"The Coming Bernanke Bust"

[Antunes]

Aqui fica um artigo de opinião muito interessante sobre o que esperar da política monetária da FED, com o seu novo governador:

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/forbes/2005/1226/138.html

[Antunes]

Aqui fica o artigo para quem não é membro:

"The incoming Fed chairman is going to suffer a housing slump and a recession. The place not to be: those now-hot foreign stocks.
Federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan leaves the job on Jan. 31 with godlike status. His adoring fans call him the Maestro. Even the normally staid British got swept up in the Greenspan worship and gave him an honorary knighthood. Succeeding such an acclaimed figure would be tough for any mere mortal. For the next chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, it will be especially hard, since Bernanke lacks many of Greenspan's advantages.

Greenspan is a master politician, while Bernanke has a lot to learn about surviving and thriving in the Washington jungle. Greenspan stayed on for so long because he skillfully avoided fights with Congress and the White House. His public statements are masterpieces of obfuscation; he can't be pinned down. His ad hoc approach to monetary policy is indefinable, allowing him to foster the notion he is clairvoyant. He sagely refuses to name an inflation target, thus giving himself wide leeway when statistics jump around.

Bernanke, though certainly smart, has served only three years as a Fed governor and six months as President Bush's chief economist. The academic politics he faced as chairman of Princeton's economics department pales before the challenges he will encounter as Fed boss. What evidence has emerged from his brief time on the national scene is revealing. In a jarring November 2002 speech he suggested that the Fed could drop money out of helicopters to stop deflation. That comment has now created news coverage that no central banker wants.

As clear as Greenspan is obscure, Bernanke wants to set an inflation target (perhaps 2%) and wrote a book on that subject. The problem with such a rigid formula is that it might conflict with the Fed's legal requirement to promote maximum employment and stable growth. Because Euroland's inflation is higher than the European Central Bank's 2% target, the bank can't cut interest rates to help its stagnant economies and, indeed, increased rates Dec. 1.

Bernanke's earlier public statements may box him in. His vociferous concerns over deflation and worries about a jobless recovery may force him into excessive hawkishness on inflation. In October he said that "a moderate cooling in the housing market" would not preclude economic growth in 2006. That statement will haunt him once housing crashes.

Greenspan, blessed with plain old good luck, reigned while inflation was unwinding, so he spent most of his time lowering rates. Easy money makes people happy. After he took over in August 1987, Greenspan enjoyed an expanding U.S. economy that had just two recessions, both mild. The strong economy helped him surmount his first test, the October 1987 market crash. Buoyed by growing earnings, stocks quickly recovered.

His strategy has been not to prick bubbles but to wait until they break, then clean up the mess. Greenspan did nothing to curb the stock speculation building in the late 1990s. Massive monetary ease before and after Sept. 11 kept speculation alive despite the bear market. Aided by non-Fed actions like exploding government spending, speculation simply shifted from stocks to real estate.

The cruel irony is that Greenspan deserves a lot of the blame for the impending housing debacle, yet Bernanke will take the heat. The bursting of the housing bubble that's now beginning will bring a painful U.S. recession. Like King Louis XV, Greenspan's attitude may well be: Après moi, le déluge.

Coming after earlier stock losses, house depreciation will leave consumers with no piggy bank with which to support their consumption habits. Their 25-year borrowing-and-spending binge will be replaced by a saving spree. The big losers will be foreign lands that depend on American consumers to buy their surplus goods and services.

This scenario is beginning to unfold just as U.S. investors are stampeding to foreign stock markets, chasing the rallies that overseas bourses have lately been relishing. Some U.S. advisers are recommending a 33% allocation to foreign stocks, up from 20% two months ago. At current rates U.S. investors in 2005 will put $100 billion into mutual funds offering foreign stocks. Such a sum is equal to the flow into U.S.-only funds, which last year got twice what international funds did.

But investors are probably catching foreign stock cabooses, not locomotives. The dollar, which I think will keep climbing (with help from Fed rate increases), is eroding overseas stock gains. When U.S. consumer-spending weakness is felt globally, export earnings and economic activity abroad will nosedive and murder foreign stocks. Best advice: Unload your foreign equities now on all those bullish latecomers. Start first with the export-led Asia tigers, especially China. They'll suffer the most."