Regulación a bancos grandes

A estas alturas casi nadie piensa que los gobiernos tienen capacidad de "vigilar" a la industria bancaria para evitar riesgos indebidos. Es una industria inherentemente riesgosa y la estabilidad del sistema es un bien público. En general, la calidad del producto de la industria no es un bien público: por ejemplo, si un fabricante de pan o autos baja su calidad eso no afecta la percepción de calidad que tienen los consumidores sobre el pan o los autos de otros fabricantes. Pero en la banca si: el deterioro en la capacidad de pago de un proveedor afecta la calidad de todos los demás, y si es un proveedor grande la afecta mucho.
Por eso es poco creíble que en una crisis financiera el problema se al detrioro de proveedores pequeños o de algún actor marginal (los proverbiales especuladores que aparecen en los discursos de políticos cuando hay un cambio grande en el valor de los activos). Si hay crisis, lo más probable es que algún proveedor grande haya fallado, en especial si se trata de una crisis monetaria.
Por eso las propuestas de limitar el crecimiento de los bancos fueron populares durante el siglo pasado y han renacido a partir del pánico de septiembre de 2008. Becker flotó una idea al respecto que citamos en este espacio:
http://gabriel0317.blogspot.com/2009/03/becker-el-rescate-puede-haber-aumentado.html

Hart y Zingales han publicado un artículo al respecto que se enfoca a elevar el costo de ser un banco grande:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481779

La política bancaria de países como México y Canadá se basa en tener bancos grandes, en buena medida por la idea de que así se disminuye el riesgo de pánico. Las propuestas de Becker, Hart y Zingales se enfocan a cómo mantener un sistema bancario más competitivo pero considerando explícitamente el mayor riesgo de pánico que se genera.

Samuelson, Friedman y su visión en 1950

Cerca ya de los 100 años de edad, Paul Samuelson publicó este artículo en el que habla de las "idioteces" de Milton Friedman. Esta ya no le va a contestar, pero pueden ustedes revisar este reporte publicado en 1950 en el American Economic Review (esto se encuentra fácilmente en la página de Jstor). Ahí se buscaba presentar una visión común de varios economistas notables sobre las posibilidades de estabilizar la economía. Los temas de regulación y ciclos económicos se tratan en la última sección. Respecto a esta, Friedman expresó una nota de disensión (la única en el reporte). Su mensaje principal era que el problema de regular mercados es diferente del problema de estabilización de precios y empleo que enfrentan la política monetaria y fiscal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/opinion/24iht-edsamuelson.html?scp=1&sq=paul%20samuelson&st=cse

¿Qué provoca la recesión de 2007-2009?

En el paradigma del pánico bancario en realidad no hay una explicación de qué produce el pánico. Eso nos deja con la discusión de si el pánico es causado por la recesión o viceversa.

http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2009/10/panic-of-08-recession-cause-or-effect.html

Competencia entre iglesias: ¿adquisiciones hostiles?

Una vez que desaparece elmodelo de iglesias nacionales y la industria de servicios religiosos se mueve hacia la competencia, podemos esperar no solo movilidad de las personas entre confesiones, sino también eventos de "fusión y adquisición". Ante la crisis anglicana por la librealización (por ejemplo, se acepta a sacerdotes mujeres y matrimonio homosexual), la católica lanza un programa para atraer individuos y congregaciones inconformes hacia a su ámbito.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Roma/llama/anglicanismo/tradicional/elpepisoc/20091021elpepisoc_2/Tes

Maskin: el modelo correcto para estudiar los eventos de 2008

Eric Maskin opina que el modelo de pánico bancario de Diamond y Dybing es el correcto para iniciar el estudio del episodio de 2008. Como hemos comentado en otras entradas, el banco central de Estados Unidos siguió esa visión.

http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/economic-theory-and-financial-crisis-eric-maskin

Brooks: filosofía y política económica

NYT, October 6, 2009
Bentham vs. Hume
By DAVID BROOKS
I’d like to introduce you to two friends of mine, Mr. Bentham and Mr. Hume.
Mr. Bentham knows everything. He went to Stanford, then to the Kennedy school before getting a business degree. He’s got multivariate regressions coming out of his ears, and he sprinkles C.B.O. reports on his corn flakes for added fiber.
Mr. Hume is very smart, too, but he doesn’t seem to make much use of his intelligence. He worked on Wall Street for a little while, but he never could accurately predict how the market was going to move tomorrow or the day after that.
Mr. Bentham is a great lunch partner. If you ask him to recommend a bottle of wine, he’ll reel off the six best vintages on the wine list, in ranked preference. Mr. Hume can’t even tell you which entree to order because he doesn’t know what you like.
If you put Mr. Bentham in charge of the government, he’d proceed with confidence. If you told him to solve a complicated issue like the global-warming problem, he’d gather the smartest people in the country and he’d figure out how to expand wind, biomass, solar and geothermal sources to reduce CO2 emissions. He’d require utilities to contribute $1 billion a year to a Carbon Storage Research Consortium. He’d draw up regulations determining how much power plants would be allowed to pollute.
He’d know about battery efficiency and building retrofit programs, and he’d give you a long string of dazzling proposals. So then you’d ask him to solve the health care mess.
He’d say we have to cover the uninsured without bankrupting the country. He’d design a set of insurance policy regulations to make sure everybody gets uniform care. He’d get out his magnifying glass and help pay for expanded coverage by identifying waste in Medicare.
Then, he’d say, we’ve got to change the way government reimburses providers. He’d set up a $1 billion-a-year Innovation Center within the Department of Health and Human Services. He’d organize a superempowered Medicare commission to rewrite regulations and hold down costs. He’d set up comparative effectiveness research centers with teams of experts who would determine what treatments work best. He’d encourage doctors to merge their practices into efficient teams because he’d seen successful pilot programs along that line.
Mr. Hume, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be so impressive. If you asked him to take on global warming, he’d pile up reports on the problem. But if you walked into his office after a few days, you’d find papers strewn in great piles on the floor and him at his desk with his head in his hands.
“I don’t know the best way to generate clean energy,” he’d whine, “and I don’t know how technology will advance in the next 20 years. Why don’t we just raise the price on carbon and let everybody else figure out how to innovate our way toward a solution? Or at worst, why don’t we just set up a simple cap-and-trade system — with no special-interest favorites — and let entrepreneurs figure out how to bring down emissions?”
On health care, he’d be much the same. He’d spend a few days reading reports. Then one day you’d find him in the fetal position, weeping. He’d confess that he doesn’t know enough to reorganize a fifth of the economy. He can’t figure out which health care delivery system is the most efficient. “Why don’t we just set up insurance exchanges with, say, 12 different competing policies? We’ll let everybody choose a policy, and we’ll let people keep any money they save. That way they can set off a decentralized cascade of reform, instead of putting all the responsibility on us here.” And then Mr. Hume would beg you to leave him alone.
I’ve introduced you to my friends Mr. Bentham and Mr. Hume because they represent the choices we face on issue after issue. This country is about to have a big debate on the role of government. The polarizers on cable TV think it’s going to be a debate between socialism and free-market purism. But it’s really going to be a debate about how to promote innovation.
The people on Mr. Bentham’s side believe that government can get actively involved in organizing innovation. (I’ve taken his proposals from the Waxman-Markey energy bill and the Baucus health care bill.)
The people on Mr. Hume’s side believe government should actively tilt the playing field to promote social goods and set off decentralized networks of reform, but they don’t think government knows enough to intimately organize dynamic innovation.
So let’s have the debate. But before we do, let’s understand that Mr. Bentham is going to win. The lobbyists love Bentham’s intricacies and his stacks of spending proposals, which they need in order to advance their agendas. If you want to pass anything through Congress, Bentham’s your man.

Williamson, restricciones verticales y teorema de Coase

Este es un par de comentarios en torno al trabajo de Williamson, con motivo de haber sido designado ganador del premio Nobel de economía en 2009. El primer punto se refiere al cambio de visión hacia el efecto monopólico de las prácticas verticales; este es un punto con una gran relevancia práctica. El segundo punto es una expresión clásica del teorema de Coase.

David Henderson (WSJ):
Prior to Mr. Williamson's work, many legal scholars and economists had seen vertical integration as a way to acquire market power. This argument made little sense, as antitrust scholars Robert Bork and the late Ward Bowman pointed out, because it's hard to multiply market power using vertical integration. As the Nobel committee noted, Mr. Williamson's work led to less concern that vertical integration enhances market power and this has caused judges and antitrust officials to be less hostile to vertical integration.
Although the Nobel committee did not highlight Mr. Williamson's classic 1968 article, "Economies as an Antitrust Defense," I will. Mr. Williamson showed that horizontal mergers of companies in the same industry—even those that increase market power and even those where the increase in market power leads to a higher price—can create efficiency. The reason is that if mergers reduce costs, the reduction in costs can create more gains for the economy than the losses to consumers from the higher price.

Justin Lahart (WSJ):
He found that many economic decisions that standard theory said would be more efficiently left to the marketplace were actually better left within a firm. "Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent," the Nobel judges said. "But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets."
Mr. Williamson's work is driven by two key ideas. The first is that a contractual agreement can never be complete; there are always contingencies that haven't been accounted for. The other is that people act opportunistically within the gray area of contracts to make sure they benefit the most, and that can lead to problems.