A crise e os maquiaveis da finança

1. António Borges, que tem a coragem — ou o atrevimento? — que faltam aos neoliberais cá da praça, saiu em defesa da lógica de evolução do sistema financeiro internacional que está na origem da crise actual. Honra lhe seja feita, por isso.

2. Mas, mesmo os que, como eu, são largamente ignorantes das especificidades da alta finança internacional há coisas que percebem há muitos anos.

3. Uma dessas coisas elementares que estão ao alcance de qualquer mortal, mesmo ignorante das lógicas e das subtilezas da alta finança, é lembrada, preto no branco, por uma revista insuspeita de desvios esquerdistas, que dá pelo nome de Economist.

4. A citação que se segue é do seu último número:

[…] Put crudely, the bright new finance is the highly leveraged, lightly regulated, market-based system of allocating capital dominated by Wall Street. It is the spivvy successor to “traditional banking”, in which regulated commercial banks lent money to trusted clients and held the debt on their books. The new system evolved over the past three decades and saw explosive growth in the past few years thanks to three simultaneous but distinct developments: deregulation, technological innovation and the growing international mobility of capital.
Its hallmark is securitisation. Banks that once made loans and held them on their books now pool and sell the repackaged assets, from mortgages to car loans. In 2001 the value of pooled securities in America overtook the value of outstanding bank loans. Thereafter, the scale and complexity of this repackaging (particularly of mortgage-backed assets) hugely increased as investment banks created an alphabet soup of new debt products. They pooled asset-backed securities, divided the pools into risk tranches, added a dose of leverage, and then repeated the process several times over.
Meanwhile, increasing computer wizardry made it possible to create a dizzying array of derivative instruments, allowing borrowers and savers to unpack and trade all manner of financial risks. The derivatives markets have grown at a stunning pace. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the notional value of all outstanding global contracts at the end of 2007 reached $600 trillion, some 11 times world output. A decade earlier it had been “only” $75 trillion, a mere 2.5 times global GDP. In the past couple of years the fastest-growing corner of these markets was credit-default swaps, which allowed people to insure against the failure of the new-fangled credit products. […]

5. É para factos deste tipo e desta gravidade que os neoliberais devem uma explicação razoável… ou o reconhecimento público dos seus erros e das respectivas consequências.