Ofrece Washington 800 mil mdd para rescatar su “libre” mercado
■ El gobierno ha comprometido más de 5 billones de dólares en 22 programas de salvamento
■ El total para apuntalar la economía podría llegar a 7.5 billones, la mitad del PIB de EU
■ Pronósticos pesimistas para 2009; desplome del gasto del consumidor y precios inmobiliarios
David Brooks (Corresponsal)
Nueva York, 25 de noviembre. El gobierno de George W. Bush anunció hoy mecanismos de hasta 800 mil millones de dólares en nuevos préstamos y adquisiciones de deuda para buscar descongelar los mercados de crédito para los consumidores y rescatar el “libre mercado” de la peor crisis desde la gran depresión, en lo que ya es la intervención estatal en la economía más costosa de la historia de Estados Unidos.
Con esta iniciativa anunciada hoy, el gobierno estadunidense ya ha invertido y/o comprometido más de 5 billones de dólares en 22 programas para rescatar la economía, y según algunos cálculos el total podría llegar a 7.5 billones, el equivalente de la mitad del PIB de Estados Unidos en 2007 o casi el doble del costo estadunidense de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, reportó ABC News.
Mientras se registra una contracción económica en el último trimestre, con pronósticos aún más pesimistas para el próximo año, un continuo desplome en el gasto del consumidor como también en los precios del sector inmobiliario y más bancos al borde del abismo, el gobierno aparentemente está dispuesto a romper con todas las reglas del libre mercado y hacer lo necesario para subsidiar la economía.
La Reserva Federal y el Departamento de Tesoro presentaron dos nuevos programas para ampliar el crédito a fin de promover el gasto del consumidor y reducir las tasas de interés de las hipotecas, y con ello intentar resucitar dos pilares de la economía, el del consumidor y el sector inmobiliario.
Nuevo programa hipotecario
Bajo el nuevo programa, la Reserva Federal adquirirá hasta 100 mil millones en préstamos emitidas por las gigantescas hipotecarias Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac y también comprará hasta 500 mil millones en valores combinados respaldados por hipotecas de estas empresas. La idea, informó la Reserva Federal, es “reducir el costo e incrementar la disponibilidad del crédito para la compra de casas…”.
Por separado, la Reserva Federal también lanzó un mecanismo de 200 mil millones diseñado para apoyar el crédito al consumidor, incluyendo préstamos para estudiantes, compra de autos y tarjetas de crédito.
El secretario del Tesoro, Henry Paulson, declaró hoy que los 200 mil millones sólo es el arranque de este programa, afirmando que tardará un tiempo para que empiece a funcionar “y entonces podría ser ampliado e incrementado a lo largo del tiempo”. Paulson explicó que “con la economía en picada, es muy importante que el crédito esté disponible para los consumidores. Lo que estamos haciendo es apoyar el crédito al consumidor” con este mecanismo.
Estos nuevos programas fueron anunciados al empeorar aún más el panorama económico. Hoy se informó que en el tercer trimestre la economía se contrajo 0.5 por ciento, la reducción más severa en siete años, mientras que el gasto del consumidor se desplomó a su nivel más bajo en 28 años, según datos de informes gubernamentales, reportó la agencia Reuters.
A la vez, los precios de vivienda se desplomaron 16.6 por ciento en el tercer trimestre en comparación con el mismo periodo de hace un año, según uno de los índices más observados, una baja sin precedente desde que comenzó el sondeo especializado en 1988.
Por otra parte, la agencia federal que asegura depósitos bancarios, la Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation o FDIC, informó hoy que la lista que mantiene de bancos en apuros financieros se incrementó casi en 50 por ciento durante el tercer trimestre del año, de 117 bancos asegurados por el FDIC en el segundo trimestre a 171 ahora. La lista no revela los nombres de los bancos y varios que ni siquiera estaban en la lista han fracasado. Unos nueve bancos en la lista fracasaron durante el tercer trimestre. A la vez, el FDIC reportó que los bancos comerciales y los de ahorro sufrieron un desplome de 94 por ciento en sus ganancias durante el tercer trimestre
La debilidad del sector fue comprobada con un segundo rescate de Citigroup el pasado fin de semana, donde en esencia el gobierno respaldó más de 300 mil millones en activos problemáticos de la empresa, e invirtió otros 20 mil millones además de los 25 mil millones ya “inyectados” anteriormente por Washington.
Sólo ha pasado una semana desde que el secretario del Tesoro Paulson declaró que los rescates gubernamentales habían logrado estabilizar las principales empresas financieras del país, sólo para tener que anunciar otro rescate de miles de millones en el caso de Citigroup el pasado domingo.
Dos días después se anuncian los mecanismos para comprar hasta 800 mil millones más en valores “tóxicos” hipotecarios como otro tipo de deuda. Y todos los pronósticos indican que se necesitará aún más –el propio gobierno lo supone– antes de que esta crisis toque fondo.
Y ya es la intervención estatal más costosa de la historia. Según ABC News, si llega a más de 7.5 billones, sería más que los costos combinados del Plan Marshall, la compra de Luisiana, la guerra de Corea y la guerra de Vietnam y el presupuesto total desde sus inicios de NASA.
Obama, segundo acto
Por segundo día consecutivo, el presidente electo Barack Obama intervino en el debate nacional sobre la crisis económica, algo que rompe la tradición de no participar en el debate sobre políticas en la fase final del presidente saliente. Con la intención de tranquilizar a ciudadanos, inversionistas y políticos cada vez más alarmados por la crisis en momentos de lo que algunos consideran un “vacío político” por la transición antes de que asuma la presidencia el 20 de enero, Obama afirmó hoy que “es importante, dada la incertidumbre en los mercados y dada la muy legítima ansiedad que siente el pueblo estadunidense, que se sepa que su nuevo presidente tiene un plan y actuara rápida y audazmente”.
Hoy, al presentar a otros dos integrantes de su equipo económico –Peter Orszag y Rob Nabors como los principales encargados de la Oficina de Administración y Presupuesto de la Casa Blanca (ambos ex altos funcionarios del gobierno de Bill Clinton)–, Obama afirmó que ellos estarán encargados de cortar miles de millones de dólares de programas federales para financiar las iniciativas a fin de manejar la crisis financiera y estimular la economía.
Obama informó que su equipo económico está elaborando un ambicioso paquete de estímulo económico y aunque no ofreció detalles específicos, líderes legislativos y fuentes cercanas al proceso indican que podría ser tan gigantesco como de entre 500 a 700 mil millones de dólares, si no es que más.
¿Y las otras crisis mundiales? ¿Y el resto del mundo? Según cálculos de un nuevo informe del Instituto de Estudios de Políticas (Institute for Policy Studies, IPS) en Washington, los aproximadamente 4.1 billones de dólares que Estados Unidos y los gobiernos europeos ya han dedicado al rescate sólo de sus empresas financieras (antes de los anuncios de hoy) son 40 veces más que los fondos que esos mismos gobiernos están destinando para combatir el cambio climático y la pobreza en el mundo en desarrollo.
De hecho, según IPS, esos 4 mil millones son 45 veces más que el total de fondos de Estados Unidos y Europa destinados a la asistencia para el desarrollo el año pasado. Sólo los 152 mil millones gastados para rescatar a una sola empresa, la aseguradora AIG, es mucho mayor que los 90.7 mil millones que los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y Europa destinaron en asistencia a todos los países en desarrollo en 2007.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve and the Treasury announced $800 billion in new lending programs on Tuesday, sending a message that they would print as much money as needed to revive the nation’s crippled banking system.
The gargantuan efforts — one to finance loans for consumers, and a bigger one to push down home mortgage rates — were the latest but probably not the last of the federal government’s initiatives to absorb the shocks that began with losses on subprime mortgages and have spread to every corner of the economy.
In the last year, the government has assumed about $7.8 trillion in direct and indirect financial obligations. That is equal to about half the size of the nation’s entire economy and far eclipses the $700 billion that Congress authorized for the Treasury’s financial rescue plan.
Those obligations include about $1.4 trillion that has already been committed to loans, capital infusions to banks and the rescues of firms like Bear Stearns and the American International Group, the troubled insurance conglomerate. But they also include additional trillions in government guarantees on mortgages, bank deposits, commercial loans and money market funds.
The mortgage markets were electrified by the Fed’s announcement that it would swoop in and buy up to $600 billion in debt tied to mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages fell almost a full percentage point, to 5.5 percent, from 6.3 percent.
But analysts said the program would do little to reduce the tidal wave of foreclosures. That is because most of the foreclosures are on subprime mortgages and other high-risk loans that were not bought or guaranteed by government-sponsored finance companies like Fannie Mae.
Stock investors reacted coolly to the announcements. The major stock indexes initially fell. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index later edged up, closing at 857.39, up 0.66 percent. The Nasdaq closed down 0.5 percent, at 1,464.73.
The long-term risks are enormous but difficult to estimate. They begin with the danger of a new surge of inflation, at least after the economy comes out of its current downturn. Beyond that, taxpayers will have to pick up the losses from loans that default or guarantees that have to be made good.
But the most troublesome unknowns are how the maze of protections for investors and consumers will change economic and political behavior in the future.
“The Federal Reserve has a lot of levers of influence with consequences for individual industries,” said Vincent R. Reinhart, a former Fed official and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Now that it has used those levers, don’t you think Congress will want it to start using them again? The Fed could become the go-to place for bailouts.”
Administration and central bank officials contend that the risk of doing nothing is a full-blown depression in which unemployment climbs above 10 percent and the country needs years to recover. Many private economists agree.
“They are doing whatever it takes,” said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor who is now vice chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic forecasting firm. “The problem is, the more you go in this direction, the harder it is to turn around and the harder your exit strategy is.”
Most economists agree that the United States is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and that it has already fallen into a severe recession that is likely to be one of the deepest in decades.
“What they are doing is trying to limit the damage to something consistent with a severe postwar recession, but not something worse than that,” Mr. Meyer said.
Indeed, the government reported on Tuesday that the economy contracted by 0.5 percent in the third quarter, slightly worse than previously estimated. But private forecasters predict that economic activity will fall by 4 to 5 percent in the fourth quarter and continue to contract for much of next year.
In the first of two new actions announced on Tuesday, the Treasury and the Fed said they would create a $200 billion program to lend money against securities backed by car loans, student loans, credit card debt and even small-business loans.
The Treasury would contribute $20 billion to the so-called Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility and assume responsibility for any losses up to $20 billion. The Federal Reserve would lend the new entity as much as $180 billion.
The new facility would then lend money at low rates to companies that post collateral based on securities backed by consumer debt or business loans. The new program would be allowed to accept only securities with Triple-A ratings, the highest possible, from at least two rating agencies.
The Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., made it clear that the new lending facility was just a “starting point” and could be expanded to many other kinds of debt, like commercial mortgage-backed securities. “It’s going to take awhile to get this program up and going, and then it could be expanded and increased over time,” he said at a news conference.
Separately, the central bank announced that it would try to force down home mortgage rates by buying up $600 billion in debt tied to home loans guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government-controlled financing companies.
The actions on Tuesday represented two milestones in the government’s expansion into private markets.
It was the first time that the Fed and the Treasury have stepped in to finance consumer debt. The $200 billion program comes close to being a government bank.
But the new programs also represented a new level of commitment by the Federal Reserve. Instead of trying to strengthen the economy by reducing short-term rates, which is the usual policy tool, the Fed is now pumping vast amounts of money directly into specific markets for mortgages — and anything else it believes needs help.
Over the last year, the Fed and the Treasury have bailed out major Wall Street firms, rescued the world’s biggest insurer, taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars in bank transactions.
As big as the two new lending programs are, Mr. Meyer cautioned that they were only going to reduce the pain that lies ahead, not eliminate it. Unemployment, at 6.5 percent in October, is still likely to climb to 7.5 or even 8 percent next year, he predicted. But it may not shoot up to 9 or 10 percent, a level that economists often consider the unofficial dividing line between a recession and a depression.
The new actions are unlikely to be the last. Until the economy begins to turn around, Fed officials have made it clear they are prepared to print as much money as needed to jump-start lending, consumer spending, home buying and investment.
“They are using every tool at their disposal, and they will move from credit market to credit market to reduce disruptions,” said Richard Berner, chief economist at Morgan Stanley.
The Federal Reserve has now moved to a radical new phase of its effort to shore up the economy. Until now, it has carefully distinguished between two goals — reducing the panic and turmoil in financial markets, and propping up the economy itself, which has been battered as the supply of credit has dried up.
To tackle the first goal, the Fed expanded its lending programs to banks and Wall Street firms, and organized the rescue of failing firms like Bear Stearns.
To bolster the general economy, it relied on its traditional tool: reducing the overnight Federal funds rate, the interest rate that banks charge for lending their reserves to one another. Normally, a lower Federal funds rates leads to lower long-term rates, like those for mortgages.
But the central bank has already lowered the rate to 1 percent, and it cannot reduce it below zero. Instead, policy makers are buying up other kinds of debt securities, which has the effect of driving down the rates in those parts of the market.
The move amounts to what economists refer to as “quantitative easing,” which means having the Fed pump staggering amounts of money into the economy by buying up a wide range of debt instruments.
In a conference call with reporters, Fed officials insisted their goal was not to pursue a policy of quantitative easing, but simply to unfreeze the mortgage market.
But for practical purposes, the actions lead to similar results.
Fed offers credit markets another $800bn bailout
The Federal Reserve is injecting $800bn (£518bn) more into the troubled credit markets in its latest high-stakes attempt to end the drought of mortgages, car finance deals and student loans that has pushed the United States into recession.
With three new plans announced yesterday, the Fed is massively increasing the scale of its intervention in the markets and inflating the size of its balance sheet. "Millions of Americans cannot find affordable financing for their basic credit needs," said the Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson. "And credit card rates are climbing, making it more expensive for families to finance everyday purchases. This lack of affordable consumer credit undermines consumer spending and as a result weakens our economy."
Lenders have turned off the taps to consumers because of the collapse of the secondary market, where they used to sell on the loans and raise the cash needed for yet more lending. Loans are packaged together and sold as asset-backed securities (ABS) in a process called securitisation, but ABS buyers are demanding vastly inflated interest rates because of their concerns about the underlying economy, so issuance declined precipitously in September and came to a halt in October.
By offering $200bn in loans to ABS holders, the Fed believes it will stimulate demand and that securitisation will therefore restart. That, in turn, will encourage lenders to thaw their dealings with consumers.
"The ABS markets historically have funded a substantial share of consumer credit and small business loans. Continued disruption of these markets could significantly limit the availability of credit to households and small businesses and thereby contribute to further weakening of US economic activity," it explained.
To insulate the Fed from losses on its $200bn in ABS loans, the Treasury is handing the central bank $20bn from the $700bn Wall Street bailout fund agreed by Congress last month. Traders hailed the scheme as an ingenious way of using the Fed to "leverage" the bailout money, magnifying the effect of taxpayers' investment by 10 times. However, an early surge by stock markets subsided later in the day. The Dow Jones index closed up 0.4 per cent at 8,479.5.
Having already spent $270bn taking direct stakes in US banks and loaning $40bn to the nationalised insurance group AIG, there is just $20bn left in the first half of the bailout fund, and Mr Paulson may ask Congress to release the second $350bn tranche before he leaves office.
The $200bn ABS plan was the most unusual of the three major Fed programmes announced yesterday. It also said it would buy $500bn of mortgage-backed securities to support the mainstream mortgage market, and $100bn in debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage finance businesses. Both plans are aimed at propping up the secondary mortgage market, making home loans more readily available and reducing mortgage rates, which have remained stubbornly high despite repeated cuts in official interest rates.
The credit markets have been wrecked by the collapse of US house prices, which began a negative feedback loop that has still not ended. A glut of homes repossessed from sub-prime borrowers who could not afford the payments is still putting downward pressure on prices, it was clear yesterday. The latest Case-Shiller house price index showed values in 20 metropolitan areas down a record 16.6 per cent in the third quarter of the year and they are now back where they were in the early months of 2004.
Falling house prices have trashed the value of mortgage-backed securities and related assets on bank balance sheets, forcing banks to pull back on their lending activities – making things worse. "The turmoil in the financial markets is placing further downward pressure on a housing market already weakened by its own fundamentals," said David Blitzer, the chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's, which publishes the Case-Shiller figures.
The wider impact of the credit crisis was on display in other economic figures yesterday. The third-quarter GDP figure for the US was revised down to minus 0.5 per cent; the government had first calculated only a 0.3 per cent decline. Economists are bracing themselves for anything between -3 per cent and -5 per cent in the fourth quarter, representing the sharpest contraction in economic activity in at least 25 years.
With this week marking the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, much will depend on consumer confidence, which continues to be depressed, a new survey shows. The Conference Board confidence index, however, rebounded slightly from an all-time low of 38 in October to 44.9.
The Fed's new programmes yesterday came only a week after Mr Paulson said that there would most likely be no additional use of the Wall Street bailout fund until Barack Obama's administration takes over on 20 January, which sent markets diving. Traders most fear a prolonged power vacuum, but the Treasury said yesterday that Mr Obama's transition team had been kept involved in the latest plans. The $800bn intervention will be run mainly out of the Federal Reserve in New York, whose president, Tim Geithner, was named on Monday as Mr Obama's Treasury Secretary. Meanwhile, the President-elect yesterday named Peter Orszag to be his budget director, with a brief to slim down some government spending.
La Comisión Europea aprueba un plan de rescate por 260 mil mdd
El monto del paquete representa 1.5 por ciento del PIB de la Unión Europea; insta a las 27 naciones del bloque a reducir impuestos, y destina 6.4 mil mdd al sector automotriz.
Reuters
Publicado: 26/11/2008 08:50
Bruselas. La Comisión Europea aprobó este miércoles un paquete de estímulo fiscal por 200 mil millones de euros (260 mil millones de dólares), destinado a potenciar la economía de las 27 naciones del bloque.
La propuesta, liderada por el presidente de la Comisión Europea, José Manuel Barroso, recibió el apoyo tras un encuentro a puertas cerradas de la comisión y representa 1.5 por ciento del Producto Interno Bruto de la UE.
La suma del paquete fue mayor que la prevista inyección financiera de 130 mil millones de euros.
El paquete se financiará utilizando 1.2 puntos porcentuales del gasto de presupuestos nacionales y 0.3 puntos porcentuales de fondos de la UE, dijo una fuente que pidió el anonimato. El plan insta a los estados a recortar el impuesto al valor agregado en algunos servicios laborales.
El plan incluye un aporte de cinco mil millones de euros de financiación adicional para el sector europeo del automóvil y unos pagos de unos fondos estructurales acelerados a los países miembros de hasta seis mil 300 millones de euros.
El plan será sometido a la cumbre de la UE en diciembre para su aprobación por parte de los líderes europeos.
La medida intenta zanjar las diferencias entre los países de la UE en torno a cómo reaccionar a la peor crisis financiera global desde la Gran Depresión.
Barroso hizo hincapié en que cada gobierno de la UE debería considerar que el esquema les da distintas opciones, en vez de imponer determinadas políticas por la fuerza.
"Nuestro planteamiento es ofrecer las herramientas a los estados miembros. Las medidas que los estados miembros introducen no deben ser idénticas, pero deben ser coordinadas", afirmó Barroso en una conferencia de prensa.
"Es la mejor forma de restaurar la confianza de los ciudadanos y contrarrestar el temor a una larga y profunda recesión", agregó.
Francia, Gran Bretaña y otros estados miembros de la UE ya lanzaron esfuerzos para reactivar sus economías.
"Las medidas anunciadas por los estados miembros, por supuesto son parte de este esfuerzo", indicó Barroso.
El funcionario señaló que no estaba claro si el paquete sería suficiente. Los economistas eran escépticos sobre cómo sería gestionado el plan.
"Las medidas reales que los gobiernos tomarán son una pregunta abierta, será diferente de país a país", aseguró Christoph Weil de Commerzbank.
El paquete pide a los estados que reduzcan el impuesto al valor agregado para los servicios intensivos en mano de obra e incluye planes por al menos cinco mil millones de euros en financiamiento extra para alentar a la industria automotriz a desarrollar autos más amigables con el medio ambiente.
El programa generó preocupación por la posibilidad de que impulse un alza en los déficit fiscales de los países de la UE, que según las normas del bloque no pueden superar el tres por ciento del Producto Interno Bruto.
Pero el comisario europeo de asuntos económicos, Joaquín Almunia, dijo que se permitirían transgresiones temporales a esos límites, siempre y cuando los déficit no se disparen demasiado por encima del umbral de tres por ciento.
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