financial markets escaped many of the more egregious consequences of such innovations.

Contemporary economists' reliance on mechanical rules to understand – and influence – economic outcomes extends to macroeconomic policy as well, and often draws on an authority, John Maynard Keynes, who would have rejected their approach. Keynes understood early on the fallacy of applying such mechanical rules. "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle," he warned, "having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand."

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes sought to provide the missing rationale for relying on expansionary fiscal policy to steer advanced capitalist economies out of the Great Depression. But, following the second world war, his successors developed a much more ambitious agenda. Instead of pursuing measures to counter excessive fluctuations in economic activity, such as the deep contraction of the 1930s, so-called stabilisation policies focused on measures that aimed to maintain full employment. The "New Keynesian" models underpinning these policies assumed that an economy's "true" potential – and thus the so-called output gap that expansionary policy is supposed to fill to attain full employment – can be precisely measured.

But, to put it bluntly, the belief that an economist can fully specify in advance how aggregate outcomes – and thus the potential level of economic activity – unfold over time is bogus. The projections implied by the Fed's macro-econometric model concerning the timing and effects of the 2008 economic stimulus on unemployment, which have been notoriously wide of the mark, are a case in point.

Yet the mainstream of the economics profession insists that such mechanistic models retain validity. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman, for example, claims that "a back-of-the-envelope calculation" on the basis of "textbook macroeconomics" indicates that the $800bn US fiscal stimulus in 2009 should have been three times bigger.

Clearly, we need a new textbook. The question is not whether fiscal stimulus helped, or whether a larger stimulus would have helped more, but whether policymakers should rely on any model that assumes that the future follows mechanically from the past. For example, the housing market collapse that left millions of US homeowners underwater is not part of textbook models, but it made precise calculations of fiscal stimulus based on them impossible. The public should be highly suspicious of claims that such models provide any scientific basis for economic policy.

But to renounce what Friedrich von Hayek called economists' "pretence of exact knowledge" is not to abandon the possibility that economic theory can inform policymaking. Indeed, recognising ever-imperfect knowledge on the part of economists, policymakers, and market participants has important implications for our understanding of financial instability and the state's role in mitigating it.

Asset-price swings arise not because market participants are irrational, but because they are attempting to cope with their ever-imperfect knowledge of the future stream of profits from alternative investment projects. Market instability is thus integral to how capitalist economies allocate their savings. Given this, policymakers should intervene not because they have superior knowledge about asset values (in fact, no one does), but because profit-seeking market participants do not internalise the huge social costs associated with excessive upswings and downswings in prices.

It is such excessive fluctuations, not deviations from some fanciful "true" value – whether of assets or of the unemployment rate – that Keynes believed policymakers should seek to mitigate. Unlike their successors, Keynes and Hayek understood that imperfect knowledge and non-routine change mean that policy rules, together with the variables underlying them, gain and lose relevance at times that no one can anticipate.

That view appears to have returned to policymaking in Keynes's homeland. As Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, put it, "Our understanding of the economy is incomplete and constantly evolving … To describe monetary policy in terms of a constant rule derived from a known model of the economy is to ignore this process of learning." His successor, Mark Carney, has come to embody this view, eschewing fixed policy rules in favor of the constrained discretion implied by guidance ranges for key indicators.

Rather than trying to hit precise numerical targets, whether for inflation or unemployment, policymaking in this mode attempts to dampen excessive fluctuations. It thus responds to actual problems, not to theories and rules (which these problems may have rendered obsolete). If we are honest about the causes of the 2008 crisis – and serious about avoiding its recurrence – we must accept what economic analysis cannot deliver in order to benefit from what it can.

• Roman Frydman is a professor of economics at New York University. Michael D. Goldberg is a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire. They are co-authors of Imperfect Knowledge Economics and Beyond Mechanical Markets.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.