À atenção do Papa Bento XVI

A propósito desta notícia, recomenda-se que Sua Santidade promova, com carácter de urgência, a leitura serena e atenta por parte dos seus conselheiros económicos de "The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Studies in Ethics and Economics)", por Thomas Woods Jr.

É que o problema não é haver regulação e banco central a menos. É exactamente o contrário, como o mesmo Thomas Woods aqui explica, de forma sintética. O que segue é um excerto desse seu último texto (meus realces):

«(...) In the United States we have 115 agencies that regulate the financial sector, and the Securities and Exchange Commission never had a bigger budget or staff than under George W. Bush. There has been a threefold (inflation-adjusted) increase in funding for financial regulation since 1980. For reasons I’ve explained in my 2011 book Rollback, the repeal in 1999 of one provision of Glass-Steagall had zero to do with the financial crisis. Europe has never operated under Glass-Steagall-style restrictions and is none the worse for it. There is no repealed regulation that would have prevented the crisis consuming the world right now.

The banking industry is by far the least laissez-faire sector of the U.S. economy; it is a cartel arrangement overseen by the Federal Reserve and shot through with monopoly privilege, bailout protection, and moral hazard.

The present malaise, therefore, does not call for another layer of supervision, as the Pontifical Council appears to think. It calls for a serious moral and economic reevaluation of institutions, among them central banking and fiat money, that we have long taken for granted, and in support of which all manner of historical and theoretical fallacies have taken widespread root.

The last thing we need is a larger, more centralized version of what we have now. Our problem isn’t greedy people or bad personnel. Every society and every period of world history have had those. The problem is the system itself (...)»