Proştii sub clar de cifre

Citesc cu încântare un articol din FT, "dedicat" celor de S&P, care au băgat în căcat nouă ţări din zona euro. Parcă l-aş fi scris eu! Da, aşa e: după ce au presat statele europene să adopte programe de austeritate, inclusiv prin scăderea ratingului, acum cretinii justifică noua scădere prin faptul că, adoptând programe de austeritate ţările respective strangulează creşterea economică, fără de care nu se paote consolidare fiscală şi reducerea datoriilor.  "This time, though, S&P had wisdom to impart. Its serried ranks of economists, analysts and financial wizards were offering startling insights. Fiscal retrenchment, they intoned, would not alone repair the public finances of eurozone countries. The weak economies needed growth in order to revive flagging tax revenues. Wow! Who would have thought it? Perhaps S&P  is hunting a Nobel Prize. 

I suppose it would be unkind to recall at this point that the rating agencies have been in the vanguard of those telling politicians to pile austerity on austerity, and threatening an instant downgrade for anyone that dared even think about Keynes’s paradox of thrift. S&P, after all, has also offered us a second searing revelation: the threat to sovereign solvency is not simply a reflection of the deficits and debts of individual states. No.

There is also a problem of European governance. The process is cumbersome.The 17 eurozone states struggle to take quick, decisive action. No one who has watched Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest stumble from summit to Brussels summit for the best part of two years could possibly have guessed that the effort to reconcile domestic politics with eurozone economics had thrown up the odd snag...

These are the same organisations that stamped triple A on the billions upon billions of junk credit that brought us the financial crash. It must have been coincidental that the banks bundling up this debt were a fast-growing source of business for the agencies. What was it one S&P employee said in a private email when journalists asked awkward questions back in 2007? “We sound like the Nixon White House.” Given what happened next, the former US president might have considered that something of a slur."

Nici măcar cinism nu este, dacă e să mă întrebaţi pe mine. E imbecilitate pură şi simplă. Trebuie să admitem că agenţiile de rating nu pot stăpâni complexitatea, nu au cum modela corect realitatea. Pur şi simplu au ajuns un soi de mama Omida, le dau la oha! De exemplu, pentru România au doi ciumpalaci, care o vizitează nu mai mult de două zile, când e s-o viziteze, trec pe la BNR, pe la finanţe, mai discută la o bere cu unii şi alţii, şi pa! Că pierdem avionul!

Din păcate, acordul Basel 1, parcă, din 2004, a băgat agenţiile de rating în chiar inima sistemului financiar global. Adică au băgat lupul paznic la oi. Ce  e de făcut? Ce zice nenea ăsta. Să le dăm şi lor o notă care să le trimită la coşul de gunoi: "As for S&P, perhaps we should not be overly punitive. After all, all the other villains of the crash have got away scot-free. The second thing I keep hearing, though, is that we must still take the agencies seriously because they remain embedded in the global financial system. Shouldn’t we just downgrade them? Junk would do."