A mudança da maré da globalização

Embora desconte a tradicional opinião anti-euro e anti-UE de Evans-Pritchard gostaria de salientar uma vertente, a opinião de que a maré das deslocalizações para a Ásia mudou!!!
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"World power swings back to America"
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Há mais de 5 anos que falo sobre o tema:

• (Maio de 2006) "O regresso dos clientes"
• (Outubro de 2011) "Recordar Lawrence... nada está escrito (parte XII)"

Porque precisamos de uma enxurrada

"Portugal is in worse shape than Ireland. Total debt is 330pc of GDP. The current account deficit is near 12pc of GDP (while Ireland is moving into surplus). Portuguese banks rely on foreign wholesale funding to cover 40pc of assets.
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The country has been trapped in perma-slump with an over-valued currency for almost a decade. Successive waves of austerity have failed to make a lasting dent on the fiscal deficit, yet have been enough to sap the authority of the ruling socialists and revive the far-Left.
Former ministers are already talking openly of the need for an EU-IMF rescue. It is hard to see how Portugal could avoid being sucked into the vortex alongside Ireland. Europe and the IMF would then face a cumulative bail-out bill of €200bn or so. That stretches the EFSF to its credible limits."
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E não me venham dizer que o Ambrose é um anti-euro, isto é factualmente verdade.
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Teixeira dos Santos diz que é um problema de contágio e que a culpa é dos irlandeses... pois, é mesmo isso.
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Finalmente, Nicolau Santos assume na Antena 1, agora mesmo, que as medidas de austeridade do OE2011 não são suficientes... o pânico parece que tomou conta dos ministros portugueses...
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A forma como pensam pode ser lida na forma como o administrador do Centro Hospitalar Lisboa Norte trata o desafio de redução de 15% nos custos. Ou se mantêm os custos, ou se reduz a prestação de serviços... e o aumento da eficiência? E a criatividade? Por isso é que precisamos de uma enxurrada.

A acontecer... será um autêntico day of reckoning

"Legal noose tightens on Europe's monetary union":

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"Contrary to general belief, Germany’s eurosceptic professors have not abandoned their legal efforts to block the EU rescues for European banks exposed to Greek debt, and since May 7 for banks exposed to debt from Spain, Portugal, and Ireland as well.

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Should they succeed, of course, the eurozone risks disintegration within days, and perhaps hours. I am not sure that investors in New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing, or indeed Frankfurt quite understand this."

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Time to shut down the US Federal Reserve?

"Time to shut down the US Federal Reserve?"

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"Actually, Greenspan never got a Phd. His honourary doctorate was awarded later for political reasons. (He had been a Nixon speech-writer). But never mind." LOL, I know what you mean, here we have Vieira da Silva.

Para reflexão

"The IMF should impose default on Greece to end the charade" (Porque é que não há políticos que laem assim, claro e de forma transparente como Ambrose?)

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"When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification." (Se vivêssemos há 300/400 anos ou menos, este era o momento para que as sociedades mais precavidas, invadissem as sociedades menos precavidas para lhes saquear o imobiliário e alargar o poder. Chega-se ao ponto em que, já nem há dinheiro para pagar o soldo a quem defenda a sociedade da invasão) (aqui)

Destruir oferta?

Isto "Is China's Politburo spoiling for a showdown with America?" e isto "Taking on China" anda à volta disto "Cenários: O que diz Roubini (parte I)"

Para reflexão

Não sei se o tom armagedónico do final do artigo de Evans-Pritchard é possível:
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"More hedge funds will join the EMU divergence play, betting that the North-South split has gone beyond the point of no return for a currency union. This will enrage the Eurogroup. Brussels will dust down its paper exploring the legal basis for capital controls. Italy's Giulio Tremonti will suggest using EU terror legislation against "speculators".

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Wage cuts will prove a self-defeating policy for Club Med, trapping them in textbook debt-deflation. The victims will start to notice this. Articles will appear in the Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese press airing doubts about EMU. Eurosceptic professors will be ungagged. Heresy will spread into mainstream parties.
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Greece's Prime Minister Papandréou will balk at EMU immolation . The Hellenic Socialists will call Europe's bluff, extracting loans that gain time but solve nothing. Berlin will climb down and pay, but only once: thereafter, Zum Teufel.
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In the end, the Euro's fate will be decided by strikes, street protest, and car bombs as the primacy of politics returns. I doubt that 2010 will see the denouement, but the mood music will be bad enough to knock the euro off its stilts."

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No entanto, não posso estar mais de acordo com o início do artigo:

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"As the great bear rally of 2009 runs into the greater Chinese Wall of excess global capacity (Moi ici: Basta voltar aos esquemas deste postal), it will become clear that we are in the grip of a 21st Century Depression – more akin to Japan's Lost Decade than the 1840s or 1930s, but nothing like the normal cycles of the post-War era. The surplus regions (China, Japan, Germania, Gulf ) have not increased demand (Moi ici: Reparem na demografia da China, Japão e Alemanha. Quem é que consome mais, a juventude ou a terceira idade?) enough to compensate for belt-tightening in the deficit bloc (Anglo-sphere, Club Med, East Europe), and fiscal adrenalin is already fading in Europe. The vast East-West imbalances that caused the credit crisis are no better a year later, and perhaps worse (Moi ici: Ontem, no twitter, Tom Peters escreveu "I am a credentialed, fire-breathing, anti-protectionist. But, and there is a but, current exchange rate imbalance with China not sutainable." E o que Martin Wolf escreveu recentemente). Household debt as a share of GDP sits near record levels in two-fifths of the world economy. Our long purge has barely begun. That is the elephant in the global tent."

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Para reflexão

"So, people and some central banks are seeking refuge in a stable currency that is beyond the control of the financial engineers.

"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people." Fredrich August von Hayek

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"The gold standard has one tremendous virtue: the quantity of the money supply, under the gold standard, is independent of the policies of governments and political parties. This is its advantage. It is a form of protection against spendthrift governments." Ludwig von Mises
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Alan Greenspan himself states the case most eloquently in his famous essay from 1966 Gold and Economic Freedom.
"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.""

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Por que sobe a cotação do ouro...

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E ainda:

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"Personally, I have been feeling vertigo with gold near $1180. All my contrarian instincts cause me to dislike momentum stories — but there again, maybe this is not momentum. Perhaps it is a civilization shift. Can’t make up my mind."

Como eu gostava que o meu país aprendesse com os erros dos outros

"It acquiesced in a mad investment bubble (like China now) in the 1980s, stealing growth from the future.
It wasted its immense fiscal firepower, scattering money for 20 years on half-baked spending projects to keep the economy afloat. QE was too little, too late, and this is the lesson for the West. We must cut borrowing drastically over the next decade, and offset this with ultra-easy monetary policy."

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Alguém vai pedir responsabilidades aos políticos que tomaram as decisões na altura? Hipotecaram o futuro para ganharem eleições então, para fazerem boa figura nos debates no parlamento, para terem boas estatísticas, para terem boas primeiras páginas, para ajudar os amigos, para...

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Toda essa gente, hoje, pertence à história. Ocuparam o palco, brilharam e saíram deixando aos que ficam, aos contribuintes, a criança nos braços. O pau vai, as costas folgam, mas o pau volta outra vez e com força redobrada... como ilustra tão bem Elaine, as mitologias antigas faziam muitas referências à deusa do equilíbrio, à balança.

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Trecho retirado de um artigo de Evans-Pritchard.

Beggar thy neighbour

"A sterling crash is a godsend"

There is gaping whole in world demand. It is being filled by governments, all nearing the limit of fiscal stimulus.

Evans-Pritchard strikes again "Lehman is a footnote in the great East-West globalisation crisis"
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E chama a atenção, mais uma vez para aqueles circulos de causa-efeito que reconheci nos escritos de Roubini.
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"There is gaping whole in world demand. It is being filled by governments, all nearing the limit of fiscal stimulus. Some have exceeded it: Spain is to raise taxes by 1.5pc of GDP, and Japan's Democrats are retreating from spending pledges. China is trying to plug the gap, belatedly, by ramping up credit 70pc this year, but it will take a cultural revolution to induce the Chinese to spend. The liquidity is leaking into stocks, metals, and property.
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Yes, markets are sizzling, but industrial production is still down 23pc in Japan, 17pc in the eurozone, 13pc in the US and 11pc in Russia. We have a global glut of manufacturing plant. This is why companies will have to slash staff. Don't be deceived: profits can look good at first when firms cut into the bone. It is no strategy for an economy."
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Ontem transcrevi: "As debt is a mechanism through which we pull demand forward, the debt and consumption has meant we have been growing today at the expense of future growth." Evans-Pritchard é mais cáustico e chama os nomes aos bois "Couldn't they see that this was cheating: stealing from the future?" O que seria de esperar da Geração TuTuTu dos egoístas de Maio de 68?
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Roubar o futuro, não o nosso por que nós estamos cá e se não sabemos defender-nos a responsabilidade é nossa, mas o daqueles que ainda não nasceram ou ainda não podem influenciar o governo da cidade.
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Como é que se compram estas evoluções da confiança?
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Roubando o futuro outra vez!

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Não posso concordar com esta visão da coisa "El 'error Lehman'". A falência do Lehman não foi a causa, foi um sintoma. Let us wait for the Spanish banks future...

Calvinist destruction

Que me conhece sabe deste meu ponto fraco, I love sounbytes.
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Por isso, ao ler este texto de Evans Pritchard "Does the world have the courage to deal with its debts?" não pude deixar sorrir com o termo Calvinist destruction.
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"There are three ways out of our mess. We can pursue 1930s liquidation that purges debt through mass default. Such Calvinist destruction cannot be imposed on a modern democracy.
We can devalue debt by deliberate inflation. This will backfire as bond vigilantes boycott government debt - unless rigged by capital controls or "administrative measures". You see where this leads.
Or we can try to right the ship by paying down our debts, very slowly, by sweat and toil, navigating a treacherous course between the Scylla and Charybdis of the twin-flations, for as long as it takes. This is the only responsible course left we as we face the devastating consequences of our own credit delusions. Are we up it?"

A via Espartana (parte II)

Continuado daqui.
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"“This was not a crisis of panic. It is crisis of massive deleveraging. The shadow banking system has disappeared.”
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The root problem is that the deficit spenders of the Anglosphere, Club Med, and Eastern Europe are being forced to retrench: yet the surplus exporters of Germany and Asia cannot — or will not — create enough demand to compensate. China is growing fast but it has a GDP of $3 trillion, far too small to lift the $40 trillion bloc of OECD economies (North America, Europe, Japan) out of the quagmire."
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"The great error is to think of this as a financial crisis. Bank failures are a symptom, not the cause. He said there was “a structural weakness in global demand” that has been building for a quarter century."
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E o grand finale:
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"Any attempt by the US to inflate its way out of this debt trap risks setting off a “disorderly collapse of the dollar”.
Washington will not opt for this deliberately. Unfortunately, it may drift into such an outcome as the path of least political resistance.
Yes, but I can see plenty of other candidates for this sort of beggar-thy-neighbour somnambulism.
Others may yet beat the US to currency debauchery"
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Trechos de Evans-Pritchard recortados de "Bears still growl at the Sanctum Sanctorum of the policy elites"