Resumo
A atuação do Federal Reserve System – Fed – durante a formação e estouro da bolha imobiliária mostra as dificuldades de um banco central em processos financeiros de grande magnitude. O Fed foi leniente com o desenvolvimento da bolha, por considerar que a alta do preço dos imóveis ajudava a reduzir os riscos de instabilidade financeira gerados pelas crises de 2000-2002. Quando a crise do mercado subprime se tornou aguda, em setembro de 2008, o Fed atuou agressivamente como emprestador de última instância, expandindo a base monetária para conter os riscos de inadimplência generalizada no mercado interbancário. Nos dois momentos, o Fed agiu com pragmatismo e discricionariedade, contrariando as teses dominantes do “Novo Consenso”, mas foi “prisioneiro” dessas teses e dos interesses do mercado financeiro: a tese de que a desregulamentação dos mercados favorece a sociedade inibiu iniciativas intervencionistas para restringir as inovações financeiras no mercado imobiliário; a tese de que o mandato da Autoridade Monetária deve ser a estabilidade de preços contribuiu para a leniência com os riscos crescentes nos mercados financeiros.
Abstract
The Fed’s actions during the development and burst of the US real estate bubble highlight a Central Bank’s dilemma when facing a financial process of great magnitude. During the bubble’s development and growth, the Fed was lenient since it considered that the increase in real estate prices helped reduce the risk of financial instability brought on by the financial crisis from 2000 to 2002. When the subprime crisis surfaced, the Fed started to act vigorously as a lender of last resort, with a vigorous expansion of the monetary basis in order to defend the system from the risk of a widespread default in the interbank market. In both cases the Fed was pragmatic and discretionary, and did not follow the mainstream thesis in economics analysis, the so called “New Monetary Consensus”. However, at the same time, the US Central Bank is a “prisoner” of these thesis and of the financial interests that help it sustain them: the thesis that the financial market’s deregulation benefits the entire society inhibited interventionist actions that would have restrained the new financial instruments in the housing market and the thesis that the main goal of the Monetary Authority should be price stability contributed to the leniency with the increasing risks in the financial markets.
Keywords: Federal Reserve. Monetary policy. Subprime crisis. Financial deregulation
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