Aspectos monetarios y financieros

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

[visillófilas pepitófagas]

Los movimientos del FMI y EEUU respecto a los SDRs (yuan incluido) parecen una manera de atajar el dilema de Triffin, desacoplando al dólar de la parte mala del dilema, pero manteniéndolo bastante acoplado para la buena (nota: el FMI no es un Estado que produzca ni tenga ciudadanos).

En este contexto habría que incluir también (como complemento o alternativa) los diferentes tratados de comercio bilaterales o multilaterales recientemente firmados o buscados (TTIP incluido).

Por último, el artículo de Cohen es sorprendente por su candidez. ¿Desde cuándo hay decisiones económicas puras, exentas de política? Quizá escriba para el público ignorante y anti-chino.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

...por tanto, el pensamiento de Fofoa no es contrario al papel moneda, ni de la imposibilidad de que este sea estable, sino antes bien, el poner de manifiesto las contradicciones que se habrán de revelar en el largo plazo cuando un mismo elemento desempeña o pretende desempeñar en el sistema funciones diversas (como el Pisito, bien básico ¿y? medio de himbersión), a saber:

- El papel moneda de patrón metálico, que debe aumentar en masa al ritmo aproximado en que lo hace la economía o el volumen de bienes y servicios, y el oro, como elemento físico limitado en cantidad. Eso conduce a la imposibilidad de mantener el patrón oro dado un plazo de tiempo lo bastante largo donde se dé crecimiento - inevitablemente se debe romper la paridad, como hizo Nixon, o habría que recurrir a la re-evalauación del precio del oro fijado en dólares, como pretendía Rueff.

- El dólar (no el papel moneda en general) en su contradicción entre moneda de reserva y moneda de USA (dilema de Triffin)

Y yendo más allá y espero que esto permita enlazar con Minsky, la moneda, entre sus distintas funciones tradicionales: de depósito de valor, medio de intercambio y unidad de cuenta. Y añadiría otras dos funciones: medio de pago de intereses estable en el tiempo, medio de pago de impuestos. Graeber nos habla de estas dos últimas funciones de manera extensa. Por ejemplo, cómo fue la introducción de la obligación de pagar con moneda metálica los (nuevos) impuestos en las colonias, por parte de las metrópolis, lo que forzó la "monetización" de sus economías, basados en otros sistemas no necesariamente basados en moneda - ni en trueque tampoco, por cierto - él hizo su tesis sobre Madagascar si recuerdo bien, pero ha pasado varias veces en la historia. Sobre los intereses y el "asunto deuda" cobra especial relevancia Minsky, en tanto que la demanda de dinero, en determinadas condiciones - ciertamente no frecuentes, pero se han dado ya varias veces, en una fase de Desapalancamiento moderado o fuerte, puede pasar a ser determinante, y por realimentación del proceso, conducir a la conocida "Debt Deflation".

Durante largas épocas puede haber suficiente equilibrio para que se atiendan armoniosamente todas las funciones requeridas, pero llegado un cierto punto de crisis, un tipo de función puede ahogar a las demás. Como la demanda de dinero como forma de repago de deudas en una Debt Deflation, que seca la economía ordinaria privándola del necesario líquido lubricante de transacciones (medio de intercambio -> caída de la velocidad del dinero).

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Otras veces al hablar de retroalimentación ha habido cachondeo, por resultar un palabro pedante.

En inglés es más normalucho, cualquier sistema con "feedback", pero es un anglicismo dudosamente necesario.

El caso es que si procede aplicarlo a algo, sin duda en economía procede.

Ríanse menos  ¡que el pobre LvB llorará en su tumba!

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy

[visillófilas pepitófagas]

Con el tipo de conceptos que se manejan en este hilo, que "realimentación" se considere pedante es el colmo 

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Con el tipo de conceptos que se manejan en este hilo, que "realimentación" se considere pedante es el colmo 

¡Claro que sí! Y hasta Carmena está de acuerdo con nosotros:

"La soledad siempre me ha retroalimentado y me ha permitido elaborar la felicidad", apunta Carmena

http://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/madrid/2015-11-24/carmena-feliz-arrepiente-alcaldia-madrid_1105689/

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://blogs.elconfidencial.com/mercados/perlas-de-kike/2015-11-26/ineficientes-por-decreto_1107163/

Edito: e interesantes enlaces en el artículo de Kike

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-12/five-strange-things-that-have-been-happening-in-financial-markets

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-19/where-have-all-the-arbitrageurs-gone-

http://www.icmagroup.org/assets/documents/Regulatory/Repo/IFLR_Andy-Hill-repo-article-September-2015.pdf

[sudden and sharp]

http://blogs.elconfidencial.com/mercados/perlas-de-kike/2015-11-26/ineficientes-por-decreto_1107163/

Otro ejemplo:

Código: [Seleccionar]

    PLAZO      TAE   TIPO NOMINAL EJEMPLO INTERÉS MENSUAL*
   1 mes: 0,200 % 0,20 %         1,67 €
 3 meses: 0,200 % 0,20 %         1,67 €
 6 meses: 0,349 % 0,35 %         2,91 €
12 meses: 0,349 % 0,35 %         2,91 €
13 meses: 0,399 % 0,40 %         3,33 €
25 meses: 0,250 % 0,25 %         2,08 €
36 meses: 0,250 % 0,25 %         2,08 €

(*)Ejemplo de beneficio mensual obtenido al invertir 10.000 euros al tipo
de interés informado en los plazos correspondientes. Importe sujeto a la retención
fiscal en cada momento.
Bankia depósitos "on-line":
http://www.bankia.es/page/id-1-1002-0-100345-465542-100180-0.go

Más interés a 6 meses que a 36. Nos vamos a divertir con estas "nuevas reglas".

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Capex flushed down the toilet...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-26/heatmap-global-capex-shrinkage

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Exports FTW

CAMBRIDGE – Should a country’s development strategy pay special attention to exports? After all, exports have nothing to do with satisfying their people’s basic needs, such as education, health care, housing, power, water, telecoms, security, the rule of law, and recreation. So why give precedence to satisfying the needs of distant foreign consumers?

That, in a nutshell, is what many opponents of free trade and economic globalization – as well as many on the right who believe that all industries should be treated equally – want to know. But there are no right answers to wrong questions. It is precisely because governments care about their own people that they should focus on exports.

To see this, consider what a market economy is all about. Some, including Pope Francis, would say that it is about greed – a system in which everybody cares only about herself.

But a market economy should be understood as a system in which we are supposed to earn our keep by doing things for other people; how much we earn depends on how others value what we do for them. The market economy forces us to be concerned about the needs of others, because it is their need that constitutes the source of our livelihood. In some sense, a market economy is a gift-exchange system; money merely tracks the value of the gifts we give one another.

As a result, a market economy encourages specialization: We become very good in a narrow set of skills or products, and exchange them for millions of other things we have no clue how to do or make. As a consequence, we end up doing remarkably few things and buying everything else from others.

This observation is as true about an individual as it is about a place, whether the place is a neighborhood, a town, a state or province, or a country. Every town has grocery stores, beauty parlors, gas stations, and movie theaters that serve the local community. Economists call these “non-tradable activities,” because they are not undertaken with distant customers in mind.

But the town’s people would also want access to things that nobody in the city even knows how to make. For example, most towns and cities do not produce food, cars, gasoline, medicines, TVs, or films. So they need to “import” these goods from elsewhere. To pay for what they want from out-of-towners, they must sell them some of the things that they do know how to make.

Of course, the out-of-towners have the option of buying from somewhere else. This is why the goods and services that a place can sell to non-residents have a disproportionate impact on its quality of life – and even its viability. A mining town becomes a ghost town when the mine closes, because the grocery store, the pharmacy, and the movie theater no longer have the capacity to buy the “imported” food, medicine, and films they need.

In contrast to non-tradable activities, a place’s export activities need to be pretty good to convince out-of-town customers – who have ample other options – to buy from local producers. That means that exports must have an attractive quality/cost ratio.

One way to increase this ratio is to improve quality and productivity. Another is to lower wages. The higher the productivity and the quality of export activities, the higher the wages they can pay and still remain competitive. If employment in the export industry is significant, as is true in most places that do not rely on oil revenues, the wages that the export sector can afford will affect the wages of everybody in town. Everyone thus has an interest in improving their export sector.

Because they are subject to greater competition, export activities tend to undergo faster technological and productivity improvements than other parts of the economy. They are constantly under threat from innovation and new competitors that could disrupt their business. Consider the iPhone’s devastating impact on Finland’s once-dominant national champion Nokia, or the effect of the shale-oil revolution on OPEC.

Successful places tend to move from a few technologically simple industries that are competitive enough to export their products to a greater number of industries that are increasingly complex. For example, in 1963, 97% of Thailand’s export basket was composed of agricultural and mineral products such as rice, rubber, tin, and jute. By 2013, these represented less than 20% of the total, while machinery and chemicals accounted for 56%.

A similar transformation can be seen in every successful non-OPEC developing country. The success of a place is very much related to its people’s ability to accomplish this transformation, as exemplified by places such as Singapore, Turkey, and Israel.

So what should countries, provinces, and cities do? Skeptics might say that they should just focus on fixing the things that locals care about, such as education or infrastructure, or improve everybody’s “business environment.” Exports will take care of themselves.

But life is more complicated than this. The needs of export activities are often quite distinct. The specific rules, infrastructure, skills, and technological mastery that export activities require tend to be different from those needed for the non-tradable activities that usually generate the bulk of a place’s employment. While diversification into new areas is always challenging, it is particularly difficult for tradable activities, which have to face foreign competition from the start. By contrast, pioneers in non-tradable activities start with a captive market. Moreover, exporters need particularly strong connections to knowhow found elsewhere on the planet, thus making them more sensitive to foreign investment, migration, and international professional links.

To survive and thrive, societies need to pay special attention to those activities that produce goods and services they can sell to non-residents. Indeed, the need to act on new export opportunities and remove obstacles to success is probably the central lesson from the East Asian and Irish growth miracles.

Non-tradable activities are akin to a country’s sports leagues: different people like different teams. Those engaged in tradable activities are like the national team: we should all root for them – and organize ourselves to make sure they succeed.

[juancoco]

No hace falta decir que la estrategia española es la de competir con bajos salarios hasta ganarle a China, según creo.

Por otra parte yo cogería con pinzas ese tema de las exportaciones, el cual es otro mantra globalizador porque:

A.- Todos los paises del planeta no pueden ser exportadores netos a la vez.

B.- El hecho de que unos exporten y otros importen de forma consistente acumula tensiones en la balanzas
     de capitales, cosa que tarde o temprano conduce a una crisis.

Generalmente son los paises exportadores lo que venden la libre competencia internacional y los tratados de libre comercio y olvidan, por les conviene,  que los USA se convirtieron en el primer productor industrial y agrícola del mundo desarrollando su economía dentro del proteccionismo más absoluto.

La clave no son las exportaciones, la clave es el ambiente liberal y de libertades individuales del que gozó la población de ese país desde su independencia hasta mitad del siglo XIX. Los USA han sido el experimento mas grande que a existido en cuanto a libertades individuales......y por eso fue torpedeado sin piedad.

Otra cosa que también olvidan nuestros neoliberales es que durante todo ese periódo la sociedad anónima por acciones se encontraba prohíbida, en ese lugar no querían saber nada de oligopolios al estilo Europeo y sobre todo inglés, es más la guerra de independencia de los USA fue prácticamente una guerra contra la East India Company, la multinacional mas grande y monopólica de la época...cotizaba en Londres. Los USA hicieron lo que hicieron mediante PYMES regentadas de forma solidaria con todos sus bienes por sus propios dueños.

Lo de las exportaciones no era la causa, era la consecuencia.

Saludos

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Generalmente son los paises exportadores lo que venden la libre competencia internacional y los tratados de libre comercio y olvidan, por les conviene,  que los USA se convirtieron en el primer productor industrial y agrícola del mundo desarrollando su economía dentro del proteccionismo más absoluto.

Y otros lo recuerdan:

http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-trouble-with-interest-rates-by-j--bradford-delong-2015-11

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/12/01/actualidad/1448945871_307165.html

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

WASHINGTON, DC – Over the next few weeks, the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are likely to put in place notably different policies. The Fed is set to raise interest rates for the first time in almost ten years. Meanwhile, the ECB is expected to introduce additional unconventional measures to drive rates in the opposite direction, even if that means putting further downward pressure on some government bonds that are already trading at negative nominal yields.

In implementing these policies, both central banks are pursuing domestic objectives mandated by their governing legislation. The problem is that there may be few, if any, orderly mechanisms to manage the international repercussions of this growing divergence.

The Fed is responding to continued indications of robust job creation in the United States and other signs that the country’s economy is recovering, albeit moderately so. Also conscious of the risk to financial stability if interest rates remain at artificially low levels, the Fed is expected to increase them when its policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee meets on December 15-16. The move marks a turning point in the Fed’s approach to the economy. In deciding to raise interest rates, it will be doing more than simply lifting its foot from the financial-stimulus accelerator; it will also be taking a notable step toward the multiyear normalization of its overall policy stance.

In the meantime, the ECB is facing a very different set of economic conditions, including generally sluggish growth, the risk of deflation, and worries about the impact of the terrorist attacks in Paris on business and consumer confidence. As a result, the bank’s decision-makers are giving serious consideration to pushing the discount rate further into negative territory and extending its large-scale asset-purchase program (otherwise known as quantitative easing). In other words, the ECB is likely to expand and extend experimental measures that will press even harder on the financial-stimulus accelerator.

In a perfect world, policymakers would have assessed the potential for international spillovers from these divergent policies (including possible spillbacks on both sides of the Atlantic) and put in place a range of instruments to ensure a better alignment of domestic and global objectives. Unfortunately, political polarization and general policy dysfunction in both the US and the European Union continue to inhibit such an effort. As a result, lacking a more comprehensive policy response, the harmonization of their central banks’ divergent policies will be left to the markets – in particular, those for fixed-income assets and currencies.

Already, the interest-rate differential between “risk-free” bonds on both sides of the Atlantic – say, US Treasuries and German Bunds – has widened notably. And, at the same time, the dollar has strengthened not only against the euro, but also against most other currencies. Left unchecked, these trends are likely to persist.

If history is any guide, there are three major issues that warrant careful monitoring in the coming months. First, the US is unlikely to stand by for long if its currency appreciates significantly and its international competitiveness deteriorates substantially. Companies are already reporting earning pressures due to the rising dollar, and some are even asking their governments to play a more forceful role in countering a stealth “currency war.”

Second, because the dollar is used as a reserve currency, a rapid rise in its value could put pressure on those who have used it imprudently. At particular risk are emerging-country companies that, having borrowed overwhelmingly in dollars but generating only limited dollar earnings, might have large currency mismatches in their assets and liabilities or their incomes and expenditures.

And, finally, sharp movements in interest rates and exchange rates can cause volatility in other markets, most notably for equities. Because regulatory controls and market constraints have made brokers less able to play a countercyclical role by accumulating inventory on their balance sheets, the resulting price instability is likely to be large. There is a risk that some portfolios will be forced into disordered unwinding. Furthermore, the central banks’ policy of curtailing so-called “volatile volatility” is likely to be challenged.

Of course, none of these outcomes is preordained. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have the ability to lower the risk of instability by implementing structural reforms, ensuring more balanced aggregate demand, removing pockets of excessive indebtedness, and smoothing out the mechanisms of multilateral and regional governance.

The three possible outcomes of all this include a relatively stable multi-speed world, notable disruptions that undermine the US’s economic recovery, and a European revival that benefits from US growth. The good news is that the impact of the divergence will depend on how policymakers manage its pressures. The bad news is that they have yet to find the political will to act decisively to minimize the risks.

As the Fed normalizes its monetary policy and the ECB doubles down on extraordinary measures, we certainly should hope for the best. But we should also be planning for a substantial rise in financial and economic uncertainty.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/federal-reserve-ecb-policy-divergence-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2015-12