As injecções de liquidez como subsídios à imprudência

Inflação. Por Luciano Amaral.

As injecções de liquidez são um subsídio generalizado às instituições financeiras. Quer isto dizer que não distinguem as merecedoras de salvação das que não o merecem, pela sua imprudência. Uma solução melhor talvez fosse deixar desaparecer as imprudentes, para premiar as prudentes e consolidar o sector. Há quem diga que isto não é possível, porque as actuais instituições financeiras são “demasiado grandes para poderem abrir falência”. Não sei se já alguém reparou que isto é a negação do princípio básico do nosso sistema económico: sem falências não podemos saber o que foi mal feito.

Johan Norberg vs. Naomi Klein

Johan Norberg: The Record of Liberalization

EM 06/10/26

"Secessão: o factor supresa e a subversão constitucional

Provavelmente o tema que ao longo das próximas décadas não vai deixar de supreender todos e em todo o lado. Vivemos a diplomacia das fronteiras dos grandes Estados (e guerras ocasionais por causa delas). Mas o conflito entre grandes Estados e Blocos, sendo ainda possível é menos provável. Vamos passar à outra face visivel da democracia - o "direito" a constituir uma democracia mais pequena, à parte, mais homogénea. Para o qual ninguém está preparado. A começar pelos sistemas constitucionais."

Paul Johnson Introduction to Rothbard's America's Great Depression

"(...) For half a century, the conventional, orthodox explanation, provided by John Maynard Keynes and his followers, was that capitalism was incapable of saving itself, and that government did too little to rescue an intellectually bankrupt market system from the consequences of its own folly. This analysis seemed less and less convincing as the years went by, especially as Keynesianism itself became discredited. In the meantime, Rothbard had produced, in 1963, his own explanation, which turned the conventional one on its head. The severity of the Wall Street crash, he argued, was not due to the unrestrained license of a freebooting capitalist system, but to government insistence on keeping a boom going artificially by pumping in inflationary credit. The slide in stocks continued, and the real economy went into freefall, not because government interfered too little, but because it interfered too much. Rothbard was the first to make the point, in this context, that the spirit of the times in the 1920s, and still more so in the 1930s, was for government to plan, to meddle, to order and to exhort.(...)

His book is an intellectual tour de force, in that it consists, from start to finish, of a sustained thesis, presented with relentless logic, abundant illustration, and great eloquence. I know of few books which bring the world of economic history so vividly to life, and which contain so many cogent lessons, still valid in our own day. It is also a rich mine of interesting and arcane knowledge, and I urge readers to explore its footnotes, which contain many delicious quotations from the great and the foolish of those days, three-quarters of a century ago. It is not surprising that the book is going into yet another edition. It has stood the test of time with success, even with panache, and I feel honored to be invited to introduce it to a new generation of readers.

Paul Johnson, December 1999"

Inflation Watch - July

CPI US: 5.6%
Fed Rate: 2%
Yields 10Y: 3.83%

CPI EU: 4.00%
ECB Rate: 4.25%
Yields 10Y: 4.14%

D. A Note on Some Criticisms of 100-Percent Reserve

"One popular criticism of 100-percent bank reserves charges that the bank could not then earn any income or cover costs of storage, printing, etc. On the contrary, a bank is perfectly capable of operating like any goods warehouse, i.e., by charging its cus­tomers for its services to them and reaping the usual interest return on its operations.

Another popular objection is that a 100-percent-reserve policy would eliminate all credit. How would businessmen be able to borrow funds for short-term investment? The answer is that businessmen can still borrow saved funds from any individual or institution. “Banks” may still lend their own saved funds (capital stock and accumulated surplus) or they may borrow funds from individuals and relend them to business firms, earning the interest differ­ential.[35] Borrowing money (e g., floating a bond) is a credit trans­action; an individual exchanges his present money for a bond—a claim on future money. The borrowing bank pays him interest for this loan and in turn exchanges the money thus gathered for promises by business borrowers to pay money in the future. This is a further credit transaction, in this case the bank acting as the lender and businesses as the borrowers. The bank’s income is the interest differential between the two types of credit transactions; the payment is for the services of the bank as an intermediary, channeling the savings of the public into investment. There is, furthermore, no particular reason why the short-term, more than any other, credit market should be subsidized by money creation." Chapter 11—Money and Its Purchasing Power (continued)
6. The Supply of Money, Murray N. Rothbard

O Mito da quantidade de dinheiro

Carlos Santos num comentário a um post:

"Ora imagine que a produção de bens e serviços aumenta. Pelo menos para financiar a aquisição de acréscimo de produção, concordará que a moeda em circulação deverá aumentar? É que de outra forma, se me responder pela via da oferta e da procura e me disser que os preços vão descer, eu pergunto-lhe qual é o estímulo para o aumento da produção por parte de produtores individuais descentralizados? Acreditando que todos nós pensamos que o empresário se move pelo motivo lucro, que ganho teriam os empresários em aumentar a produção se a consequência fosse a descida do preço? A consequência seria a economia como perpetuação de um equilíbrio estático, em que por a quantidade de moeda ser sempre a mesma, o volume de produção seria também o mesmo aos mesmos preços. Acha que é isto que a História Económica demonstra? Ou a História Económica é também um domínio demasiado schumpeteriano para sujarmos aí as mãos?"


Bem...

A quantidade de moeda pode ser fixa que isso em nada afectaria o funcionamento da economia. Os custos baixariam, e a taxa de lucro manter-se-ia intacta. Tal com acontece em muitos sectores de tecnologia.

E o crescimento económico significa sim, descida de preços. Quando um produto desce de preço é porque o seu custo diminuiu, o rendimento que sobra permite adquirir ou mais ou novos produtos. E isso só não é visível em termos nominais por causa da inflação de preços induzida pelo aumento da massa monetária. Depois da revolução industrial e durante o século 19 era habitual os preços descerem.

Aliás, em termos abstractos qualquer quantidade de dinheiro seria suficiente. Podia existir apenas um Kg de ouro, que isso chegaria. Era apenas uma questão de divisibilidade, coisa fácil por certificados.

Os preços nominais ajustam tudo o que fôr necessário. O impostante mesmo é por prioridade:

- não existir deflação/contração da quantidade de moeda
- a massa monetária aumentar num rácio pequeno e estável equilibrado por um qualquer custo marginal (caso da prospecção do ouro, cujo incentivo é proporcional à descida de preços).

Já agora, quanto a outras afirmações:

"o que tenho lido do CN parece-me que qualquer coisa a menos que a descoberta de novas minas de ouro é um “fenómeno monetário falsificador”"

Bem, o processo de criação de notas de depósito sem existência do ouro depositado pode ser considerado "falsificador". Esse foi o processo pelo qual o padrão-ouro foi subvertido primeiro pontualmente (as corridas aos depósitos corrigiam a situação funcionando como punição) que conduz a crises (ciclos), e depois de forma sistémica (devido aos Bancos Centrais) onde depois os Estados finalmente nacionalizam (roubam) o ouro depositado (pelo fim unilateral da obrigação contratual) e declaram a proibição do seu uso como moeda.

Como se vê, o actual sistema nasceu em pecado original.

Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure.

"Should the financial authorities, in a misguided attempt to spur production, increase the supply of bank credit, dire results may impend. If the interest rate is driven below the "natural rate"—primarily determined by people’s preferences for present over future goods—investors might be misled.

They may shift unduly to higher stages of production, not realizing that lower interest rates reflect, not a genuine decrease in time preference, but rather financial manipulation. When interest rates rise again to their "true" level, overly optimistic investments face collapse. The process of adjustment to the actual preferences of consumers is precisely, in the Austrian view, the downturn phase of the business cycle. " David Gordon - Review of Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure. By Roger W.Garrison. Routledge, 2001. xvi + 272 pgs.

Ver esta excelente apresentação em PowerPoint, com a explicação breve mas detalhada, e ainda assim simples de entender, sobre a relação entre a manipulação da taxa de juro e os ciclos económicos:

Lecture I: The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle (PowerPoint)

PS: Restantes:

Lecture II: Keynes and Hayek: Head to Head (PowerPoint)
Lecture III: The Great Depression (PowerPoint)
Lecture IV: The Fiscal Issues: Taxes and Deficit Finance (PowerPoint)
Lecture V: Vienna vs. Chicago on Monetary Issues (PowerPoint)

Why Money Supply Matters

PS: Existe quem não acredite em deduções apriori nem confie nos olhos. Só parâmetros. Dito isto, os efeitos entre o crescimento da massa monetária (e que medida? Alan Greenspan disse em directo na TV que já não se sabia o que constituía moeda) e os preços são seguramente complexos, a teoria comprova o efeito mas assume a não-uniformidade, a variação de outros factores em sentido contrário (como a procura de moeda), etc.

True synthetic a priori statements

Em "Economic Science and the Austrian Method ", Hoppe

"It took painstaking intellectual effort to recognize explicitly what, once made explicit, everybody recognizes immediately as true and can understand as true synthetic a priori statements, i.e., propositions that can be validated independently of observations and thus cannot possibly be falsified by any observation whatsoever.

The attempt to disprove the action-axiom would itself be an action aimed at a goal, requiring means, excluding other courses of action, incurring costs, subjecting the actor to the possibility of achieving or not achieving the desired goal and so leading to a profit or a loss.

And the very possession of such knowledge then can never be disputed, and the validity of these concepts can never be falsified by any contingent experience, for disputing or falsifying anything would already have presupposed their very existence. As a matter of fact, a situation in which these categories of action would cease to have a real existence could itself never be observed, for making an observation, too, is an action.

Mises's great insight was that economic reasoning has its foundation in just this understanding of action; and that the status of economics as a sort of applied logic derives from the status of the action-axiom as an a priori-true synthetic proposition.

The laws of exchange, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the Ricardian law of association, the law of price controls, and the quantity theory of money, all the examples of economic propositions which I have mentioned can be logically derived from this axiom. And this is why it strikes one as ridiculous to think of such propositions as being of the same epistemological type as those of the natural sciences. To think that they are, and accordingly to require testing for their validation, is like supposing that we had to engage in some fact-finding process without knowing the possible outcome in order to establish the fact that one is indeed an actor. In a word: It is absurd.

Praxeology says that all economic propositions which claim to be true must be shown to be deducible by means of formal logic from the incontestably true material knowledge regarding the meaning of action. Specifically, all economic reasoning consists of the following:

(1) an understanding of the categories of action and the meaning of a change occurring in such things as values, preferences, knowledge, means, costs, etc(

(2) a description of a world in which the categories of action assume concrete meaning, where definite people are identified as actors with definite objects specified as their means of action, with some definite goals identified as values and definite things specified as costs. Such description could be one of a Robinson Crusoe world, or a world with more than one actor in which interpersonal relationships are possible; of a world of barter exchange or of money and exchanges that make use of money as a common medium of exchange; of a world of only land, labor, and time as factors of production, or a world with capital products; of a world with perfectly divisible or indivisible, specific or unspecific factors of production; or of a world with diverse social institutions, treating diverse actions as aggression and threatening them with physical punishment, etc; and

(3) a logical deduction of the consequences which result from the performance of some specified action within this world, or of the consequences which result for a specific actor if this situation is changed in a specified way.

Provided there is no flaw in the process of deduction, the conclusions that such reasoning yield must be valid a priori because their validity would ultimately go back to nothing but the indisputable axiom of action. If the situation and the changes introduced into it are fictional or assumptional (a Robinson Crusoe world, or a world with only indivisible or only completely specific factors of production), then the conclusions are, of course, a priori true only of such a "possible world." If, on the other hand, the situation and changes can be identified as real, perceived and conceptualized as such by real actors, then the conclusions are a priori true propositions about the world as it really is. [19]

Such is the idea of economics as praxeology. And such then is the ultimate disagreement that Austrians have with their colleagues: Their pronouncements cannot be deduced from the axiom of action or even stand in clear-cut contradiction to propositions that can be deduced from the axiom of action.

And even if there is agreement on the identification of facts and the assessment of certain events as being related to each other as causes and consequences, this agreement is superficial. For such economists falsely believe their statements to be empirically well-tested propositions when they are, in fact, propositions that are true a priori."

A decadência americana Cap. 45

Dingell Pushes Access to $25 Billion in Plant Aid for GM, Ford

Destaque: "How Much Money Does an Economy Need?"

Review by David Gordon

[How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Solving the Central Economic Puzzle of Money, Prices, and Jobs. By Hunter Lewis. Axios Press. Vi + 185 pages.]

"In Are the Rich Necessary? Hunter Lewis showed himself to be a master of dialectics; and he here applies the same method to monetary theory. Not content to expound his own views, Lewis carefully explains conflicting standpoints as well. Lewis does not disguise his own strong commitment to Austrian economics, but the reader of this book will understand not only this position, but its chief competitors as well.(...)"

As Lewis notes, cycles cannot be blamed on the free market. The flaw that makes the cycle possible is fractional-reserve banking, in which a bank is permitted to create credit in excess of the deposits that have been made to it. The bank is required only to maintain a certain ratio between deposits on hand and its credit expansion. A free market need not incorporate fractional-reserve banking; it can, instead, institute the alternative 100% reserve system. Indeed, Murray Rothbard argued that a free market required this latter arrangement. The fractional-reserve system is the artifact of particular legal decisions. Lewis calls attention in this connection to two decisions of British courts in the early nineteenth century.

An effort to require banks to maintain 100% reserves against all deposits failed in British courts in 1811 and 1816. The House of Lords also confirmed the right to maintain fractional reserves in 1848. (p. 55)

How does fractional-reserve banking make the business cycle possible? The problem arises if the government, in an effort to promote prosperity, increases the generation of bank credit. (Lewis discusses in detail various ways in which the Federal Reserve System can do this.) The increase in the money supply lowers the monetary rate of interest. Investment then increases: because business loans are available at lower interest rates, projects that were formerly unprofitable are now feasible. Business then expands, especially in capital goods.

Trouble — usually sooner rather than later — arises. The interest rate is not in essence a monetary phenomenon. Quite the contrary, interest reflects time preference, the rate at which people prefer present goods to future goods. This rate will not in general alter just because of the monetary expansion. The lowering of the interest rate thus proves a temporary affair, and the interest rate rises to reflect time preference. As a result, some of the new investments prove unprofitable and must be liquidated.

In the Austrian view, this liquidation ought to be allowed to proceed unhindered. Should the government attempt to alleviate matters by further monetary expansion, the result will be another artificial boom that will again require correction. The necessary liquidation cannot be indefinitely deferred. If the government continues its expansionist course, the upshot will be hyperinflation and the collapse of the monetary system altogether.

Keynes denied this analysis."

O mistério da inflação

Ler no http://ovalordasideias.blogspot.com/:

Money does not cause inflation: here's why

Parece que é porque a (ausência de) relação matemática entre inflação monetária e a inflação de preços no consumidor o prova. A estatística como fazedor de leis económicas.

Mas então, que problema mesmo existiria com a legalização dos falsificadores de moeda (bem é mais estender esse previlégio à iniciativa privada fora do cartel criado pelos Bancos Centrais)?

"Imagine"

A world without fiat currency
It´s not hard to - it already existed

A world were one coin of gold means one coin of gold
Not a bid deal

A world were one coin deposited means one coin deposited
It´s simple

A world were fabricating false receipts of non-existing coins deposited is a crime
That would be really something

A world were investing means someone saving first
It´s just the natural order of things

A world were prices going down would be a good sign
Although economists would become mad

But then again, many already are
and maybe i am one of them

Because i like to imagine
that money is money

PS: só me falta a música.

Intellectual role models

IHS --- Now We Are Talking. Por Pete Boettke.

If Milton Friedman can cause intellectual angina among "faculty" smart enough to warrant an appointment at U of Chicago, then everyone should realize the intellectual state of affairs we are in. Almost as dire as the economy itself! If that is an accurate depiction of the world of ideas in US universities, then organizations like FEE, IHS and Liberty Fund have a huge role to play in creating space for classical liberal and libertarian scholarship --- but they will be successful only if they do not water-down the message either by cheap commitments to non-thinking sloganeering or stealthy and non-commitment to libertarian scholarship. As I have said before, we neither want ignorant dogmatism nor milly-mouthed pseudo-sophistication. Time, instead, to uphold as ideal intellectual role models: Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Rand, Nozick and Friedman (among our honored deceased from the 20th century) and Buchanan and Epstein (among the still living great classical liberals).