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No fim, um pedido de desculpas:
Sorry for the legal language, but people in the USA sue each other for ridiculous reasons!

The Keiretsu and the Japanese Economy
R. Taggart Murphy

“So, how do you like Japan, Mr. Binney?’

The scene: a party at the Sumitomo Bank back in 1984 for the new manager of Chase Manhattan’s Tokyo branch where I was then working.

“I like it fine,” he answered. “And the beer is great,” he went on, glancing at the drink in his hand. “I just love Sapporo Beer.”

Whoops. Most of us from Chase looked at the floor while our hosts tittered politely. Our manager should have said he enjoyed Asahi Beer, not Sapporo. Because Asahi was the Sumitomo group brewer and naturally the Sumitomo Bank served as the company’s so-called “main bank”. At that time, Sumitomo Bank was regularly seconding its own people to the then-troubled beer maker including two of its presidents.

Of course you can’t expect fresh-off-the-plane gaijin to know about such distinctive features of Japanese business life as “main banks” and business groups – a.k.a. guruppu gaisha or keiretsu. But maybe our manager was right after all. Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer would presumably say so. For they contend in The Fable of the Keiretsu: Urban Legends of the Japanese Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2006), that there “are no keiretsu and never were.” (p. 37). Not only that, the notion of a “main bank” that steps in to assist troubled companies is a “myth”; moreover, “Japanese firms do not maintain a ‘main bank system’ and never did.” (p. 157).

How is it that two generations of scholars – not to mention roomfuls of bankers – could be so deceived? Well, you see, most scholars of Japan in the West who can read Japanese are not trained economists or at least not the right kind of economist. Miwa and Ramseyer draw attention to the fact that they are political scientists (Ulrike Schaede/ Kent Calder/ Daniel Okimoto/ Chalmers Johnson), historians (John Dower/ Sheldon Garon/ William Lockwood), business or law school professors (Michael Gerlach/ Carl Kester/ Frank Upham/ Curtis Milhaupt) or even, heaven help us, sociologists (Ronald Dore/ Ezra Vogel). If they have the temerity to call themselves economists, they dabble with such dubious notions as RSI theory (Ronald Gilson) or “relationship banking” (Hugh Patrick). Meanwhile, few properly credentialed right-thinking Western economists read Japanese so they “repeated bizarre tales told by sociologists” rather than relying on “sophisticated financial studies.” (p. 56)

Enter J. Mark Ramseyer, blessed with the ability to read Japanese — he spent his boyhood here — and an immunity to the anecdotal tale-spinning of sociologists and historians so sound it might be termed “robust” in certain circles, “goodthinkful” in others. We bankers may have been deluded with such “urban legends” as keiretsu and a powerful financial bureaucracy that could jerk the reins whenever it felt so inclined, but Mark Ramseyer knows better. Didn’t Isoda Ichiro, former chairman of the Sumitomo Bank, make precisely Ramseyer’s point in 1990 – that the Ministry of Finance did not have the legal power to boss Sumitomo Bank around? Of course he lost his job as a result while inspectors from the Ministry descended on the bank in droves and forced the severing of all links between Isoda and the bank— no amakudari (literally, “descent from heaven” or the practice of officials parachuting into lucrative post-retirement sinecures at affiliates or subsidiaries) post for him. But in Ramseyer’s Japan, amakudari hardly matters and anyone who feels miffed by bureaucrats can take them to court. (Ramseyer should break this news to the likes of Citigroup, which was forced to shut down its private banking business here three years ago when it ran afoul of bureaucratic directives.)

But what about Japanese economists? They surely can read Japanese? Yes, our authors concede, they can read, but alas, they are the products of social science departments where “Marxists ruled.” (p. 53) “At virtually all economics departments, (Marxists) at least framed the debates,” they go on to write. And thus we are told (p. 156) that “through the 1970s, Japanese economists were overwhelming Marxist.” We are reminded three pages later that “Until recently, most Japanese economists were Marxists.”

Uh-oh. That must explain why a whole roster of leading Japanese economists got things so wrong and why they are in need of Yoshiro Miwa to set them right. From Hoshi Takeo’s work on the evolution of the Japanese banking system to Horiuchi Akiyoshi’s studies of the effects of amakudari on bank regulation, Aoki Masaaki on those “mythical” main banks and Nakatani Iwao on the role of the banks in the keiretsu, we have the spectacle of an entire generation of economists devoting their working lives to the study of a “mirage,” a “fiction”, a “myth.” Of course implying that scholars such as Hoshi and Aoki are Marxists is a bit of a stretch – Hoshi has been awarded a prize from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan’s premiere – and resolutely non-Marxist – business and financial newspaper while Aoki recently retired from the Stanford economics department where Marxists did not rule.

“Know thy data!” Miwa and Ramseyer exhort Japan scholars and analysts (p. 160). And the authors have marshaled a fair amount of it to demonstrate that nothing much happens at the lunch clubs for presidents of leading keiretsu members. That companies with the likes of Sumitomo and Mitsubishi in their names do a lot of business with companies that do not share those names. That Toyota has no meaningful affiliation with the Mitsui group. That Marx-leaning Occupation officials overstated the role of the zaibatsu (pre-war antecedents of the keiretsu) in the pre-1945 Japanese economy and misunderstood their financing arrangements. That “main banks” do not willingly pour good money after bad to rescue troubled firms. That having outside directors does not necessarily improve Japanese corporate performance.

Little of this is new. Anyone who expects to work with Japanese institutions better learn fast that negotiations of substance do not take place at ceremonial encounters among titular leaders — among other things, that is why Japanese Cabinet meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes — and that a person’s title is a poor clue to real decision-making power. Many of the most successful names in Japanese business – Honda, Sony, Kyocera, Matsushita, Ito-Yokado come readily to mind in addition to Toyota – have nominal or no affiliation with a keiretsu. Great tension existed between the zaibatsu and the kakushin kanryo (“reform bureaucrats”) who tried to militarize the entire Japanese economy in the buildup to the war; and yes, the doctrinaire Marxists got the zaibatsu wrong. But this is all common knowledge now.

If this book doesn’t break new ground on Japan, why was it written? The authors concede their real purpose: “to explain how modern scholars have come to share the myths about Japan that they do” (p. ix). Or, to put it differently, they are doing battle on behalf of an ideology. Those “modern scholars” resisting the ideology’s demonstrable inroads into areas of the academy beyond its origins in neo-classical economics call it “economics imperialism.” Economics imperialism holds not only that free markets are an optimal way of organizing economies, but also that any meaningful account of economic and political reality has to start from the premise that individual human beings are rational, utility-maximizing decision makers. That history and culture-specific institutions do not really matter when considering economic life. And that “competition among profit-maximizing firms in decentralized markets” (p. 156) must be the default assumption in analyzing economic performance — particularly when the economy in question boasted a track record once labeled a “miracle”.

This helps explains why the authors are not content to argue – as many economists do today – that market-distorting features of the postwar Japanese economy eventually helped bring on the supposed stagnation of the last fifteen years. But rather why they are on a self-appointed mission to dynamite the entire established conceptual framework that two generations of scholars, analysts and business people on both sides of the Pacific have built up in an attempt to get a grip on the complex story that is modern Japanese economic history.

This is what leads them into contending that the very labels coined by the Japanese themselves – guruppu gaisha, sangyo seisaku (industrial policy), gyosei shido (administrative guidance) – for important economic institutions here are simply a kind of myth-spinning. It leads them into the palpable absurdity of denying the very existence of the dense network of formal and informal ties that bound Japanese economic entities to each other. Miwa and Ramseyer may both be meticulous scholars, but one wonders if they have ever encountered the words yoshingendo shoryaku saki (literally, “entities outside credit limits”), the term used informally within banks and trading companies for borrowers so well protected within the Japanese system that bankruptcy was considered unthinkable. Were they ever inside a bank office here when word reached the floor that inspectors from the Ministry of Finance or the Financial Supervisory Agency were on their way over? Where were they in July 2000 when the Sogo Department Store went bankrupt? When Nishimura Masao, the former president of the Industrial Bank of Japan (“IBJ”), testified in the Diet that the bank had known Sogo was insolvent since 1994 but that IBJ had continued to pour money down the black hole of its balance sheets? How do they interpret the enormous headlines in the Japanese papers on the day of the bankruptcy? If your ideology forces you to deny the very existence of “main banks” and of a political/bureaucratic nexus that provided protection for favored entities from “market forces”, what do you say when the protection proves too costly? When IBJ, the proud crown jewel of the Japanese financial system, is forced to dissolve itself through a merger because it can no longer do what a “main bank” is supposed to do? You make strident claims that the institutions that propped up Sogo up for so many years and led IBJ to act the way it did “do not exist and never did.” Because otherwise to get a grip on what happened you would have to cope with all those modes of inquiry from history, geography, anthropology, political philosophy — yes, even sociology and the likes of institutional economics – that your ideology has proclaimed “essentially bankrupt.” (p. 56)

This book has been extravagantly praised in circles that have long attempted to ignore or otherwise explain Japan away. But the very tone of that praise – and that the book was written – testify ultimately to the denial of the partisans of a reductionist ideology.

R. Taggart Murphy is Professor and Vice Chair, MBA Program in International Business, Tsukuba University (Tokyo Campus). He is the author of The Weight of the Yen (Norton, 1996) and, with Akio Mikuni, of Japan’s Policy Trap (Brookings, 2002). This is a revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in The Journal of Economic History. Posted at Japan Focus on June 25, 2008.

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Para que não me esqueça. E como poderia?…

Paul Krugman é, obviamente, um excelente economista. Daqueles que pode vir a ganhar o prémio Nobel (apesar de me parecer que já esteve mais perto do que está agora). Não me passa pela cabeça pôr em causa a sua autoridade enquanto (macro)economista. Mas falar dele enquanto autoridade sobre preços de petróleo? A não ser que eu me engane muito, Krugman nunca fez nada relacionado com petróleo. A sua obra é vasta, mas a sua autoridade científica sobre este assunto específico é zero.

Quando recorremos a argumentos de autoridade, tenho a ideia de que recorremos sempre às mesmas autoridades. Para alguns é o Hayek, para outros o Friedman e, entre os vivos, Paul Krugman é uma autoridade muito comum. Mas dificilmente alguém será uma autoridade em todos os assuntos. Se queremos usar um argumento de autoridade, temos primeiro de encontrar a autoridade.

Neste assunto, a maior autoridade é James Hamilton. Desde os anos 80 que estuda o assunto. Desde os anos 80 que já produziu (e ainda produz) investigação relevantíssima nesta área. Desde definir e re-definir o significado de choque petrolífero à análise empírica e teórica de como estes choques se propagam para a macroeconomia.

Fica o link para o seu último artigo sobre o assunto. Já agora, na secção sobre especulação, Hamilton termina assim: an ongoing speculative price bubble would have to result in continuous inventory accumulation, or else be ratified by cuts in production. The former is clearly unsustainable, and if it is the latter, one might make the case that the supply cuts rather than the speculation itself has been the ultimate cause of the price increase.

Estando uma semana sedeado no ICS, estive com o nosso especialista em sondagens e pude confirmar que, ao contrário do que foi a 1 de Fevereiro deste ano prometido, Pedro Magalhães não se desfez do seu dedo mindinho. Enfim, fica o aviso feito, se o Obama perder as eleições vou exigir o pagamento da aposta. Quando trabalhei em Lisboa, em 1997/98, alguns dos meus amigos brincavam com o meu sotaque de Coimbra. Agora que vivo em Braga já há alguns anos, devo ter um sotaque ainda mais exótico aos ouvidos alfacinhas. Tenho de lhes perguntar.

Já passei férias em Paris, Praga, Nova Iorque, Washington, Barcelona, etc. No entanto, nunca me passou pela cabeça a ideia de passar férias numa cidade portuguesa. Ir 10-15 dias para Lisboa, e durante esses dias fazer o que os turistas fazem. Tenho de falar com a Sandra sobre isso.

Amanhã volto para Braga. Segunda-feira, começa o Curso de Verão do meu núcleo de investigação. James Hamilton vem cá partir-nos a cabeça com Econometria Bayesiana. Enfim vamos ver como sobrevivo ao massacre.

Os modelos que os economistas usam são simplificações de realidades complicadas. Uma das simplificações mais criticadas é a da racionalidade dos agentes económicos. Levado ao extremo, este pressuposto implica que, perante a informação disponível, cada pessoa em cada momento faz escolhas óptimas. A ideia tem um sabor darwinístico: num mercado competitivo, quem não optimize os seus recursos será derrotado. Mas como saber se este pressuposto é razoável? A maioria das vezes as realidades humanas são demasiado complexas para se conseguir reunir provas concludentes que confirmem ou desmintam um dado modelo económico. Valha-nos o futebol, com regras tão simples que qualquer economista as consegue entender.

Ignacio Palacio-Huerta, professor na Universidade de Brown, apercebeu-se de que a interacção estratégica entre o marcador de um penálti e o guarda-redes é um laboratório perfeito para se testar alguns teoremas clássicos da Teoria dos Jogos, um dos ramos da Ciência Económica. Palacio-Huerta testou as implicações do teorema do minimax, demonstrado por John Von Neuman em 1928, com aplicação a jogos em que os jogadores têm interesses opostos. O jogo é simples. O marcador do penálti tem de decidir se chuta para a direita ou para a esquerda (penáltis à Panenka ficam para Hélder Postiga). Simultaneamente, o guarda-redes tem de escolher o lado para onde vai mergulhar. Se os jogadores forem racionais, quais serão as suas escolhas?

Comecemos pelo atacante. Se o atacante seguir a estratégia óptima, chutará mais vezes para o seu lado mais forte, mas também rematará para o seu lado mais fraco a fim de apanhar o guarda-redes desprevenido. Exemplificando: imagine o leitor que quando o Ronaldo marca um penálti para a esquerda marca 95% das vezes e que quando chuta para a direita marca apenas 50%. Nesse caso, o Ronaldo deve passar a rematar mais vezes para a esquerda. Mas, se o fizer, os guarda-redes também se atirarão mais vezes para esse lado. Assim, a probabilidade de marcar quando chuta para a esquerda vai diminuir. Já a probabilidade de marcar quando chuta para a direita aumentará. Matematicamente, demonstra-se que a solução óptima corresponde a uma estratégia mista: a proporção de vezes que chuta para a esquerda e para a direita deve ser tal que, no momento do chuto, as probabilidades de golo sejam iguais quer chute para um lado quer chute para o outro. Um raciocínio semelhante aplica-se aos guarda-redes, concluindo-se que, se estes seguirem a estratégia óptima, a probabilidade de defesa é independente do lado que escolhem. A hipótese de racionalidade leva-nos ainda mais longe: as escolhas dos jogadores devem parecer aleatórias para que o adversário não consiga adivinhar o lado correcto.

Palácios-Huerta observou vídeos de todos os penáltis marcados entre 1995 e 2000 nos principais campeonatos europeus (Itália, Inglaterra e Espanha). Regra geral, guarda-redes e bola voam para o mesmo lado metade das vezes. A taxa de sucesso quando o atacante engana o guarda-redes é de 100% (excluindo os casos em que não acerta na baliza). Quando o guarda-redes acerta com o lado, consegue defender cerca de 40% dos remates. Em média, 80% dos penáltis resultam em golo.

Regressando à matemática, as implicações do teorema foram testadas e confirmadas: os marcadores de penáltis escolhem o lado para onde atiram a bola de tal forma que a probabilidade de marcar golo é praticamente igual quer chutem para a esquerda quer para a direita. A probabilidade de um guarda-redes defender o chuto é também igual, quer se atire para a esquerda quer para a direita. Finalmente, não vale a pena tentar prever se o remate vai para um lado ou para o outro, ou para que lado mergulhará o guarda-redes. Tal como se previa, essas decisões são imprevisíveis. Ou seja, mesmo sem fazerem cálculos elaborados, no momento do penálti, os melhores jogadores são estrategas exímios.

Chamo também a atenção dos leitores interessados para um dos links na parte final do texto, que remete para uma outra questão importante no contexto japonês… e não só: o aumento exponencial do trabalho precário e as suas várias consequências psicológicas e sociais.

"Conservatism" and "Nationalism". The Japan Puzzle
Gavan McCormack*

Japanese politics are characterized by two related paradoxes: first, that the word “conservative” is usually applied to those who insist on the need to remake Japan’s postwar society, including its constitution, and who in other words are actually radicals, while those who insist on “conserving” Japan’s postwar democratic institutions are labeled radicals or leftists; and second, that those who most insist that Japan subordinate itself to the United States describe themselves as “nationalists,” while those who seek to prioritize Japanese over US interests are suspected of being somehow “un-Japanese.” It is an Alice in Wonderland confusion!

The thrust of the “reforms” undertaken by the Koizumi and Abe governments between 2001 and 2007 was to bring Japan closer in line with the United States in both security and economic terms. On the former, in 2003 Japan’s armed forces were for the first time sent to a theatre of conflict at US behest and “conservatives” since then have attached the highest priority to trying to ensure that in future Japan could do more by joining the United States in collective security actions (read: wars) as an East Asian Great Britain. On the latter, the same “conservatives” have been intent on “liberalizing” the Japanese economy by the removal of remaining obstacles to the penetration of US and international capital. Currently, Japanese politics are in a state of frozen immobility, the Fukuda government having lost control over the Upper House but too fearful of annihilation at the polls to seek a mandate. Though immobilized, however, Fukuda faces the same direction as his predecessors.

The fact that the United States – the model for Japanese so-called conservatives on both strategic and economic fronts – is engaged on a catastrophic and illegal war that has virtually destroyed one major country and destabilized an entire region, and that the excesses of its unregulated capitalism have plunged the world economy into the greatest crisis in a generation, should give pause to the proponents of such an agenda; but it seems not to.

The ink had scarcely dried on the 1946 constitution, incorporating the three principles of pacifism, human rights, and political democracy, before the US regretted it. Ever since then, it has been urging Japan to revise it. The brunt of US attention is directed to Article 9, the so-called pacifist clause. [The Japanese and English texts of Article 9 are available here.]

For half a century, Japanese “conservatives,” intent on remaking the country to American design, sought to revise (or neutralise) Article 9, but constitutionalist forces were simply too strong, both in the Diet and in the country at large. They had to be content with steadily watering it down by widening and loosening the way it was interpreted. Now, however, that is no longer enough. As Japan wavered in 2007 over whether to renew its naval mission to the Indian Ocean, withdrawing and then resending its fleet, and as the reorganization of US military bases in Japan (agreed in 2005-2006), and Japan’s conversion of its armed forces from what former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contemptuously called a “boy scout” corps to a real fighting army, both proceed far too slowly for the Bush administration, American impatience mounted. Only with explicit revision can Japan’s SDF become a regular national army (kokugun) able to fight alongside their American allies. Prime Minister Abe in May 2007 succeeded in railroading through the Diet a law spelling out procedures for such a revision. In doing so, however, he so alienated the voting public that he and his government were resoundingly defeated at the Upper House election two months later. He had to resign shortly afterwards. In another “Wonderland” kind of paradox Japanese revisionists, denouncing the existing constitution as an American imposition but insisting above all on American priorities for revision, actually replicate the events of six decades ago.

They now have a two-pronged strategy to meet American demands. In the short term, they hope to secure passage of a permanent law to authorize the overseas despatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces for “international cooperation activities.” That would obviate the current need for a “Special Measures Law” (with attendant Diet debate and inevitable restrictions and conditions) every time the SDF is to be sent on a mission. For the longer term, 239 present and former members of the national parliament joined on 1 May in a new organization, the Diet Members Alliance to Establish a New Constitution. Unlike its predecessors, this Association incorporates prominent members of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. By thus incorporating the opposition, the revision requirement of a two-thirds parliamentary majority becomes feasible.

Outside the Diet, however, to the dismay of revisionists the more they attack Article 9 the stronger public support for it becomes, reaching two-thirds in the May 2008 Asahi opinion survey. The Article 9 Society, established in 2004 by prominent intellectuals and public figures, has now grown to have 7,000 branches nationwide, rivalling as a grassroots political mobilization the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Where revisionists are ashamed by the constitution, A9 Society members propagate it as a global model. In May 2008 they filled to overflowing a vast convention centre just outside Tokyo under the slogan “The world has begun to choose Article 9.”

As the “conservatives” revise their strategy for revision, they also display a disturbing contempt for constitutional principle. In April, when the Nagoya High Court found that the Koizumi and Abe governments had acted in breach of the constitution by consenting to US demands to “show the flag” and put Japanese “boots on the ground” in Iraq, and that therefore the Japanese troop presence in Iraq was both unconstitutional and illegal, the Prime Minister, Chief Cabinet Secretary, Minister of Defence, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Self Defence Forces all dismissed it, insisting that such a judgment would have no effect whatever on Japan’s troop deployment. The rule of law and the separation of powers seemed to them irrelevant.

Nor is constitutionalism just about matters of war and peace. The LDP constitutional proposal would restore the Meiji Constitution’s condition to human rights clauses: “so long as this does not interfere with public order (chitsujo).” It would restore the emperor to the preamble, legitimise state involvement in Yasukuni rituals and subtly erode local self-government, even striking out Article 95.

Before any revision, already constitutional guarantees (in Article 25) of “minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living” and (in Article 21) of freedom of expression ring just as hollow for the irregularly employed, freeters, pacifists and critics of society, as does Article 9’s pledge that Japan will not possess “land, sea, or air forces.” As neo-liberal “reform” spreads and deepens, further American-izing Japanese society, one in three Japanese workers is now exploited and impoverished as an “irregular,” constituting a new class of working poor known as the “precariat,” those living at the margins. Shocking reports of the poor and the sick starving to death (one leaving a pathetic note saying how he longed for a rice ball…) or being reduced to homelessness or snatching sleep in all-night internet cafes, are common. Relative poverty levels (within the OECD) are worse only in the United States. As for freedom of expression, a recent court judgment affirmed the conviction (on trespass charges) of the “Tachikawa Three” for inserting leaflets opposing the dispatch of Japanese forces to Iraq into the letterboxes of defence force staff in 2003. For their “crime” of protesting a troop despatch that the Nagoya court has now found to have been illegal and unconstitutional, they were arrested and held for 75 days in detention - as if they were criminals.

Article 9 (war) and Article 25 (livelihood) may also be closely related. Late in 2007, one desperate young freeter published an essay that encapsulated the social despair that currently spreads, especially among young people. For him, only the prospect of a war offered hope, since, he believes, only in a state of war could there be the prospect of the sort of upheaval of society from which he could expect betterment.

*Gavan McCormack is a coordinator of Japan Focus. His Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, was published in New York and London in 2007, and its publication in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese translation is imminent. This essay is a lightly revised and expanded version of his monthly essay for the vernacular Korean daily, Kyunghyang sinmun, published on 2 June 2008. It is published at Japan Focus on June 22, 2008.

Texto e imagem retirados de Japan Focus, 23 Junho 2008.

By Naomi Klein, Los Angeles Times

Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, claims the key to solving the United States’ economic woes is slashing spending on Social Security. The National Assn. of Manufacturers says the fix is for the federal government to adopt the organization’s wish-list of new tax cuts. For Investor’s Business Daily, it is oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "perhaps the most important stimulus of all."

But of all the cynical scrambles to package pro-business cash grabs as "economic stimulus," the prize has to go to Lawrence B. Lindsey, formerly President Bush’s assistant for economic policy and his advisor during the 2001 recession. Lindsey’s plan is to solve a crisis set off by bad lending by extending lots more questionable credit. "One of the easiest things to do would be to allow manufacturers and retailers" — notably Wal-Mart — "to open their own financial institutions, through which they could borrow and lend money," he wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.
Never mind that that an increasing number of Americans are defaulting on their credit card payments, raiding their 401(k) accounts and losing their homes. If Lindsey had his way, Wal-Mart, rather than lose sales, could just loan out money to keep its customers shopping, effectively turning the big-box chain into an old-style company store to which Americans can owe their souls.
If this kind of crisis opportunism feels familiar, it’s because it is. Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It’s a maneuver I call "disaster capitalism."
Sometimes the enabling national disasters have been physical blows to countries: wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters. More often they have been economic crises: debt spirals, hyperinflation, currency shocks, recessions.
More than a decade ago, economist Dani Rodrik, then at Columbia University, studied the circumstances in which governments adopted free-trade policies. His findings were striking: "No significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis." The 1990s proved him right in dramatic fashion. In Russia, an economic meltdown set the stage for fire-sale privatizations. Next, the Asian crisis in 1997-98 cracked open the "Asian tigers" to a frenzy of foreign takeovers, a process the New York Times dubbed "the world’s biggest going-out-of-business sale."
To be sure, desperate countries will generally do what it takes to get a bailout. An atmosphere of panic also frees the hands of politicians to quickly push through radical changes that would otherwise be too unpopular, such as privatization of essential services, weakening of worker protections and free-trade deals. In a crisis, debate and democratic process can be handily dismissed as unaffordable luxuries.
Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, "Capitalism and Freedom," who articulated the strategy most succinctly. "Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
A decade later, John Williamson, a key advisor to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (and who coined the phrase "the Washington consensus"), went even further. He asked a conference of top-level policymakers "whether it could conceivably make sense to think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform."
Again and again, the Bush administration has seized on crises to break logjams blocking the more radical pieces of its economic agenda. First, a recession provided the excuse for sweeping tax cuts. Next, the "war on terror" ushered in an era of unprecedented military and homeland security privatization. After Hurricane Katrina, the administration handed out tax holidays, rolled back labor standards, closed public housing projects and helped turn New Orleans into a laboratory for charter schools — all in the name of disaster "reconstruction."
Given this track record, Washington lobbyists had every reason to believe that the current recession fears would provoke a new round of corporate gift-giving. Yet it seems that the public is getting wise to the tactics of disaster capitalism. Sure, the proposed $150-billion economic stimulus package is little more than a dressed-up tax cut, including a new batch of "incentives" to business. But the Democrats nixed the more ambitious GOP attempt to leverage the crisis to lock in the Bush tax cuts and go after Social Security. For the time being, it seems that a crisis created by a dogged refusal to regulate markets will not be "fixed" by giving Wall Street more public money with which to gamble.
Yet while managing (barely) to hold the line, the House Democrats appear to have given up on extending unemployment benefits and increasing funding for food stamps and Medicaid as part of the stimulus package. More important, they are failing utterly to use the crisis to propose alternative solutions to a status quo marked by serial crises, whether environmental, social or economic.
The problem is not a lack of ideas "alive and available" — to borrow Friedman’s phrase. There are plenty available, from single-payer healthcare to legislating a living wage. Hundreds of thousands of jobs can be created by rebuilding the ailing public infrastructure and making it more friendly to public transit and renewable energy. Need start-up funds? Close the loophole that lets billionaire hedge fund managers pay 15% capital gains instead of 35% income tax, and adopt a long-proposed tax on international currency trading. The bonus? A less volatile, crisis-prone market.
The way we respond to crises is always highly political, a lesson progressives appear to have forgotten. There’s a historical irony to that: Crises have ushered in some of America’s great progressive policies. Most notably, after the dramatic market failure of 1929, the left was ready and waiting with its ideas — full employment, huge public works, mass union drives. The Social Security system that Moody’s is so eager to dismantle was a direct response to the Depression.
Every crisis is an opportunity; someone will exploit it. The question we face is this: Will the current turmoil become an excuse to transfer yet more public wealth into private hands, to wipe out the last vestiges of the welfare state, all in the name of economic growth? Or will this latest failure of unfettered markets be the catalyst that is needed to revive a spirit of public interest, to get serious about the pressing crises of our time, from gaping inequality to global warming to failing infrastructure?
The disaster capitalists have held the reins for three decades. The time has come, once again, for disaster populism.

Naomi Klein is the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

Nos anos 70, o fim de Bretton Woods e da convertibilidade do dólar, que deixaram a política monetária sem uma âncora e muito exposta aos interesses de curto prazo dos governos, conjugados com os choques petrolíferos de 73, 79 e 80, resultaram num cenário macroeconómico considerado até então pela generalidade dos economistas como altamente improvável: desemprego a aumentar e taxas de inflação galopantes. Estagflação foi o termo cunhado pelos economistas para designar aquela combinação. Alguns chamaram à sua soma o índice da miséria.

Este índice da miséria, que tinha vindo a diminuir desde meados dos anos 80, voltou a aumentar nos últimos anos. A causa desse aumento é a coincidência da crise financeira com o aumento do preço do petróleo, das matérias-primas e dos bens alimentares. Apesar das semelhanças com o cenário macroeconómico dos anos 70, há diferenças importantes a registar. Uma dessas diferenças é a forma de actuação dos bancos centrais. O mau desempenho das economias naquele período, por um lado, e os avanços da ciência económica, por outro lado, mostraram que o controlo da inflação com taxas de câmbio flexíveis só é possível se os Bancos Centrais conseguirem estabilizar as expectativas dos agentes em relação à inflação. Daqui resultou que a credibilidade e a independência dos interesses de curto prazo do poder político se tornaram elementos centrais na actuação dos bancos centrais.

Desde essa altura, a estabilidade dos preços passou a ser o objectivo primordial da política monetária. Nos anos 90, a generalidade dos bancos centrais dos países industrializados, incluindo o Banco Central Europeu elegeram a estabilidade dos preços como o seu principal objectivo. Esta estratégia, a que se chamou Inflation Targeting, alcançou até recentemente um sucesso assinalável. Por exemplo, Jean-Claude Trichet, presidente do BCE, afirmou há poucos dias que, nos 10 anos da sua existência, a taxa de inflação média da Zona Euro foi 2,1%. O objectivo é 2%.

Durante alguns anos o preço do petróleo aumentou sem que fosse visível nas taxas de inflação da Zona Euro e da economia americana. A explicação para esse facto é que a subida do preço do petróleo foi durante os primeiros tempos vista como transitória e, por isso, foi possível conter as expectativas inflacionistas e o aumento dos salários. No entanto, os agentes parecem começar a interiorizar a ideia de que a subida do preço do petróleo, tal como o de muitas matérias-primas e bens alimentares, poderá ter um carácter permanente. As empresas e os consumidores já interiorizaram esse facto e esperam por isso preços mais elevados no futuro. Essa alteração nas expectativas é visível, nos mercados financeiros, no aumento das taxas de juro de longo prazo, mas também nas ruas, onde o descontentamento com o aumento dos preços tem tomado forma nas recentes manifestações dos sectores que têm os combustíveis como um dos principais custos de produção.

As crescentes pressões inflacionistas, e a divergência das taxas de inflação em relação ao seu objectivo, colocam em causa a credibilidade dos bancos centrais e a sua capacidade de estabilizar as expectativas e, assim, a taxa de inflação, aumentando a probabilidade de uma subida das taxas de juro num futuro próximo. Esta é a explicação para as repetidas ameaças de um aumento das taxas de juro por Jean-Claude Trichet e, mais recentemente, por Ben Bernanke. O presidente da Reserva Federal, depois dos cortes históricos entre Agosto do ano passado e Março deste ano, declarou no início de Junho que os riscos de uma recessão muito grave nos Estados Unidos tinham diminuído e ameaçou subir as taxas de juro para fixar as expectativas inflacionistas. As últimas declarações dos responsáveis do BCE e da Reserva Federal sugerem que na ponderação dos riscos a inflação tem vindo a ganhar face à recessão.

O grande desafio dos bancos centrais europeu e americano é conseguir conter as expectativas inflacionistas, e evitar assim um aumento em espiral dos preços e dos salários, sem de facto aumentar significativamente as taxas de juro.   

De facto, a ameaça de recessão continua a pairar sobre a economia americana e europeia e um aumento das taxas de juro neste contexto irá agravar as condições da actividade económica. Embora a estabilidade dos preços seja o principal objectivo dos bancos centrais, o seu objectivo último é o bem-estar das sociedades, o que significa que aqueles não são indiferentes à evolução do produto (nas palavras de Mervyn King, presidente do banco de Inglaterra, não são ‘inflation nutters’). Numa situação de recessão, a percepção pela opinião pública de que os bancos centrais não estão a fazer tudo o que está ao seu alcance para ajudarem a ultrapassar a crise pode colocar em causa a sua independência do poder político. Esse risco é mais elevado para o Banco Central Europeu, cujo mandato estabelece uma clara prioridade da estabilidade dos preços sobre o produto ou o emprego, ao contrário do que acontece com o Banco Central americano.

A actual crise será assim o grande teste à reforma institucional dos bancos centrais, iniciada nos anos 80, e ao Banco Central Europeu que este ano comemora 10 anos de existência.