| Quote of the Day | Stay Hunger
-- J.
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| Financial : Happy 2010 | | Posted by xav on 2008/4/29 22:31:27 (1284 reads) |
 The Bernanke Conundrum by Paul Krugman
Bernanke fue reelecto por un nuevo periodo luego de una intensa disputa en el senado
A Republican won in Massachusetts — and suddenly it’s not clear whether the Senate will confirm Ben Bernanke for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. That’s not as strange as it sounds: Washington has suddenly noticed public rage over economic policies that bailed out big banks but failed to create jobs. And Mr. Bernanke has become a symbol of those policies.
Where do I stand? I deeply admire Mr. Bernanke, both as an economist and for his response to the financial crisis. (Full disclosure: before going to the Fed he headed Princeton’s economics department, and hired me for my current position there.) Yet his critics have a strong case. In the end, I favor his reappointment, but only because rejecting him could make the Fed’s policies worse, not better.
How did we get to the point where that’s the most I can say?
Mr. Bernanke is a superb research economist. And from the spring of 2008 to the spring of 2009 his academic expertise and his policy role meshed perfectly, as he used aggressive, unorthodox tactics to head off a second Great Depression.
Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story. Before the crisis struck, Mr. Bernanke was very much a conventional, mainstream Fed official, sharing fully in the institution’s complacency. Worse, after the acute phase of the crisis ended he slipped right back into that mainstream. Once again, the Fed is dangerously complacent — and once again, Mr. Bernanke seems to share that complacency.
Consider two issues: financial reform and unemployment.
Back in July, Mr. Bernanke spoke out against a key reform proposal: the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency. He urged Congress to maintain the current situation, in which protection of consumers from unfair financial practices is the Fed’s responsibility.
But here’s the thing: During the run-up to the crisis, as financial abuses proliferated, the Fed did nothing. In particular, it ignored warnings about subprime lending. So it was striking that in his testimony Mr. Bernanke didn’t acknowledge that failure, didn’t explain why it happened, and gave no reason to believe that the Fed would behave differently in the future. His message boiled down to “We know what we’re doing — trust us.”
As I said, the Fed has returned to a dangerous complacency.
And then there’s unemployment. The economy may not have collapsed, but it’s in terrible shape, with job-seekers outnumbering job openings six to one. Nor does Mr. Bernanke expect any quick improvement: last month, while predicting that unemployment will fall, he conceded that the rate of decline will be “slower than we would like.” So what does he propose doing to create jobs?
Nothing. Mr. Bernanke has offered no hint that he feels the need to adopt policies that might bring unemployment down faster. Instead, he has responded to suggestions for further Fed action with boilerplate about “the anchoring of inflation expectations.” It’s harsh but true to say that he’s acting as if it’s Mission Accomplished now that the big banks have been rescued.
What happened here? My sense is that Mr. Bernanke, like so many people who work closely with the financial sector, has ended up seeing the world through bankers’ eyes. The same can be said about Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers, the Obama administration’s top economist. But they’re not up before the Senate, while Mr. Bernanke is.
Given that, why not reject Mr. Bernanke? There are other people with the intellectual heft and policy savvy to take on his role: among the possible choices would be my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, and Janet Yellen, the president of the San Francisco Fed.
But — and here comes my defense of a Bernanke reappointment — any good alternative for the position would face a bruising fight in the Senate. And choosing a bad alternative would have truly dire consequences for the economy.
Furthermore, policy decisions at the Fed are made by committee vote. And while Mr. Bernanke seems insufficiently concerned about unemployment and too concerned about inflation, many of his colleagues are worse. Replacing him with someone less established, with less ability to sway the internal discussion, could end up strengthening the hands of the inflation hawks and doing even more damage to job creation.
That’s not a ringing endorsement, but it’s the best I can do.
If Mr. Bernanke is reappointed, he and his colleagues need to realize that what they consider a policy success is actually a policy failure. We have avoided a second Great Depression, but we are facing mass unemployment — unemployment that will blight the lives of millions of Americans — for years to come. And it’s the Fed’s responsibility to do all it can to end that blight.
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| Financial : Big Bang Financiero | | Posted by xav on 2009/3/5 14:37:09 (310 reads) |
Obama en Problemas: En la busqueda de un big bang economico-financiero mundial?
Por Esteban C. Buljevich Abogado
Ex funcionario internacional del IFC, Banco Mundial
Tan solo la semana pasada estabamos repasando y expectantes acerca de los puntos salientes del paquete de estímulo fiscal y del rol y los modelos que podia seguir el gobierno Norteamericano para rescatar a su quebrado sistema financiero y tambien reactivar su economia, desconociendo hasta ese momento lo que sucedería días después: con el derrumbe del precio de las acciones del Citi y el BofA, entre otras instituciones financieras, la aceleración de la debacle económico-financiera a nivel global y los la quasi-nacionalización del tan mitico Citi en Estados Unidos.
Hoy por hoy, la falta de acciones contundentes de la administracion de Obama esta llevando lentamente a la destrucción total del sistema financiero Norteamericano y de su mercado de capitales asi como a una recesion mundial sin precedentes, con el consecuente contagio que tal situacion obviamente tendra en el resto de los mercados y economias del mundo.
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| Financial : Warren.The worst of the wall street crisis is over | | Posted by xav on 2008/5/4 0:30:48 (412 reads) |
Buffett Says Credit Crisis Ebbs for Wall Street Firms (Update4)
May 3 -- Warren Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said the global credit crunch has eased for bankers, and the Federal Reserve probably averted more failures by helping to rescue Bear Stearns Cos.
``The worst of the crisis in Wall Street is over,'' Buffett said today on Bloomberg Television. ``In terms of people with individual mortgages, there's a lot of pain left to come.''
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| Financial : OIL | | Posted by xav on 2007/3/31 18:21:20 (642 reads) |
oil
Desde la última caída significativa en el precio del petróleo (1988- U$S 12) el precio del crudo ha ascendido a U$S 70. La pregunta emergente sería, si acaso el precio del petróleo caerá en picada, como muchos analistas tienden a creer, o si llegaremos a presenciar una suba de precios aún mayor.
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