The slump goes on: why?

Extraído de um magnífico artigo de Paul Krugman e Robin Wells publicado no passado dia 31 de Agosto em "The New York Review of Books":

"In [Richard] Koo’s analysis, simultaneous attempts by many private players to pay down their debts lead to a “fallacy of composition” that’s closely related to the famous (but too often overlooked) “paradox of thrift.” Each individual corporation or household cuts back on spending in an effort to reduce debt; but these spending cuts reduce everyone’s income and keep the economy persistently depressed.

These broader problems of debt and deleveraging arguably explain why the successful stabilization of the financial industry has done no more than pull the economy back from the brink, without producing a strong recovery. The economy is hamstrung—still crippled by a debt overhang. That is, the simultaneous efforts of so many people to pay down debt at the same time are keeping the economy depressed.

So what’s the answer? In the short run, the only way to avoid a deep slump when almost everyone in the private sector is trying to pay down debt simultaneously is for the government to move in the opposite direction—to become, in effect, the borrower of last resort, issuing debt and continuing to spend as the private sector pulls back. In the heat of a Minsky moment, budget deficits are not only good, they are necessary. Indeed, the surge in budget deficits around the world between 2007 and 2009 was arguably even more important than the financial rescue in keeping the real estate bust from triggering a full replay of the Great Depression.

This surge in budget deficits, by the way, wasn’t mainly the result of deliberate efforts to stimulate the economy. Instead, the main factors were a collapse in tax receipts as economies slumped, and secondarily a rise in automatic payments like unemployment insurance benefits. In the United States, the two-year federal deficit over 2009–2010 will be around $2.5 trillion; the Obama stimulus plan accounts for less than a quarter of the total."

O problema é convencer agora os credores internacionais de que mais défice e mais dívida no curto prazo melhorará a capacidade a médio/longo prazo de reembolsar as dívidas, sem ser através de recurso a mais e mais dívidas. O problema de facto não é o valor da dívida, mas a sua sustentabilidade, ou seja, a possibilidade de a reembolsar ou de a refinanciar em permanência. Sobretudo no último caso, joga mais a credibilidade dos governos e a solidez das perpectivas de crescimento a longo prazo do que qualquer outra coisa.