dinsdag 10 maart 2009

het stuk van Bernanke dat er toe doet

Zoals de meesten wellicht wel weten heeft Ben Bernanke vandaag een speech gegeven voor de CFR. Boeiend was het zonder twijfel, maar zoals te verwachten was bleven de scherpe quotes grotendeels uit. Gelukkig, want de Fed-voorzitter heeft enorm veel invloed, één kleine uitschuiver kan koersen doen kelderen.

Voor wie toch alles wil weten: dit is de beste transcript (al is deze qua opmaak beter leesbaar). Maar eerlijk: bepaar u de moeite, ik zal het stuk geven waar alles instaat dat u moet weten:

RUBENSTEIN: You're a famous student of the Federal Reserve during the Great Depression era. How would you say the Federal Reserve today is going things differently than the Federal Reserve you studied during the Great Depression?

BERNANKE: You're right that I spent a great deal of my academic career studying not just the Great Depression but the whole general issue of how financial crises and financial distress affect the overall economy. And I must say that I always thought that I was way on the edge in terms of thinking how powerful these effects might be. There are many people in economics who say, "Well, you can let large financial firms fail. The market will take care of it," or "These effects are second order."

I hope that view is no longer seriously maintained -- (laughter) -- because I must say that having seen the power of financial crisis to address and to affect not just the U.S. economy but the global economy, I'm more persuaded than ever that these effects are very real and very powerful and that in trying to address the financial crisis, we are doing the best and most effective thing we can do to help the broader economy.

To respond to your question, I learned basically two lessons from my studies of the depression. The first is that monetary policy needs to be supportive, not contractionary. The Federal Reserve didn't understand what was going on. They were pursuing very orthodox policies constrained by the gold standard. But the effect of their policies was to create a powerful deflation of about 10 percent a year in the U.S. between 1930 and 1933, which was extremely damaging. Friedman and Schwartz were among the first to point this out in their classic 1963 book. So one lesson to be learned is that monetary policy needs to be supportive in a period of crisis like this.

And I'm sure everyone knows the Federal Reserve has taken this to heart. We've been very aggressive. We've cut rates now to -- essentially to zero. We did that very quickly. Other countries are now following our lead. And we are now augmenting those conventional monetary policies with new creative unconventional policies to try and have additional impact on financial conditions. So that was the first lesson.

The second lesson is that -- to reiterate what I said before, is that when the financial system breaks down, becomes highly unstable, then that has very severe adverse effects on the economy.

Once again, this is something that was not handled. The Federal Reserve did not intervene to stop the failure of about a third of all the banks in the United States. Globally, there were massive bank failures. I think perhaps the most critical, in May of 1931, the Creditanstalt, which was one of the largest banks in Europe, failed, which generated a wave of financial crisis around the world. Up till early 1931, arguably the 1929 downturn was just a ordinary -- severe but ordinary downturn. It was the financial crises and the collapse of banks and other institutions in late 1930 and early
1931 that made the Great Depression great.

And so we must have a commitment to stabilize our banking system, to prevent the failures of any large systemically critical firms, and, going forward, to find stronger rules, regulations, mechanisms to make sure we're not put in this situation where we are dealing with these "too big to fail" firms, which is obviously very detrimental to the market discipline and to the functioning of the economy in the longer term.
Wat kunnen we hieruit leren?
  1. Bernanke pleit voor meer regulering (niet nieuw, wel hier wel heel expliciet)
  2. Hij geeft een steek naar de regering Bush omdat ze Lehman Brothers hebben laten failliet gaan (toegegeven, vergezocht, maar volgens mij toch een verdoken verwijt)
  3. Hij waarschuwt zeer scherp dat grote banken niet kopje onder mogen gaan, om een herhaling van de jaren 30 te voorkomen. Zijn verwijzing naar 'Creditanstalt' is daarbij zeer to the point, dat is immers een gebeurtenis die vaak onderbelicht wordt bij een van de vele historische overzichten die men tegenwoordig in zowat alle kranten publiceert.
  4. Onder woorden brengen dat de interestvoet tot nul is teruggebracht geeft hij redelijk onduidelijk weer, terwijl het publiek waarvoor hij spreekt maar al te goed weet hoe ver de fed haar rentevoet heeft laten zakken. Expliciet toegeven dat je jezelf geen ruimte meer hebt gelaten voor beleid is natuurlijk heel vervelend...
  5. 'Too big to fail' komt algemeen over, een hint dat de overheid bepaalde ondernemingen (kuch, GM, kuch) niet kan laten failliet gaan?

Deze puntjes geven volgens mij zowat de essentie weer van de speech en aansluitende Q&A. Andere elementen waren uiteraard ook boeiend (o.a.: hij ziet econ. herstel beginnen in 2010), maar uiteindelijk komt het wat de crisis betreft allemaal op de hierboven vermelde quote neer. Bij deze hoeft u de lange speech niet meer volledig te lezen/beluisteren. Graag gedaan.

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