Si tenéis que leer un libro sobre la crisis, que sea este: Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
El subtítulo ya dice lo que puedes esperar de él. Es compacto (apenas 200 páginas) y para todos los públicos (no presupone conocimientos previos de economía). Es el libro perfecto para tener una noción básica de lo que ha sucedido, de los precedentes, de las posibles soluciones y del futuro que nos espera mientras sigan echando leña al fuego. No es fácil encontrar un libro divulgativo tan comprensible y a la vez tan informativo. Tom Woods, que después de varios intentos ya está ducho en el arte de escribir para el ciudadano de a pie, emplea razonamientos sencillos, analogías y ejemplos claros, y datos ilustrativos en abundancia.
Lo recomiendo también a quienes focalizan la discusión en los síntomas y el color de las nubes sin atender a las causas subyacentes y considerar soluciones más definitivas y a largo plazo. El tono puede alienar al estatista desprevenido, pues Woods no esconde su liberalismo y aprovecha cada oportunidad para arremeter contra la intervención pública.
El libro incluye estos capítulos:
Ch. 1 The Elephant in the Living Room 1
Ch. 2 How Government Created the Housing Bubble 11
Ch. 3 The Great Wall Street Bailout 37
Ch. 4 How Government Causes the Boom-Bust Business Cycle 63
Ch. 5 Great Myths About the Great Depression 87
Ch. 6 Money 109
Ch. 7 What Now? 141
En el capítulo 2 dedica un apartado a cada uno de los seis "culpables" de la crisis:
Culprit 1: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Culprit 2: The Community Reinvestment Act and Affirmative action in lending
Culprit 3: The government's artificial stimulus to speculation
Culprit 4: The "pro-ownership" tax code
Culprit 5: The Federal Reserve and artificially cheap credit
Culprit 6: The "too Big to Fail" mentality
Un aspecto a destacar del libro de Woods es su alusión a múltiples precedentes históricos de esta crisis para ayudar a iluminar sus causas y posibles soluciones, tanto del inmediato pasado (la crisis puntocom o la recesión japonesa) como del más lejano (los pánicos de 1819, 1857 y 1873, la depresión de 1920-1921, y la Gran Depresión de 1929).
Como muestra, copio un fragmento en el que Woods explica cómo la Reserva Federal crea dinero "de la nada" (no respaldado con ahorro real, lo que llamamos expansión crediticia) y cómo se filtra en el sistema, beneficiando a unos en detrimento de otros. Esta simple y básica explicación se echa en falta en la mayoría de exposiciones de la teoría del ciclo austriaca, que la dan por sabida.
En esta página podéis obtener un capítulo gratis del libro.The Federal Reserve controls the American money supply and can influence interest rates either upward or downward; it can also function as a "lender of last resort". Although people use the phrase "printing money" as a kind of shorthand for what the Fed does, the Fed increases the money supply not by printing cash and putting it into circulation, but by what are called "open-market operations", which involve the purchase and sale of assets. Strictly speaking, the Fed can purchase any kind of asset it wants, but it normally purchases government bonds. If it wants to increase the money supply, it purchases, say, $1 billion in bonds from a bond dealer. It makes the purchase by writing a check on itself for $1 billion and handing it to a firm like Goldman Sachs in exchange for the bonds. It creates this $1 billion out of thin air.
Goldman Sachs then deposit this $1 billion check from the Fed in its bank. That bank doesn't put the $1 billion in a special vault with "Goldman's Money" on the door. Instead, the bank will lend out most of that $1 billion, since the law only require it to keep a small percentage its deposits on reserve. (Most of the bank's reserves, incidentally, are kept in its own account at the Fed, with a small amount in cash in its vaults to satisfy normal day-to-day requests for cash by the bank's depositors.) When the bank, in turn, lends out the money, borrowers spend it, and it winds up in accounts in other banks, which use most of that money in still another round of expansion, and so on. With a reserve requirement of ten percent, the initial $1 billion will have supported $9 billion in additional lending by the time this process is complete. All of this $10 billion has been created out of nothing: the initial $1 billion check from the Fed, and the additional $9 billion in loans that fractional-reserve banking makes possible, were produced out of thin air. Should the Fed wish to contract credit, it follows this procedure in reverse: it sells bonds to the banks, and the money it receives for them - and the further increase in the money supply that the fractional-reserve system then created on top of it - are withdrawn from the economy.
The Fed has other mechanisms available to control the money supply. One is to raise or lower the discount rate, which is the rate at which the Fed itself extends loans to banks. It can also change the banks' reserve requirements, which means it can tell the banks they need to keep five, ten, twenty, or whatever percent of its deposits on reserve rather than lent out. Obviously, the lower the reserve requirement, the more money the bank can lend and the greater the multiplication effect we saw above. (...)
Consider this question: in what order and in what way does the new money make its way through the economy? When the government inflates the money supply, the new money does not reach everyone simultaneously and proportionately. It enters the economy at discrete points. The earliest recipients of the new money include politically favored constituencies of one kind or another: banks, for example, or firms with government contracts - in other words, wherever government spends money. These privileged parties receive the new money before inflation has pushed prices upwards. In effect the economy doesn't yet know how much the money supply has increased, and prices have not yet adjusted accordingly. By the time the new money makes its way throughout practically all sectors. But while this process is taking place, the privileged firms that are lucky enough to get the new money early benefit from being able to make their purchases at the previously existing price level - thereby silently looting those from whom they buy. When the average person gets his hands on this new money - through higher wages, say, or lower borrowing costs - prices have already been rising for quite a while, and he's been paying those prices all this time on his existing income. The value of this money was diluted by the new money before it ever reached him.
Here is another way to think about it: Money in your possession is compensation for some good or service you have provided. When you buy a dozen apples, you do so with the proceeds from a good or service that you yourself provided in the past. So you are able to buy those apples because in the past you provided someone else with something he needed.
Now imagine a situation in which business firms or banks connected to the government receive a new influx of money courtesy of Fed credit expansion. That money comes out of thin air, not from the sale of some previous good or service. Thus when these favored firms spend this money, they are in effect taking goods out of the economy without proving anything themselves. Here we see very clearly how they benefit at the expense of the rest of society: they take from the stock of goods without giving anything in return. The money they pay for their goods didn't originate in a good or service that they themselves had previously provided; it came from nowhere. The analogous case under a system barter would be one in which, instead of trading my bread for your orange juice, I just take your orange juice.
