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jueves, 27 de octubre de 2011

Unión Europea condona mitad de la deuda de Grecia

En qué consistió el salvamento de Grecia: se condona la mitad de su deuda y se crea un fondo de salvamento para los bancos que tendrán que asumir esa pérdida


http://www.cnnexpansion.com/videos/2011/10/27/las-condiciones-del-acuerdo-de-la-ue

viernes, 14 de octubre de 2011

Salida de inversión extranjera de cartera de los mercados financieros en México


En un mes, salieron de la BMV 20 mil 500 mdd de inversión extranjera

La incertidumbre financiera causó que saldo de títulos 'no residentes' se desplomara 14.43%.

Víctor Cardoso
Publicado: 14/10/2011 09:47

México, DF. La severa incertidumbre internacional observada en septiembre pasado provocó una salida de casi 20 mil 500 millones de dólares de capitales extranjeros invertidos en acciones que cotizan en la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BMV), revelan datos del mercado bursátil enviados al Instituto de Depósito de Valores (Indeval), a la Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores (CNBV) y al Banco de México.

Con esto, el saldo de títulos de empresas mexicanas adquiridos por “no residentes” pasó de 141 mil 742.5 millones de dólares en agosto pasado, a 121 mil 279.6 millones en septiembre, un desplome de 14.43 por ciento en sólo un mes, debido principalmente a que los inversionistas extranjeros realizaron, según expertos, una “recomposición de portafolios” a causa de la inestabilidad financiera internacional.

El total de inversiones extranjeras en el segmento llamado de “renta variable”, es decir, en acciones cotizadas en bolsa, se ubicó en septiembre ligeramente arriba de septiembre de 2009, cuando se agudizó la crisis financiera internacional. Fue precisamente en junio de aquel año cuando las autoridades financieras mexicanas comenzaron a estructurar información sobre la inversión de “no residentes” en “renta variable”, dado que el nivel de recursos captados por esa vía se elevó a 105 mil 710.7 millones de dólares.

Sobre la elaboración de las estadísticas, el Banco de México explica que se realizan “con información de la tenencia de títulos de renta variable emitidos por empresas mexicanas en poder de no residentes que se encuentran depositados en Indeval y en otras instituciones”.

Datos del banco central dan cuenta de que, desde abril de este año, cuando la inversión extranjera en el mercado de valores alcanzó su máximo nivel histórico de 162 mil 791.5 millones de dólares, a septiembre pasado, se han retirado casi 41 mil 512 millones de dólares que habían sido invertidos en acciones de empresas mexicanas.

Expertos financieros explicaron que esa demanda de dólares por inversionistas extranjeros es, entre otros, un factor que impactó la paridad peso-dólar. Sólo durante septiembre pasado la moneda nacional registró una devaluación de 9 por ciento y de 19.7 por ciento desde el 29 de abril, cuando comenzó a disminuir la participación de “no residentes” en el segmento de “renta variable”. No obstante, en la última reunión de la junta de gobierno del Banco de México se justificó la volatilidad del tipo de cambio “principalmente por los riesgos de una mayor desaceleración de la economía de Estados Unidos.”

Retroceso en bonos del gobierno

Según la información que manejan las autoridades financieras sobre el comportamiento de la inversión extranjera en cartera, es decir, acciones en bolsa y bonos de deuda del gobierno mexicano o “renta fija”, este último segmento también registró una baja de casi 51 mil 50 millones de pesos en septiembre pasado, que equivalen a cerca de 3 mil 725 millones de dólares (al tipo de cambio promedio del mes) adicionales, y que forman parte de la “recomposición de cartera” de los “no residentes”.

Lo anterior significó que el saldo de estos valores, particularmente Certificados de la Tesorería de la Federación, pasó de 923 mil 95.84 millones de pesos a 872 mil 46.42 millones (la caída resulta más grave si se considera el máximo histórico de 923 mil 149.44 millones de pesos alcanzado el 9 de septiembre. La tendencia a la baja se ha mantenido en los primeros días de octubre; el pasado día 5, último dato reportado, la tenencia de extranjeros en bonos gubernamentales se ubicaba en 870 mil 453 millones).

Sin embargo, un seguimiento semanal de la casa de bolsa Banamex Accival que da cuenta de la “tenencia de bonos M por extranjeros” calculado en dólares, señala que de 54 mil 100 millones esta participación cayó a 48 mil 800 millones, es decir, un retroceso de 5 mil 300 millones de dólares, equivalente a 9.8 por ciento.


jueves, 13 de octubre de 2011

Los grandes bancos y la crisis


Los grandes bancos y la crisis
Orlando Delgado Selley
E

l acuerdo Sarkozy-Merkel del domingo pasado garantizando la recapitalización de los bancos europeos afectados por la crisis de deuda, ratifica que para ellos la prioridad no es la gente, sino los bancos. Tras la quiebra de Dexia, un importante banco franco-belga-luxemburgués, los gobernantes europeos están a punto de decidir que el proyecto social europeo ha muerto para que los bancos vivan.

Hace 50 meses estalló la burbujainmobiliaria. Los grandes bancos centrales primero pensaron que era como los estallidos de otras burbujas y que podía resolverse inyectando liquidez en los mercados financieros. Tras inyecciones generosas fue quedando claro que esta vez se trataba de un problema mayor, asociado al funcionamiento del sector financiero. Lo que estalló, en realidad, fue la forma de funcionamiento de los bancos, tanto comerciales como de inversión, junto con un novedoso sistema financiero, la banca en la sombra, que surgió para operar al margen de una regulación de por sí laxa. En unos cuantos meses la recesión se generalizó en las grandes economías, impactando a las emergentes.

Prácticamente todos los gobiernos del mundo entendieron que era indispensable tomar medidas para detener la recesión. Entendieron que, además, las intervenciones fiscales tenían que ser coordinadas mundialmente. El G-20 acordó cuantiosos planes fiscales destinados a revertir el momento recesivo de la crisis. Hubo programas de rescate de las empresas bancarias en los que se utilizaron recursos públicos para salvar intereses privados. La ola privatizadora neoliberal imperante, vigente pese a la crisis, impidió que los gobiernos exigieran que los bancos rescatados pasaran al control gubernamental. Así, los grandes bancos lograron subsistir como negocios privados.

Dos años después de aquel agosto negro en 2007, las economías desarrolladas superaron la recesión gracias a los programas fiscales y monetarios aplicados. Poco a poco el resto de las economías del mundo fueron teniendo resultados positivos en la producción, sin que se presentaran problemas significativos en los precios. El FMI advirtió que había que mantener los estímulos fiscales en tanto no se consolidara la recuperación. Pese a estos llamados, los bancos europeos exigieron que países sobre endeudados garantizaran el cumplimiento de sus obligaciones crediticias. Grecia, primero, y luego Irlanda y Portugal, tuvieron que ser rescatados por la Unión Europea para asegurar que cubrieran sus pagos con los bancos acreedores. A cambio tuvieron que reducir drásticamente el gasto social.

Todo 2010 en Europa fue imponiéndose como prioridad reducir el déficit fiscal y la deuda pública. Los mercados, esto es, los grandes inversionistas globales, ayudados por las calificadoras, se impusieron a los gobiernos. Esta decisión política afectó al crecimiento económico y a la población que había sido protegida de los impactos de la crisis con la cobertura estatal. La austeridad fiscal y las privatizaciones buscaban generar espacio presupuestal para cumplir con los bancos acreedores. El proyecto social europeo incluyente y solidario fue perdiendo su definición, convirtiéndose en uno desigual y concentrador.

Se protegió a los bancos y a sus dueños con los recursos que antes se destinaban para la población más golpeada. Los bancos europeos, sin embargo, fuertemente comprometidos con las deudas soberanas demandaron mayores intereses, dificultando el cumplimiento de los programas de contención fiscal. En 2011 los problemas se han agravado. La recuperación económica no se consolidó, de modo que la nueva prioridad redujo sustancialmente el crecimiento, complicando el cumplimiento de las metas fiscales.

Se han ampliado los problemas de la zona euro, abarcando a España e Italia, lo que ha cuestionado la viabilidad de la moneda única. El eje franco-alemán ha ido respondiendo con lentitud a la crisis de deuda soberana, contribuyendo con ello al incremento de las dificultades. La segunda vuelta del rescate griego, aprobada hace meses por los gobiernos y aún pendiente de aprobación parlamentaria en algunos países, ha demostrado que las dificultades no fueron resueltas y que es indispensable restructurar esa deuda, reconociendo pérdidas bancarias. Aunque todavía es posible que subsista el proyecto social europeo, esto no ocurrirá con esos gobernantes.

domingo, 9 de octubre de 2011

La desregulación financiera en Gran Bretaña en la década de los 80´s

Traders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty ImagesTraders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images

Back in 1986, as the City broker L Messel was being acquired by a fast-expanding investment bank called Lehman Brothers, a young, ambitious financier was parachuted into London from Wall Street and put in charge of European expansion.

That man was Dick Fuld, who later achieved notoriety as the captain of the investment bank as it went down with all hands, but even in the mid 1980s he was demonstrating a deftness of touch.

At an early meeting, Messel executives told their new thrusting boss that if he was serious about achieving his aggressive growth plans, they really needed to supplement the London office with another in Frankfurt.

"No way," fired back the earnest American. "We're never going behind the iron curtain!"

Many of the Messel staff present have dined out on that one ever since, but it is only one of many anecdotes about the events leading up to what will forever be known in the City as the Big Bang.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of that radical Thatcherite reshaping of the City, a period in which the Americans arrived to snap up ancient City institutions for huge premiums, leading to the clubby atmosphere of the Square Mile being replaced with the rapacious, bonus-grabbing culture of the investment bank.

"Nobody could quite believe how much the Americans wanted to pay," recalls Adam Pollock, now head of corporate broking at Panmure Gordon, then a banker at Lazard. "It brought with it a renewed vigour and enthusiasm, with everybody working a lot harder. But that ended some traditions. It used to be de rigueur to have a big lunch."

The Big Bang was partly about modernisation – ensuring that the City used up-to-date technology such as computers. But it also dismantled the barriers between the separate, narrowly focused firms in the City, the stockbrokers, advisers and "jobbers" who created the markets in shares. Afterwards, all these services could exist under one roof and ultimately, some would argue, it led to the catastrophe of the credit crunch, whose effects the UK is still living through. "Big Bang was the start of investment banking in the UK," says Tony Dolphin, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

With the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking and deposit-taking, still in force in the US, Britain's laxer regime brought an influx of US firms, with their chinos, booze-free lunch-breaks and bumper bonuses, helping to bust open the old City cliques.

With them, argues City veteran Tony Greenham of the New Economics Foundation thinktank, came deep-seated conflicts of interest.

"On the plus side, the Americans brought a more meritocratic culture," he says. "But they also brought the idea that, instead of being client-based, it was a transaction-based business. You change from long-termism to short-termism, from looking after the long-term interests of your client to making the biggest buck out of today's deal."

When a company is considering a float or a merger, for example, its bankers will both advise it on the deal and sell the shares to investors, taking a cut on every side, meaning that their interest lies firmly in encouraging the mega-bucks transactions that came to characterise the champagne-popping culture of the City in the mid-to-late 80s, the late 90s and the early noughties.

"What happened in the old days was that the company would engage a financial adviser and they would shop around for a stockbroker," says Greenham. Now "the same company, even the same team, are advising investors and companies, and that's just a ridiculous conflict of interest".

And if the bank is involved in proprietary trading, the controversial practice Barack Obama is seeking to outlaw with his "Volcker law", it might also be risking its own money on the deal.

It is partly this tendency to omnipresence that prompted one commentator to call Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid".

Some say this observation has always been more than just a nice soundbite. Over the years, as investment banks developed increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, they became involved with one another in an ever-expanding web of bets and counter-bets, making them almost inextricably entwined. It was precisely that problem that sent shockwaves through the world's markets when the Fuld-led Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

Professor Karel Williams of Manchester's Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) argues that the Big Bang did not just unleash the forces of capitalism, it also created powerful vested interests that have shaped British politics ever since.

"Deregulation allowed the City to construct long lines of indebtedness, which are completely beyond technical regulation and, as we see with the eurozone crisis, beyond political management."

In After the Great Complacence, a book recently published by Oxford University Press, Williams and his colleagues argue that City firms treat regulations as "bricolage": instead of being constrained by regulations, they build them into their day-to-day activities.

"What have the markets spent all summer doing, except wittering on asking for political leadership, which is [code for: Angela] Merkel should listen to them and not the German electorate. But in a democracy, the prime responsibility of a political leader is to the electorate. Deregulation created a sectional interest in finance, which is beyond political subordination."

Many economists also argue that the growing dominance of finance, accelerated by the Big Bang, helped to bring about profound changes in the UK's economic model. George Osborne bemoans the imbalances in an economy far too focused on finance and debt, and with too little emphasis on Britain's former strengths in industry. But others argue that the Tories' deregulatory spree in the 80s could have done as much to bring about that out-of-kilter economic model as the forces of globalisation, which helped to undermine manufacturing.

Dolphin says: "People talk about comparative advantage as if it's God-given and just emerges, but we know that's not true. Big Bang was important in cementing Britain's advantage in finance.

"The fact that we had this growing financial industry did attract a lot of capital. Those capital flows, other things being equal, would have pushed sterling up, and therefore will have accelerated the decline of manufacturing."

Dolphin points to the fact that, as the power of finance grew, Britain consistently ran trade deficits, year after year: "It produced a casualness about the decline of manufacturing and the collapse of all competing sectors which is really quite jaw-dropping."

In the other camp is – predictably – Lord Lawson, who introduced the reforms as Margaret Thatcher's chancellor. He insists they were as much about strengthening the London Stock Exchange as slashing red tape; as much about regulation as deregulation.

"It was absolutely essential, because it was a way of bringing the stock market into the 20th century, and in particular making sure it was adequately capitalised," he says.

"The Financial Services Act, which did regulation of the stock market, was the first time that it had been put on a statutory basis. It was an act of regulation, not deregulation."

Instead, he blames Gordon Brown, more than a decade later, for handing the supervision of individual banks over to the shiny new Financial Services Authority in its Canary Wharf headquarters, while leaving the Bank of England in charge of overseeing the stability of the financial system. "The individual banks are the system," Lawson says.

He concedes that some conflicts of interest may have emerged as investment banking evolved but says: "Nobody at the time realised that if you put everything together, there would be a problem."

Britain was not the only country to unleash the money-spinning potential of the bankers, of course, but Thatcher's ideological convictions of unleashing the power of the markets put London in the vanguard — and Brown did nothing to fetter the masters of the universe.

Twenty-five years on, Lawson is unrepentant, insisting that the benefits of the Big Bang far outweigh the disadvantages. But even he admits to a certain nostalgia for the old City: "The Stock Exchange was run as a kind of private club: no outsiders could come in and it was riddled with restrictive practices. It was a very charming club – I rather liked it – but there was no way in which it could be a strong player in that business in the modern world."

That would be the modern world of 1986 – the one whose geography Fuld would soon become acquainted with.


http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/business/2011/oct/09/big-bang-1986-city-deregulation-boom-bust?code=AQCMxJY5Vgf06gm9rQtBryl0NOtq5Q057zkx04Kib49j3_2g-rBZR_09EqVmTgo-ov2H3nGH8c-Dg35C1KGvCWqnp3LwnOrNaX_PP0k5J2uoO0PviUk6CTIYHzsIo3n7r20P8UYLjkl8Djf1Qr87h-jeRpTgdwELlOnVidP_jz6axEnyhrOSEWOypPNhDnXM8UJgGuwZ_J1qK4aI3fcKiort#_=_

link

La desregulación financiera en Gran Bretaña en la década de los 80´s

Traders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty ImagesTraders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images

Back in 1986, as the City broker L Messel was being acquired by a fast-expanding investment bank called Lehman Brothers, a young, ambitious financier was parachuted into London from Wall Street and put in charge of European expansion.

That man was Dick Fuld, who later achieved notoriety as the captain of the investment bank as it went down with all hands, but even in the mid 1980s he was demonstrating a deftness of touch.

At an early meeting, Messel executives told their new thrusting boss that if he was serious about achieving his aggressive growth plans, they really needed to supplement the London office with another in Frankfurt.

"No way," fired back the earnest American. "We're never going behind the iron curtain!"

Many of the Messel staff present have dined out on that one ever since, but it is only one of many anecdotes about the events leading up to what will forever be known in the City as the Big Bang.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of that radical Thatcherite reshaping of the City, a period in which the Americans arrived to snap up ancient City institutions for huge premiums, leading to the clubby atmosphere of the Square Mile being replaced with the rapacious, bonus-grabbing culture of the investment bank.

"Nobody could quite believe how much the Americans wanted to pay," recalls Adam Pollock, now head of corporate broking at Panmure Gordon, then a banker at Lazard. "It brought with it a renewed vigour and enthusiasm, with everybody working a lot harder. But that ended some traditions. It used to be de rigueur to have a big lunch."

The Big Bang was partly about modernisation – ensuring that the City used up-to-date technology such as computers. But it also dismantled the barriers between the separate, narrowly focused firms in the City, the stockbrokers, advisers and "jobbers" who created the markets in shares. Afterwards, all these services could exist under one roof and ultimately, some would argue, it led to the catastrophe of the credit crunch, whose effects the UK is still living through. "Big Bang was the start of investment banking in the UK," says Tony Dolphin, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

With the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking and deposit-taking, still in force in the US, Britain's laxer regime brought an influx of US firms, with their chinos, booze-free lunch-breaks and bumper bonuses, helping to bust open the old City cliques.

With them, argues City veteran Tony Greenham of the New Economics Foundation thinktank, came deep-seated conflicts of interest.

"On the plus side, the Americans brought a more meritocratic culture," he says. "But they also brought the idea that, instead of being client-based, it was a transaction-based business. You change from long-termism to short-termism, from looking after the long-term interests of your client to making the biggest buck out of today's deal."

When a company is considering a float or a merger, for example, its bankers will both advise it on the deal and sell the shares to investors, taking a cut on every side, meaning that their interest lies firmly in encouraging the mega-bucks transactions that came to characterise the champagne-popping culture of the City in the mid-to-late 80s, the late 90s and the early noughties.

"What happened in the old days was that the company would engage a financial adviser and they would shop around for a stockbroker," says Greenham. Now "the same company, even the same team, are advising investors and companies, and that's just a ridiculous conflict of interest".

And if the bank is involved in proprietary trading, the controversial practice Barack Obama is seeking to outlaw with his "Volcker law", it might also be risking its own money on the deal.

It is partly this tendency to omnipresence that prompted one commentator to call Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid".

Some say this observation has always been more than just a nice soundbite. Over the years, as investment banks developed increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, they became involved with one another in an ever-expanding web of bets and counter-bets, making them almost inextricably entwined. It was precisely that problem that sent shockwaves through the world's markets when the Fuld-led Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

Professor Karel Williams of Manchester's Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) argues that the Big Bang did not just unleash the forces of capitalism, it also created powerful vested interests that have shaped British politics ever since.

"Deregulation allowed the City to construct long lines of indebtedness, which are completely beyond technical regulation and, as we see with the eurozone crisis, beyond political management."

In After the Great Complacence, a book recently published by Oxford University Press, Williams and his colleagues argue that City firms treat regulations as "bricolage": instead of being constrained by regulations, they build them into their day-to-day activities.

"What have the markets spent all summer doing, except wittering on asking for political leadership, which is [code for: Angela] Merkel should listen to them and not the German electorate. But in a democracy, the prime responsibility of a political leader is to the electorate. Deregulation created a sectional interest in finance, which is beyond political subordination."

Many economists also argue that the growing dominance of finance, accelerated by the Big Bang, helped to bring about profound changes in the UK's economic model. George Osborne bemoans the imbalances in an economy far too focused on finance and debt, and with too little emphasis on Britain's former strengths in industry. But others argue that the Tories' deregulatory spree in the 80s could have done as much to bring about that out-of-kilter economic model as the forces of globalisation, which helped to undermine manufacturing.

Dolphin says: "People talk about comparative advantage as if it's God-given and just emerges, but we know that's not true. Big Bang was important in cementing Britain's advantage in finance.

"The fact that we had this growing financial industry did attract a lot of capital. Those capital flows, other things being equal, would have pushed sterling up, and therefore will have accelerated the decline of manufacturing."

Dolphin points to the fact that, as the power of finance grew, Britain consistently ran trade deficits, year after year: "It produced a casualness about the decline of manufacturing and the collapse of all competing sectors which is really quite jaw-dropping."

In the other camp is – predictably – Lord Lawson, who introduced the reforms as Margaret Thatcher's chancellor. He insists they were as much about strengthening the London Stock Exchange as slashing red tape; as much about regulation as deregulation.

"It was absolutely essential, because it was a way of bringing the stock market into the 20th century, and in particular making sure it was adequately capitalised," he says.

"The Financial Services Act, which did regulation of the stock market, was the first time that it had been put on a statutory basis. It was an act of regulation, not deregulation."

Instead, he blames Gordon Brown, more than a decade later, for handing the supervision of individual banks over to the shiny new Financial Services Authority in its Canary Wharf headquarters, while leaving the Bank of England in charge of overseeing the stability of the financial system. "The individual banks are the system," Lawson says.

He concedes that some conflicts of interest may have emerged as investment banking evolved but says: "Nobody at the time realised that if you put everything together, there would be a problem."

Britain was not the only country to unleash the money-spinning potential of the bankers, of course, but Thatcher's ideological convictions of unleashing the power of the markets put London in the vanguard — and Brown did nothing to fetter the masters of the universe.

Twenty-five years on, Lawson is unrepentant, insisting that the benefits of the Big Bang far outweigh the disadvantages. But even he admits to a certain nostalgia for the old City: "The Stock Exchange was run as a kind of private club: no outsiders could come in and it was riddled with restrictive practices. It was a very charming club – I rather liked it – but there was no way in which it could be a strong player in that business in the modern world."

That would be the modern world of 1986 – the one whose geography Fuld would soon become acquainted with.


http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/business/2011/oct/09/big-bang-1986-city-deregulation-boom-bust?code=AQCMxJY5Vgf06gm9rQtBryl0NOtq5Q057zkx04Kib49j3_2g-rBZR_09EqVmTgo-ov2H3nGH8c-Dg35C1KGvCWqnp3LwnOrNaX_PP0k5J2uoO0PviUk6CTIYHzsIo3n7r20P8UYLjkl8Djf1Qr87h-jeRpTgdwELlOnVidP_jz6axEnyhrOSEWOypPNhDnXM8UJgGuwZ_J1qK4aI3fcKiort#_=_

link

La desregulación financiera en Gran Bretaña en la década de los 80´s

Traders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty ImagesTraders on the London Stock Exchange watch the screens in the post-Big Bang 1980s. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images

Back in 1986, as the City broker L Messel was being acquired by a fast-expanding investment bank called Lehman Brothers, a young, ambitious financier was parachuted into London from Wall Street and put in charge of European expansion.

That man was Dick Fuld, who later achieved notoriety as the captain of the investment bank as it went down with all hands, but even in the mid 1980s he was demonstrating a deftness of touch.

At an early meeting, Messel executives told their new thrusting boss that if he was serious about achieving his aggressive growth plans, they really needed to supplement the London office with another in Frankfurt.

"No way," fired back the earnest American. "We're never going behind the iron curtain!"

Many of the Messel staff present have dined out on that one ever since, but it is only one of many anecdotes about the events leading up to what will forever be known in the City as the Big Bang.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of that radical Thatcherite reshaping of the City, a period in which the Americans arrived to snap up ancient City institutions for huge premiums, leading to the clubby atmosphere of the Square Mile being replaced with the rapacious, bonus-grabbing culture of the investment bank.

"Nobody could quite believe how much the Americans wanted to pay," recalls Adam Pollock, now head of corporate broking at Panmure Gordon, then a banker at Lazard. "It brought with it a renewed vigour and enthusiasm, with everybody working a lot harder. But that ended some traditions. It used to be de rigueur to have a big lunch."

The Big Bang was partly about modernisation – ensuring that the City used up-to-date technology such as computers. But it also dismantled the barriers between the separate, narrowly focused firms in the City, the stockbrokers, advisers and "jobbers" who created the markets in shares. Afterwards, all these services could exist under one roof and ultimately, some would argue, it led to the catastrophe of the credit crunch, whose effects the UK is still living through. "Big Bang was the start of investment banking in the UK," says Tony Dolphin, chief economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

With the Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment banking and deposit-taking, still in force in the US, Britain's laxer regime brought an influx of US firms, with their chinos, booze-free lunch-breaks and bumper bonuses, helping to bust open the old City cliques.

With them, argues City veteran Tony Greenham of the New Economics Foundation thinktank, came deep-seated conflicts of interest.

"On the plus side, the Americans brought a more meritocratic culture," he says. "But they also brought the idea that, instead of being client-based, it was a transaction-based business. You change from long-termism to short-termism, from looking after the long-term interests of your client to making the biggest buck out of today's deal."

When a company is considering a float or a merger, for example, its bankers will both advise it on the deal and sell the shares to investors, taking a cut on every side, meaning that their interest lies firmly in encouraging the mega-bucks transactions that came to characterise the champagne-popping culture of the City in the mid-to-late 80s, the late 90s and the early noughties.

"What happened in the old days was that the company would engage a financial adviser and they would shop around for a stockbroker," says Greenham. Now "the same company, even the same team, are advising investors and companies, and that's just a ridiculous conflict of interest".

And if the bank is involved in proprietary trading, the controversial practice Barack Obama is seeking to outlaw with his "Volcker law", it might also be risking its own money on the deal.

It is partly this tendency to omnipresence that prompted one commentator to call Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid".

Some say this observation has always been more than just a nice soundbite. Over the years, as investment banks developed increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, they became involved with one another in an ever-expanding web of bets and counter-bets, making them almost inextricably entwined. It was precisely that problem that sent shockwaves through the world's markets when the Fuld-led Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008.

Professor Karel Williams of Manchester's Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc) argues that the Big Bang did not just unleash the forces of capitalism, it also created powerful vested interests that have shaped British politics ever since.

"Deregulation allowed the City to construct long lines of indebtedness, which are completely beyond technical regulation and, as we see with the eurozone crisis, beyond political management."

In After the Great Complacence, a book recently published by Oxford University Press, Williams and his colleagues argue that City firms treat regulations as "bricolage": instead of being constrained by regulations, they build them into their day-to-day activities.

"What have the markets spent all summer doing, except wittering on asking for political leadership, which is [code for: Angela] Merkel should listen to them and not the German electorate. But in a democracy, the prime responsibility of a political leader is to the electorate. Deregulation created a sectional interest in finance, which is beyond political subordination."

Many economists also argue that the growing dominance of finance, accelerated by the Big Bang, helped to bring about profound changes in the UK's economic model. George Osborne bemoans the imbalances in an economy far too focused on finance and debt, and with too little emphasis on Britain's former strengths in industry. But others argue that the Tories' deregulatory spree in the 80s could have done as much to bring about that out-of-kilter economic model as the forces of globalisation, which helped to undermine manufacturing.

Dolphin says: "People talk about comparative advantage as if it's God-given and just emerges, but we know that's not true. Big Bang was important in cementing Britain's advantage in finance.

"The fact that we had this growing financial industry did attract a lot of capital. Those capital flows, other things being equal, would have pushed sterling up, and therefore will have accelerated the decline of manufacturing."

Dolphin points to the fact that, as the power of finance grew, Britain consistently ran trade deficits, year after year: "It produced a casualness about the decline of manufacturing and the collapse of all competing sectors which is really quite jaw-dropping."

In the other camp is – predictably – Lord Lawson, who introduced the reforms as Margaret Thatcher's chancellor. He insists they were as much about strengthening the London Stock Exchange as slashing red tape; as much about regulation as deregulation.

"It was absolutely essential, because it was a way of bringing the stock market into the 20th century, and in particular making sure it was adequately capitalised," he says.

"The Financial Services Act, which did regulation of the stock market, was the first time that it had been put on a statutory basis. It was an act of regulation, not deregulation."

Instead, he blames Gordon Brown, more than a decade later, for handing the supervision of individual banks over to the shiny new Financial Services Authority in its Canary Wharf headquarters, while leaving the Bank of England in charge of overseeing the stability of the financial system. "The individual banks are the system," Lawson says.

He concedes that some conflicts of interest may have emerged as investment banking evolved but says: "Nobody at the time realised that if you put everything together, there would be a problem."

Britain was not the only country to unleash the money-spinning potential of the bankers, of course, but Thatcher's ideological convictions of unleashing the power of the markets put London in the vanguard — and Brown did nothing to fetter the masters of the universe.

Twenty-five years on, Lawson is unrepentant, insisting that the benefits of the Big Bang far outweigh the disadvantages. But even he admits to a certain nostalgia for the old City: "The Stock Exchange was run as a kind of private club: no outsiders could come in and it was riddled with restrictive practices. It was a very charming club – I rather liked it – but there was no way in which it could be a strong player in that business in the modern world."

That would be the modern world of 1986 – the one whose geography Fuld would soon become acquainted with.


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viernes, 7 de octubre de 2011

tipo de cambio, tasas de interés, comercio internacional, y movimiento de capitales en la crisis actual

Enfoque de economía y finanzas

Comentaristas - Viernes, 07 de Octubre de 2011 (10:17 hrs)

altAlejandro Gómez Tamez

La subvaluación como herramienta para el crecimiento


Mientras que las autoridades mexicanas han desdeñado en múltiples ocasiones la relevancia del tipo de cambio como instrumento para lograr un mayor crecimiento económico, hay otras naciones que se encuentran enfrascadas en una abierta guerra de divisas. En ese tenor, ha sido frecuente escuchar como autoridades del Banco de México y Secretaría de Hacienda dicen una y otra vez que la paridad está en el nivel que debe estar porque ahí es donde la ubican las fuerzas de la oferta y la demanda. Es decir, si está a $11 pesos por dólar está bien, y si está a $14 pesos por dólar también está bien. No hay una posición oficial al respecto al nivel deseado de tipo de cambio, y sólo dejan que el mercado lo lleve a donde le plazca.

Desde luego que ahora en día con un dólar en niveles de $13.50 no existe un riesgo para la planta productiva nacional porque a ese nivel el peso se encuentra subvaluado en un 2 por ciento y tenemos una ligera ventaja competitiva en el costo de nuestros productos. El problema surge cuando hemos tenido un precio del dólar por debajo de los $11.00 pesos, ya que ese nivel de paridad denota una sobrevaluación del peso superior al 17 por ciento; y eso sin duda es una gran desventaja en preciopara todos los productos hechos en México. Como lo comentábamos en la anterior entrega, un peso sobrevaluado hace que los productos extranjeros sean más baratos; mientras que un peso subvaluado provoca que los productos extranjeros sean más caros para los mexicanos.

La sobrevaluación del peso beneficia a los productores extranjeros, mientras que la subvaluación de nuestra moneda beneficia a los productores nacionales. Es así de simple, pero a la autoridad no le interesa utilizar el tipo de cambio para impulsar la planta productiva nacional. Y no se trata de que entré al mercado a comprar o vender dólares (según sea el caso), sino de que a través de la política monetaria lleve la paridad cambiaria a un nivel que le de competitividad a los productos mexicanos y con eso se coadyuve al aumento de la producción y el crecimiento del empleo.

Y es que es algo muy simple, si el Banco de México baja las tasas de interés hará menos tractivo el que los miles de millones de dólares e capitales especulativos y golondrinos vengan a México, y con esa medida a entrar más dólares al país, se puede tener un tipo de cambio que compense los diferenciales de inflación entre México y sus socios comerciales. Pero no, este tipo de propuestas son desechadas de inmediato por el Banco de México, ya que para ellos es mejor tener un peso sobrevaluado que le ayude a controlar la inflación con importaciones baratas.

Así pues, llama la atención que nuestro país no hace nada en materia de tipo de cambio, y paralelamente haya países como Estados Unidos que están tomando medidas en contra de naciones como China, país que mantiene una moneda subvaluada hasta en un 40 por ciento. Sucede que en la actualidad en el Senado estadounidense ya se aprobó en comisiones un proyecto de ley que permitirá al gobierno de Estados Unidos aplicar sanciones comerciales e impuestos al país asiático por la cotización del yuan.

¿Y porque hace esto el gobierno estadounidense? Simple, porque consideran que con su cotización actual del yuan está por debajo del valor real y perjudica las exportaciones estadounidenses al volver los productos chinos artificialmente más baratos en todo el mundo. Así pues, en la medida en que China continúe subvaluando su moneda, el gobierno de nuestro vecino del norte contará con elementos para compensar la ventaja competitiva que gana China manipulando su moneda.

Así, la visión de los legisladores estadounidenses es en el sentido de que China subvalora su divisa en hasta un 25 a 40 por ciento, lo que da a los productos chinos una ventaja competitiva injusta en los mercados globales y resulta en millones de empleos perdidos.

Desde luego que el gobierno de China se opone a esta ley y ha amenazado con iniciar una guerra comercial, ya que considera que esta iniciativa de ley es sólo proteccionista y viola las normas de la Organización Mundial de Comercio, además de interferir en las relaciones comerciales y económicas bilaterales. Y los chinos han ido aún más lejos en sus declaraciones al señalar que los legisladores estadounidenses estaban acudiendo al "viejo hábito" de derivar la responsabilidad por sus problemas a China; y agregan que: "la contienda por la presidencia de Estados Unidos ha escalado y el tipo de cambio del yuan es nuevamente el objetivo".

En este artículo no haremos un juicio sobre si es correcta o útil la ley que desean aprobar en los Estados Unidos, sino que pretendemos ilustrar que el tipo de cambio es en esencia ahora en día un instrumento más de política económica de las naciones, y que si éste se utiliza correctamente puede ser sumamente efectivo para aumentar la producción y crear empleos (algo muy preciado a nivel global ahora en día).

En todo este contexto, también es importante rescatar los señalamientos realizados por organismos empresariales como la Cámara Nacional de la Industria de Transformación (Canacintra), institución que se ha pronunciado por que México base su crecimiento en el mercado interno para compensar el menor dinamismo que ya se presenta en el sector exportador.

La Canacintra señala que la economía global muestra cada vez más señales de desaceleración, y esta es una situación difícil que ha provocado pérdida de confianza entre empresarios e inversionistas y esto traerá consecuencias nada alentadoras en el crecimiento mundial. Y además de lo anterior agrega que bajo este escenario pareciera que no existe preocupación en el país por la problemática que enfrenta el aparato productivo y que el objetivo principal es el mantener a flote las políticas macroeconómicas para sostener a la economía nacional.

Y es que si el gobierno mexicano se preocupará por dar un fuerte impulso al sector exportador con un tipo de cambio competitivo, que a su vez haga las importaciones más caras; y esto se complementa con las políticas de fortalecimiento del mercado interno estaríamos en otra dinámica de desarrollo nacional. Para lo anterior es fundamental consolidar la competitividad a través de reformas estructurales clave como la laboral, energética y hacendaria.

Con estas tres reformas se dará un fuerte impulso a la productividad de la mano de obra, se podrá atraer una mayor cantidad de inversión extranjera directa, y tendremos un gobierno que genere incentivos fiscales correctos y gaste correctamente el dinero público, dando prioridad al gasto en infraestructura para el transporte y comercialización de productos nacionales para el mercado nacional y de exportación. Desde luego que también se debe impulsar la innovación tecnológica, la preparación empresarial, la seguridad pública y el respeto al estado de derecho, la educación y la salud pública.

Así, con esta doble estrategia al tener un tipo de cambio en un nivel que nos dé competitividad y evite que otras naciones que subvalúan su moneda nos inunden con sus productos, aunado al estímulo del mercado interno, tendremos bases para un crecimiento sólido en el mediano plazo. Esto implica la participación del Banco de México, Poder Ejecutivo y Poder Legislativo. Ojala que trabajen en este sentido pronto porque el año 2012 será sumamente complicado, y México no aguantaría ahora dos recesiones seguidas como en los ochentas.

Director General GAEAP*
alejandro@gaeap.com