No more small booms and bust's!

terça-feira, novembro 20, 2012 David Barradas 0 Comments


And yet our economic policy makers have often aimed for maximum stability, even for eradicating the business cycle. “No more boom and bust,” as voiced by the U.K. Labor leader Gordon Brown, was the policy pursued by Alan Greenspan in order to “smooth” things out, thus micromanaging us into the current chaos. Mr. Greenspan kept trying to iron out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system, which eventually led to monstrous hidden leverage and real-estate bubbles. On this front there is now at least a glimmer of hope, in the U.K. rather than the U.S., alas: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has advocated the idea that central banks should intervene only when an economy is truly sick and should otherwise defer action.
Promoting antifragility doesn’t mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.

From WSJ Learning to Love Volatility

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448.html?mg=reno64-wsj


PS The idea to regulate, to suppress volatility, to combat the business cycle and to bailout the losers is turning the world into a fragile system prone to a big fall. If we don’t allow for small failures one day we will get a big one. All of this is done in order to win the next election......I think democracy is not serving the people anymore.

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