O meu Amigo L. Machado fez o favor de me enviar o endereço de uma nota da iarnotícias, que não conheço, mas que, por vir de quem vem, deve merecer uma leitura, que atribui aos especuladores a responsabilidade por 60% do aumento do preço do crude. Não menos!
Ainda não tive tempo para a ler com atenção mas prometo escrever um post dentro em breve, comentando. Entretanto, transcrevo mais um dos artigos de Paul Krugman sobre o assunto, conhecido professor de economia e colunista do New York Times.
Até melhor entendimento sobre a questão, continuo a concordar inteiramente com a abordagem de Krugman.
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Quanto aos 6o% da iarnotícias, se fossem verdadeiros, teríamos o problema dos preços do crude resolvidos.
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Various notes on speculation
Various notes on speculation
First, Friedrich von Schiller was right.
About 20 years ago there was an argument about exchange rates and the trade balance that, to me, resembles some of what I’m hearing now. The issue then was whether the United States had to have a real depreciation — a fall in the relative price of its goods and services — to reduce its trade deficit. A significant number of well-trained economists said no — you see, the current account is, as a matter of accounting identities, equal to capital inflows; so if capital inflows fell, so would the trade deficit — no need for real exchange rate changes. John Williamson had the perfect phrase for this delusion: he called it “the doctrine of immaculate transfer.” The point was that ultimately, to reduce the trade deficit something had to provide incentives for higher exports and lower imports; the financial markets could only affect trade to the extent that they changed those incentives.
Right now I see well-trained economists getting caught up in an equivalent fallacy — the doctrine of immaculate hoarding? — because they’re getting hung up on the financial relationships between spot and futures. Whatever you say about the futures market, it can only drive up the spot price by causing physical hoarding of physical goods.
Second, some readers have asked me why my inventory argument didn’t apply to the housing bubble. The answer is that a house is a durable good, which unlike oil, which you have to burn, isn’t used up by the consumer; what we consume are housing services — in effect, consumers rent houses, from themselves if they happen to be homeowners.
To see the equivalent in housing of what the oil bubble types think they’re seeing in oil, we’d have to have seen a sharp rise in rental rates. It didn’t happen. Here’s the Case-Shiller 20-city index compared with the BLS measure of owner’s equivalent rent, both deflated by the CPI. The housing bubble had essentially no effect on rental rates.
No bubble in rents
Third, some people have asked what I said about the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, perhaps history’s greatest example of market manipulation.I first broached the manipulation issue in California screaming, written in December 2000. I didn’t really figure it out, however — I was still giving too much credence to the conventional wisdom about underinvestment — until The Price of Power, published in March 2001. The Real Wolf, published a month later, pulled it all together.
During that whole period, I was pretty much the only voice in a major news outlet even suggesting that market manipulation might be a central factor.
And here’s the thing: I applied pretty much the same reasoning to that crisis that I’m applying now. The only way market manipulators could have been driving up prices was by keeping physical supply off the market. And they were in fact doing just that: there was huge unused generating capacity, consistent with the idea of deliberate withholding. Some years later we would actually get hold of control room tapes in which Enron traders called plants and told them to shut down, and boasted about cutting off Grandma Millie’s power.
I’m still waiting for evidence that physical withholding is going on in the oil market.
About 20 years ago there was an argument about exchange rates and the trade balance that, to me, resembles some of what I’m hearing now. The issue then was whether the United States had to have a real depreciation — a fall in the relative price of its goods and services — to reduce its trade deficit. A significant number of well-trained economists said no — you see, the current account is, as a matter of accounting identities, equal to capital inflows; so if capital inflows fell, so would the trade deficit — no need for real exchange rate changes. John Williamson had the perfect phrase for this delusion: he called it “the doctrine of immaculate transfer.” The point was that ultimately, to reduce the trade deficit something had to provide incentives for higher exports and lower imports; the financial markets could only affect trade to the extent that they changed those incentives.
Right now I see well-trained economists getting caught up in an equivalent fallacy — the doctrine of immaculate hoarding? — because they’re getting hung up on the financial relationships between spot and futures. Whatever you say about the futures market, it can only drive up the spot price by causing physical hoarding of physical goods.
Second, some readers have asked me why my inventory argument didn’t apply to the housing bubble. The answer is that a house is a durable good, which unlike oil, which you have to burn, isn’t used up by the consumer; what we consume are housing services — in effect, consumers rent houses, from themselves if they happen to be homeowners.
To see the equivalent in housing of what the oil bubble types think they’re seeing in oil, we’d have to have seen a sharp rise in rental rates. It didn’t happen. Here’s the Case-Shiller 20-city index compared with the BLS measure of owner’s equivalent rent, both deflated by the CPI. The housing bubble had essentially no effect on rental rates.
No bubble in rents
Third, some people have asked what I said about the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, perhaps history’s greatest example of market manipulation.I first broached the manipulation issue in California screaming, written in December 2000. I didn’t really figure it out, however — I was still giving too much credence to the conventional wisdom about underinvestment — until The Price of Power, published in March 2001. The Real Wolf, published a month later, pulled it all together.
During that whole period, I was pretty much the only voice in a major news outlet even suggesting that market manipulation might be a central factor.
And here’s the thing: I applied pretty much the same reasoning to that crisis that I’m applying now. The only way market manipulators could have been driving up prices was by keeping physical supply off the market. And they were in fact doing just that: there was huge unused generating capacity, consistent with the idea of deliberate withholding. Some years later we would actually get hold of control room tapes in which Enron traders called plants and told them to shut down, and boasted about cutting off Grandma Millie’s power.
I’m still waiting for evidence that physical withholding is going on in the oil market.
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