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Falemos então da perspectiva de deflação:
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- “A palavra do momento é deflação, ao estilo japonês”;
- "Petróleo perde mais de 6% em Londres";
- "Actividade industrial europeia regista contracção recorde em Outubro"
- "Zona Euro já estará em recessão - Portugal e todos os "pesos pesados" também"
Por que é que a economia americana estaria protegida da deflação?
"A particularly important protective factor in the current environment is the strength of our financial system: Despite the adverse shocks of the past year, our banking system remains healthy and well-regulated, and firm and household balance sheets are for the most part in good shape"
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Acerca da 'bondade' de taxas de juro quase zero para os devedores:
"Deflation great enough to bring the nominal interest rate close to zero poses special problems for the economy and for policy. First, when the nominal interest rate has been reduced to zero, the real interest rate paid by borrowers equals the expected rate of deflation, however large that may be. To take what might seem like an extreme example (though in fact it occurred in the United States in the early 1930s), suppose that deflation is proceeding at a clip of 10 percent per year. Then someone who borrows for a year at a nominal interest rate of zero actually faces a 10 percent real cost of funds, as the loan must be repaid in dollars whose purchasing power is 10 percent greater than that of the dollars borrowed originally. In a period of sufficiently severe deflation, the real cost of borrowing becomes prohibitive. Capital investment, purchases of new homes, and other types of spending decline accordingly, worsening the economic downturn.
Although deflation and the zero bound on nominal interest rates create a significant problem for those seeking to borrow, they impose an even greater burden on households and firms that had accumulated substantial debt before the onset of the deflation. This burden arises because, even if debtors are able to refinance their existing obligations at low nominal interest rates, with prices falling they must still repay the principal in dollars of increasing (perhaps rapidly increasing) real value."
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Segundo Bernanke:
"a central bank, either alone or in cooperation with other parts of the government, retains considerable power to expand aggregate demand and economic activity even when its accustomed policy rate is at zero."
Como?
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Bernanke refere o trabalho de Irving Fisher:
"potential connections between violent financial crises, which lead to "fire sales" of assets and falling asset prices, with general declines in aggregate demand and the price level. A healthy, well capitalized banking system and smoothly functioning capital markets are an important line of defense against deflationary shocks."
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E como é que Bernanke se propõe a tratar uma deflação?
"Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.
...
To stimulate aggregate spending when short-term interest rates have reached zero, the Fed must expand the scale of its asset purchases or, possibly, expand the menu of assets that it buys. ...
prevention of deflation remains preferable to having to cure it. If we do fall into deflation, however, we can take comfort that the logic of the printing press example must assert itself, and sufficient injections of money will ultimately always reverse a deflation. "
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Não tem a ver mas já aqui escrevemos sobre os métodos Taguchi, método de design experimental onde todas as variáveis de um sistema são alteradas em simultâneo. Escrevo isto porque a cura do senhor Bernanke parece que encara e actua sobre as variáveis do sistema isoladamente, uma a uma: segurança e solidez dos bancos e sobre-endividamento das famílias e empresas.
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O artigo de Irving Fisher referido por Bernanke "The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions" (o artigo 24 que começa na página 340 salienta o papel do sobre-endividamento no rebentamento de uma bolha), já agora: as páginas 340 a 347 são um convite ao desenho de bonecos.
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