Será assim nos outros países?

Edward Hugh no Facebook chamou-me a atenção para os números da execução fiscal italiana em 2009 segundo a agência Bloomberg:
.
"Today’s report showed that revenue from direct taxes fell 4.6 percent with indirect taxes, such as value-added tax, dropping 4.9 percent from the same period a year earlier."
.
Comparar isto com os dados portugueses é impressionante:
.

• impostos directos -21,9%;
• impostos indirectos -19,8%

Se isto for verdade...

"European car sales 'will not recover for five years'"
... quais as implicações para a minha empresa (sua) em particular?
.
Ah, mas não estamos no sector automóvel!
.
E quem compra os automóveis? Estão em que sector? E em que sector estão os trabalhadores das empresas que fabricam os automóveis? E em que sectores estão os fornecedores das empresas que fabricam os automóveis?

O ADN é muito forte

"Portugal está "bastante endividado" e tem de "poupar mais"" e "Gordon Brown's attack on Tory cuts has backfired in spectacular fashion" a via espartana é a única viável.

Retoma? Exportando para quem?

"Consumer credit down a massive 33% in Spain"
.
"Credit in Spain is contracting at an unprecedented rate, down 33% in the first quarter as Spain faces a housing bust and near 20% unemployment. "
...
"Consumer credit fell by 33.7% in the first quarter, to €5.796 billion, and late payments rose to 17.54%, according to the National Association of Financial Institutions Credit (Asnef)."

The South Sea bubble...

"Teixeira dos Santos realçou hoje que “o sistema financeiro está a viver melhores tempos. Em Portugal não temos problemas que tínhamos há seis meses”."
.
É claro que o ministro tem acesso a muito mais informação de que eu. Contudo, este tipo de reflexões não auguram nada de bom:
.
"A senior Bank of England official today compared the banking system over the last 20 years to the South Sea bubble of the early 18th century and said bankers had merely "resorted to the roulette wheel" to keep up with each other."
...
""During the golden era, competition simultaneously drove down returns on assets and drove up target returns on equity. Caught in this crossfire, higher leverage became banks' only means of keeping up with the Jones's. Management resorted to the roulette wheel.""

Corremos o risco de que a próxima Lehman Brothers seja um país...

Foi um conforto, depois de ter de gramar no noticiário da manhã da Antena 1 a diabolização da República Checa e de todos os que não estão de acordo com a constituição europeia, constatar que a Suécia entra bem na sua Presidência da União:
.
"Primeiro-ministro sueco alerta governos europeus para ordem nas finanças públicas"
.
"Reinfeldt defende que a crise financeira ainda não terminou e que é perigoso se os governos dos países membros continuarem a investir em mais planos de estímulo económico para reavivar a economia, devido ao aumento das dívidas públicas e dos défices orçamentais.
.
“Não criem mais pacotes de estímulo, caso contrário deparar-se-ão com problemas adicionais no sector financeiro”, afirmou o primeiro-ministro da Suécia."
.
Como ontem me escrevia num chat um economista inglês, corremos o risco de que a próxima Lehman Brothers seja um país... e de dentro da zona euro.

A crise já vai acabar?

Como é que ela começou?
.
"The complex issue being buried by this latest analogy is “what caused the crisis in the first place?” The answer, as I’ve been arguing for years now, is that a debt-financed speculative bubble generated illusory wealth as it grew, but its collapse has now left us with a mountain of private sector debt.
.
Now that the Ponzi folly of leveraged speculation on asset prices is over, debt has stopped growing and the contribution that growing debt made to demand has disappeared. That alone is enough to cause a crisis: in the USA in 2006-07, private debt grew by $4 trillion, boosting aggregate demand in that $14 trillion economy by over 20 per cent.
.
Even stabilising debt at its current level results in demand falling by 23 per cent in America. And now the debt bubble is acting in reverse – reducing demand as firms and families reduce debt, and necessarily spend less in the process.
.
The result is a plunge in demand that drives unemployment up and production down. Government attempts to stop this by throwing large amounts of public money at it can attenuate the process, but they are too small to counteract it because the debt levels are so huge."
.
Como é que era a pergunta? Ah, sim: Como é que a crise começou?
.
Trecho daqui.
.
Recomendo a observação dos gráficos de Edward Hugh sobre as compras no retalho na Alemanha, Itália e França.
.
E por causa da evolução etária europeia também não fica mal esta leitura:
.
"The continuing collapse in world trade is due entirely to a drop in US consumption rates. There are many articles this week about how US savings has soared from 0% to almost 3%. Of course, the government mailed all us oldsters free money last month! So we all stick this in our savings accounts. The other end of the spectrum, bankruptcies, has cleaned out the ‘lending’ side of the ledger, too. One thing about us old coots: we are not tempted by commercials to buy stupid stuff like we were when we were young and fell for nearly every temptation that passed under our noses.
.
So, getting an oldster to buy stuff is much harder. So any windfall we get, we tend to put aside for a while and take our time, figuring out what to do next. So any boost to our bottom lines will sit there for a while. Whereas, young people have pressing needs. For example, when I was younger, I was making a family and needing nearly everything. Aside from the art of dumpster diving, I had to buy all sorts of domestic stuff. Then, there was the needs of the string of children. More spending.
.
Now, I don’t need furniture. Or much of any stuff. I have other needs, of course. But I can take my time unlike when one has a growing child and like my son, for example, whose feet would grow an inch a month, it seemed, I can buy shoes and wear them for several years. Children change size and shape nearly nonstop. So you can’t just buy something and use it for 5 years.
.
Japan is one example of a country that is like the elderly population here: the entire country is now in the ‘no need to buy’ mode more and more due to the baby dearth there. And the depression which was fake for 5 years as the export sector became one of the biggest profit powers on earth, is now back to a real depression. And nothing is more depressing, psychologically, than a country that has fewer and fewer youths."

The Great World Ponzi

Já tem uns meses, mas continua actual: "Guest Post: More Debt Won't Rescue the Great American Ponzi"
.
Pelo menos já me ajudou a situar o apelo recente do ministro das Finanças (Ben Bernkanke at the National Press Club alluded to the famous quote by St. Augustine: "Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet.")
.
"At the end of the day, flushing more debt through the system is the only lever policy-makers know how to pull. Lower interest rates, quantitative easing, deficit spending, it's all the same. It's all borrowing against future income.
.
Each time we bump up against recession, we borrow a bit more to keep the economy going. With garden variety recessions, this can work. Everyone wants the good times to continue, so no one demands debts be paid back. Creditors accept more IOUs and economic "growth" continues apace. If it sounds like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, that's because it is.
.
Each time Bernie's scam got a few too many investor withdrawals, he'd simply plug the hole by raising more investor cash. The guys at Fairfield Greenwich were making so much in fees, they were happy to funnel more his way. But at a certain point, Ponzis get too big. There simply aren't enough new investors to pay off older ones. In the aggregate, the same is true for Western economies. Their debt loads are now so huge, they are simply unpayable.
.
Naturally, policy-makers sound just like Ponzi-schemers: Just give us a little more cash to get us through this rough patch and everything will be copacetic."
...
"European economies face even more oppressive debt loads.
.
The great Ponzi scheme that is the Western World's economy has grown so big there's simply no "fixing" it. Flushing more debt through the system would be like giving Madoff a few billion to tide him over. Or like adding another floor to the Tower of Babel. To what end? The collapse is already here. The question is: How much do we want it to hurt?
.
Using the public's purse to finance "confidence" in a system that is already kaput may delay the Day of Reckoning, sure, but at the cost of multiplying our losses. Perhaps fantastically.
.
Bottom line....We can bankrupt ourselves propping up a system that is collapsing anyway, or we can dig ourselves out of debt, if not with higher interest rates then certainly with fiscal austerity. That would be a hard sell to the American people, I know. But deep down, Summers and Geithner know it is the right thing to do. It is, after all, the prescription they wrote for emerging markets facing financial crises.
.
It's long past time we took our own medicine. If we don't take it voluntarily, the bond market will stuff it down our throat anyway."

Estes soundbytes são-me irresistíveis!

"BY NOW, we've all read the story, dozens of times. It goes like this: the financial crisis has brought down the Potemkin village of consumerism. The recession has exposed the internal contradictions and long-term impossibility of the neo-liberal order.
.
In a thousand community centres across Australia, in homes and kitchens and op shops, people are changing how they live their lives. People are cooking at home instead of eating out. Restaurants are responding by replacing gourmet with "home-inspired" meals. Friends are sharing clothes. Op shops are in fashion, a claim shown by talking to the fashion designer who picked up a pair of leather pants for (just!) $120 from the Salvos. Indeed, the Salvos have rebranded their stores as "Fashion with a Conscience", making the leap from evangelical Christians with a focus on charity, to "urban recyclers" with celebrity endorsements describing the shops as a "new shopping hot spot""
.

Extraído de "Crisis? What crisis?"

Burro velho não aprende

Esta figura do tabaco, usada por Nassim Taleb, está bem metida:
.
"Parece algo optimista. Diz que se fizermos esforço para mudar a atitude perante o conhecimento das coisas, podemos evitar a próxima crise...
.
Não sou assim tão optimista quanto à natureza humana. A natureza humana é imperfeita. Não nos devemos fiar nela para deixar de fumar, por exemplo. Se for um fumador que quer deixar de fumar e eu ponho à sua frente um maço de cigarros, não será a natureza humana que o vai ajudar a parar. O seu cérebro quer parar de fumar e para tal você evita ter cigarros por perto. Da mesma maneira, não posso evitar que as pessoas ouçam especialistas, nem evitar que as pessoas oiçam ou leiam os jornalistas. Posso é ajudar as pessoas a construir uma sociedade em que os erros não saiam tão caros."
.
Trecho retirado de "O verdadeiro Madoff é o sistema financeiro".
.
Há pouco, nem de propósito, esta ilustração eloquente retirada de ""Low Appraisals" Blamed for Keeping Housing Prices Down":
.
"Just as one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, so to is a return to prudent lending practices now leading to "unintended consequences", namely fewer loans being extended.
.
The post-bubble spin-mongering continues. New lending standards now mandated by Freddie and Fannie as a result of a settlement between New York State and the mortgage giants to settle charges that pressure from lenders had produced inflated appraisals requires that lenders get a second appraisal on 10% of the loans they sell to the mortgage giants.
.
Mirable dictu, this process is leading to lower valuations, which confirms that the pressure to goose prices was widespread. That isn't surprising, given the extensive reports in the media of appraiser collusion and Cuomo's findings. But the real estate industry is instead trying to characterize this as the new sobriety in valuations as the result of bureaucratic conservatism, as opposed to the market being depresses and appraisals correctly reflecting that."
.
Mudar é terrivelmente difícil!!!

And another feedback loop

"Recent global prosperity was founded on a series of elegant Ponzi schemes.
.
Consumption rather than investment drove growth, especially in the developed world. A deregulated financial system supplied the borrowing to finance the consumption. In the new economy, to borrow from Earl Wilson, there were three kinds of people — "the haves", "the have-nots" and "the have-not-paid-for-what-they-haves".
.
Like consumption, growth in global trade was also fuelled by debt. Since the 1990s, there has been a substantial build-up of foreign reserves in the central banks of emerging markets and developing countries that became the foundation for a trade-financing arrangement.
.
To maintain export competitiveness, many global currencies, including the yuan, were pegged to the dollar at an artificially low rate. This helped create the US trade deficit driven by excess US demand for imports based on an overvalued dollar.
.
Foreign central bankers invested the dollars received from exports in US debt to minimise the appreciation of their domestic currency that would make their exports less competitive. The recycled dollars flowed back to the US to finance the spending on imports, helping keep US interest rates low and facilitating more borrowing to finance further consumption and imports"
.
Retirado de "The End of the Age of Plentiful Debt"

Para reflexão

"En 2010 empezará la crisis de verdad y será brutal, terrible"
.
"“La crisis de 2010 va a obligarnos a vivir de acuerdo con nuestras necesidades y no nuestros deseos. Dado que vamos a dejar de ir a más para empezar a ir a menos, lo necesario va a volver a ser lo único importante.”"
.
"Lo que está pasando"
.
"Hoy hemos alcanzado un momento en el que este modo de operar se ha agotado. Y no es que se haya agotado desde una perspectiva sólo financiera, sino que lo ha hecho en un nivel puramente físico: el grado de endeudamiento de las personas y de las empresas ya no puede crecer más. Sin ir más lejos, en el caso de España, el endeudamiento familiar y empresarial supera en dos veces el valor añadido que la economía española genera en un año. Y en el caso de Estados Unidos, el endeudamiento es mayor que el valor de la producción estadounidense correspondiente a bastante más de tres años. No es posible que todo ese volumen de deuda continúe creciendo."
.
""El capitalismo se ha convertido en un cadáver""
.
". Y los ciudadanos, ¿qué podemos hacer?
R. Ha llegado el momento de responsabilizarnos de nuestra propia vida. Mi recomendación es que cada persona se dedique a trabajar en algo que le apasione, que realmente tenga sentido y que sea verdaderamente útil y necesario para la sociedad. Lo digo porque sólo quienes sean los mejores en su campo de especialización y aporten verdadero valor añadido a sus organizaciones tendrán garantizado un empleo a tiempo completo. Esta nueva filosofía tendrá su eje en el concepto de responsabilidad personal, que comienza con el autoconocimiento y el desarrollo personal y tiene consecuencias sobre la elección de nuestra profesión, nuestro estilo de vida y nuestro consumo.
P. ¿Algún consejo más?
R. Quien tenga deudas, que las cancele cuanto antes o que las reduzca cuanto pueda, y que no se endeude más. Y antes de comprar cualquier cosa, que cada cuál se pregunte si verdaderamente lo necesita. La crisis de 2010 va a obligarnos a vivir de acuerdo con nuestras necesidades y no nuestros deseos. Dado que vamos a dejar de ir a más para empezar a ir a menos, lo necesario va a volver a ser lo único importante. Conceptos como "utilidad", "eficiencia" y "aprovechamiento" van a ser protagonistas, así como "colectivo", "coordinación", y "colaboración". No va a quedar más remedio que abandonar el individualismo y trabajar conjuntamente para lograr una mayor optimización en la gestión y el uso de los recursos. Como ha ocurrido siempre, este tipo de cambios se producen debido a una necesidad económica."

Canário? (parte V)

O folhetim continua.
.
"Latvia is 'saved from bankruptcy' "
.
Nós por cá nunca enveredamos por este caminho "cut ... the budget". Como se faz?
.
Reparem nos direitos adquiridos "The cuts will include reducing old age pensions by 10% and cutting public sector salaries by 20%"
.
Quando chegarmos ao final deste ano com um défice ... interessante vou-me lembrar da Letónia.

Dúvidas....

Como conjugar no futuro estes três factores?
.
"El repunte del petróleo cobra nuevos bríos sobre los 72 dólares" a subida do petróleo pode, dentro de alguns(?) meses, desencadear uma subida da inflação.
.
No entretanto, temos a inflação negativa "Los precios bajan ya en un tercio de la cesta de bienes y servicios" e o consumo de petróleo a cair como já não se via há muito tempo "El consumo de petróleo registra la mayor caída desde 1982"
.
Será que a Ásia já fez o "decoupling" e está a seguir sozinha e a consumir, ou é a especulação a funcionar?
.
Inclino-me mais para a segunda hipótese já que o consumo de electricidade na principal zona industrial chinesa caíu 10% face ao mesmo período do ano anterior.

Canário? (parte IV)

"Latvia’s currency crisis is a rerun of Argentina’s" de Nouriel Roubini no Financial Times.

Canário? (parte III)

Letónia.
.
Trust me, sigam a evolução desse canário. Se essa peça de dominó cair... vai ser feio e o contágio vai chegar longe.