Abaixo o abstract da nova versão de um artigo do Buiter sobre a crise financeira de 2007. Como ja mencionado neste blog, ele é um dos melhores macroeconomistas, ainda, em atividade e sempre vale a pena ler os seus trabalhos.
Abstract
The paper studies the causes of the current financial crisis and on the policy responses by central banks and regulators. It also considers proposals for the prevention or mitigation of future crises.
The crisis is the product of a ‘perfect storm’ bringing together a number of microeconomic and macroeconomic pathologies. Among the microeconomic systemic failures were: wanton securitisation, fundamental flaws in the rating agencies’ business model, the procyclical behaviour of leverage in much of the financial system and of the Basel capital adequacy requirements, privately rational but socially inefficient disintermediation, and competitive international de-regulation. Reduced incentives for collecting and disseminating information about counterparty risk were a pervasive feature of the new financial world of securitisation and off-balance sheet vehicles. So was lack of transparency about who owned what and about who owed what and to whom. In many ways, the crisis can be seen as a failure of the transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism favoured in the US and the UK. Proximate local drivers of the specific way in which these problems manifested themselves were regulatory and supervisory failure in the US home loan market.
Among the macroeconomic pathologies that contributed to the crisis were, first, excessive global liquidity creation by key central banks and, second, an ex-ante global saving glut, brought about by the entry of a number of high-saving countries (notably China) into the global economy and by the global redistribution of wealth and income towards commodity exporters that also had, at least in the short run, high propensities to save. Very low risk-free long-term real interest rates and unprecedently low credit risk spreads of all kinds together with the ‘great moderation’ – low and stable inflation and stable global GDP growth – prompted an increasingly frantic ‘search for yield’.
In the UK, failures of the Tripartite financial stability arrangement between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the FSA, weaknesses in the Bank of England’s liquidity management, regulatory failure of the FSA, an inadequate deposit insurance arrangement and deficient insolvency laws for the banking sector contributed to the financial disarray and the failure of a medium-sized home-loan bank, Northern Rock. In the US, the balkanised and incoherent structure of regulation of financial institutions and financial markets, even at the Federal level, meant that too many regulators are involved but none is ever in charge or responsible.
Despite this, since the excesses were confined mainly to the financial sector and, in the US and some European countries, the household sector, it should have been possible to limit the spillovers over from the crisis beyond the financial sector and the housing sector without macroeconomic heroics. Measures directly targeted at the liquidity crunch should have been sufficient. The macroeconomic response of the Fed to the crisis - 325 basis point worth of cuts between September 2007 and May 2008 and a 75 basis point cut in the discount window penalty – therefore seem excessive and create doubt about the Fed’s commitment to price stability.The liquidity-enhancing policies of the Fed, and its bailout of the investment bank Bear Stearns, were effective in dealing with the immediate crisis. They also were, quite unnecessarily, structured so as to maximise moral hazard by distorting private incentives in favour of excessively risky future borrowing and lending. The cuts in the discount rate penalty, the extraordinary arrangements for pricing the collateral offered to the Fed by the primary dealers through the TSLF and the PDCF, the proposals for bringing forward the payment of interest on bank reserves, the terms of the Bear Stearns bail out and the ‘Greenspan-Bernanke put’ rate cut on January 21/22 2008, 75 bps at an unscheduled meeting and out of normal hours, are most easily rationalised as excess sensitivity of the Fed to Wall Street concerns, reflecting (cognitive) regulatory capture of the Fed by Wall Street.
The macroeconomic stability records of the Bank of England and of the ECB have been superior to those of the Fed. After climbing a quite steep liquidity learning curve in the early months of the crisis, the Bank of England is now performing its lender of last resort and market maker of last resort roles more effectively. It would be desirable to have the information in the public domain that is required to determine whether the ECB (through the Eurosystem) is pricing illiquid collateral appropriately. There is reason for concern that the ECB may be accepting collateral in repos and at its discount window at inflated valuations, thus joining the Fed in boosting future moral hazard through the present encouragement of adverse selection.
The Fed, unlike the ECB and the Bank of England, is also a banking sector regulator and supervisor. This gives it an informational advantage. The downside to the Fed’s position is the risk of regulatory capture. I believe that what I call ‘cognitive regulatory capture’ of the Fed by Wall Street has occurred during the past two decades. The net result is that both as regards macroeconomic stability and as regards future financial stability, the Fed has performed worse during this crisis than the ECB and the Bank of England.
Future regulation will have to be base on size and leverage of institutions. It will have to be universal (applying to all leveraged institutions above a certain size), uniform, countercyclical and global.
Financial crises will always be with us.
Para ler o artigo: here
