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Sterrius escreveu:1,8% em 1 semestre? OUCH

cabeça de martelo escreveu: http://www.publico.es/450884/la-presion ... n-a-coruna

Miguel escreveu:Nova ordem mundial.

Portugal e os portugueses foram drogados com credito facil, e agora devem pagar. E como nao podem vao ser uma provincia anestesiada do lobby financeiro

Adeus Portugal.

Miguel escreveu:Exelente P44

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Miguel escreveu:Nova ordem mundial.

Portugal e os portugueses foram drogados com credito facil, e agora devem pagar. E como nao podem vao ser uma provincia anestesiada do lobby financeiro

Adeus Portugal.

Obama’s Economic Policy: Achievements, Problems and Prospects

Gerald Epstein

Fonte: http://regulation.revues.org/7459

Obviously, it is much too soon to judge President Obama’s macroeconomic and financial policies against the benchmark of the Progressive Economists’ program. He has only been in office for several months. In some ways, his administration has taken major steps away from the neo-liberal approach of the Bush and Reagan administrations and toward some highly significant policies, especially with respect to addressing climate change. But in the area of financial crisis management and financial reform, the Obama administration seems oddly stuck in the prior regime. Of course, circumstances will force Obama, Bernanke, Geithner and Lawrence Summers to accept more financial regulation than did Alan Greenspan or Bill Clinton. But, so far at least, their focus has been more on trying to preserve the prerogatives of finance in the face of strong political and economic forces demanding that they control these forces.

51Part of the explanation for this apparent divergence in policies between finance and almost all other economic issues, is that President Obama is probably worried that if he undermines the confidence of finance, the whole economy could come crashing down. As a result, the President decided early on to listen to “experienced” advisors, which effectively means advisors who have a lot of experience with and probably a bias toward finance. Equally if not more important, though, is that Obama finds himself stuck with a democratic coalition that, at least since Bill Clinton and almost certainly before, had a very strong Wall Street constituency (eg. Epstein, 1981; Ferguson and Rogers, 1986; Pollin, 2005). The political power of the finance lobby in the United States is significant. For example, a recent study described the twelve key steps of financial de-regulation in the US that significantly contributed to the crisis. According to the study, Sold-Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, during the last 10 years, these financial firms spent over 5 billion dollars in campaign contributions and to hire “lobbyists” to promote these and other policies of financial de-regulation (Essential Information, 2009). This is just the “tip of the iceberg” of the political power of finance as it also has strong representation in key economic institutions of economic decision making in the US, notably in the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve (Epstein, 1981; Ferguson and Rogers, 1986).

2 These include the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), DEMOS, the Economic Policy Institute (...)
52Unless a much stronger coalition of labor, industry, and community members organizes the political power to pull Obama away from the Wall Street constituency, it is likely that we will continue to see much of the same financial policy for the rest of his administration. Groups of economists such as those that met in New York in November, 2008, must mobilize to keep the pressure on the Obama administration. Fortunately, there are a number of important organizations of economists and “progressive” “Think Tanks” in the US that are pushing the Obama administration to adopt more progressive and effective policies, including those with respect to the financial sector.2 This infrastructure of progressive research institutes and think tanks has been built up over the last fifteen years or so (though some of the older institutions such as the EPI and IPS have been around much longer than that), and now can make a significant difference in the policy debates. For example, these organizations are very active in writing policy papers and promoting their ideas in the press and at meetings and conferences and can have a significant impact. When the time comes, some of these groups will undoubtedly revisit and update the PERI/SCEPA Progressive Economists Statement or similar broad programs, and try to promote them widely.

53Still, economists are a relatively small force compared to the raw political power that comes from mobilizing voters and lobbyists. Here, the “progressive forces” represented by progressive labor unions and others are still relatively weak in the US to be sure, the mobilization of forces carried out by the Obama campaign, and those further stirred up by the economic crisis could produce a significant strengthening of these groups. However, as is well known from history, severe economic crises can also strengthen the forces of the right, and only time will tell how these pressures will play out. What we can say is this: unless the Obama administration is able to move forward quickly and change their approach to finance by developing a financial strategy that is seen as fair, equitable and can also work to get finance flowing to the real economy, then more radical forces are likely to gain increased power. And, one should remember that in the US, we are coming out of a long period in which it is the radical forces of the right, rather than of the left, that have tended to prevail.