Crédito: Kevin P. Casey/Bloomberg News (Randy Fulton na “Cidade Tenda 4” em Seattle, 2007, para onde foi viver após perder a casa)
A Comissão de Inquérito à Crise Financeira nos EUA apresentou esta semana o seu relatório sobre o que foi o maior choque financeiro da história da humanidade. Após mais de 700 entrevistas aos principais actores da crise, os autores escrevem: “mesmo quando fomos nomeados, muito já tinha sido escrito e dito sobre a crise. Ainda assim (…) ficámos muitas vezes fascinados, surpreendidos e até chocados pelo que vimos, ouvimos e lê mos. A nossa foi uma viagem de revelação”, lê-se no relatório. Um documento que, garantem, pretende: “expor factos, identificar responsabilidades, desmascarar mitos, e ajudar-nos a perceber como é que a crise poderia ter sido evitada. Esta é uma tentativa de registar a história, não de a escrever, nem de permitir que seja reescrita”. Recapitulando:
Consequências cerca de dois anos depois:
1) As this report goes to print, there are more than 26 million Americans who are out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work
2) About four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure and another four and a half million have slipped into the foreclosure process or are seriously behind on their mortgage payments
3) Nearly 11 trillion in household wealth has vanished, with retirement accounts and life savings swept away
Causas:
1) The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble (…) To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us
2) We do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup's excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not.
3) Financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care to examine, or knew to be defective; firms depended on tens of billions of dollars of borrowing that had to be renewed each and every night, secured by subprime mortgage securities; and major firms and investors blindly relied on credit rating agencies as their arbiters of risk
4) More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.
5) Too many of these institutions [bancos e outras] acted recklessly, taking on too much risk, with too little capital, and with too much dependence on short-term funding
6) Financial institutions and credit rating agencies embraced mathematical models as reliable predictors of risks, replacing judgment in too many instances. Too often, risk management became risk justification
7) Compensation systems-designed in an environment of cheap money, intense competition, and light regulation-too often rewarded the quick deal, the short-term gain-without proper consideration of long-term consequences. Often, those systems encouraged the big bet-where the payoff on the upside could be huge and the downside limited.
8) as of 2007, the five major investment banks-Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley-were operating with extraordinarily thin capital. By one measure, their leverage ratios were as high as 40 to 1, meaning for every $40 in assets, there was only $1 in capital to cover losses. Less than a 3% drop in asset values could wipe out a firm. To make matters worse, much of their borrowing was short-term, in the overnight market
9) over the past 30-plus years, we permitted the growth of a shadow banking system-opaque and laden with shortterm debt-that rivaled the size of the traditional banking system. Key components of the market-for example, the multitrillion-dollar repo lending market, off-balance-sheet entities, and the use of over-the-counter derivatives-were hidden from view, without the protections we had constructed to prevent financial meltdowns. We had a 21st-century financial system with 19th-century safeguards
10) While there was some awareness of, or at least a debate about, the housing bubble, the record reflects that senior public officials did not recognize that a bursting of the bubble could threaten the entire financial system. Throughout the summer of 2007, both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson offered public assurances that the turmoil in the subprime mortgage markets would be contained.
11) The government's inconsistent handling of major financial institutions during the crisis-the decision to rescue Bear Stearns and then to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, followed by its decision not to save Lehman Brothers and then to save AIG-increased uncertainty and panic in the market
12) Unfortunately-as has been the case in past speculative booms and busts-we witnessed an erosion of standards of responsibility and ethics that exacerbated the financial crisis
13) Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities. As early as September 2004, Countrywide executives recognized that many of the loans they were originating could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Less than a year later, they noted that certain high-risk loans they were making could result not only in foreclosures but also in “financial and reputational catastrophe” for the firm. But they did not stop.
14) The enactment of legislation in 2000 to ban the regulation by both the federal and state governments of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives was a key turning point in the march toward the financial crisis.
15) The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval. Investors relied on them, often blindly. In some cases, they were obligated to use them, or regulatory capital standards were hinged on them. This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies.
16) We conclude a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency put the financial system on a collision course with crisis.
(Nota: todos os republicanos nomeados para o painel independente recusaram assinar o relatório por ser excessivamente de esquerda, como explica o Financial Times e comenta Simon Johnson)
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