buon dia sti inglesucci so ottimisti ...
Why the G20 must focus on sustaining demand
By Martin Wolf
Published: March 10 2009 20:30 | Last updated: March 10 2009 20:30
The summit of the Group of 20 leading advanced and emerging countries in London on April 2 2009 will fail. Its members are refusing to meet what Lawrence Summers, senior economic adviser to the US president Barack Obama, calls “the universal demand agenda”. Conventional wisdom is the enemy. Alas, it is winning.
In the US, the spirit of Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary to Herbert Hoover, remains alive. His advice – lamented Hoover – was: “liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate”. Yet this foolish view is not animating US policy. The danger is not of doing nothing, but rather of doing too little. If such timidity fails, opponents will argue: these policies have failed. This will exacerbate confusion, making attempts at decisive action later on more difficult and ineffective.
The right thing to do is more than enough. It will always be possible to withdraw stimulus a year or two hence. It will be far more difficult to make action effective if depression, both economic and social, takes hold.
What, then, is “more than enough”? To answer that, we must recognise where we are. First, the recession is global (see chart). Countries heavily dependent on exports as a source of demand, such as Germany, Japan and South Korea, have been even worse affected than the US or the UK. Second, the forces underlying this recession are powerful and enduring. They include: vast losses in wealth (estimated by a study for the Asian Development Bank at close to a year’s global output); huge overhangs of private debt in deficit countries; and a breakdown in the normal functioning of the financial system.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87b6cd16-0...nclick_check=1
oggi liquidato un lotto e portato il prezzo di carico poco sopra i prezzi attuali....
