Gestão & Estratégia

Análise do artigo: “Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis” publicado pela Knowledge Wharton no último dia 13 de maio.

Continuando a nossa série de artigos sobre a crise mundial, o recém publicado artigo da Wharton Business School nos traz uma visão interessante sobre como os modelos econômicos matemáticos adotados pelo sistema financeiro são falhos e incompletos.

Os autores destacam que os principais modelos preditivos adotados têm como premissa base que os agentes econômicos agem racionalmente, quando na verdade diversos outros fatores psico-sociais tem influência direta sobre as decisões financeiras tanto de indivíduos quanto de grandes organizações.

O início do artigo é bastante interessante, com uma argumentação provocativa questionando os economistas como um todo e sua crença de que apenas a chamada “economia real” seria a fonte das crises e não o sistema financeiro e seus produtos de alto risco.

A leitura deste artigo certamente será muito proveitosa, vale destacar que a Wharton é uma das escolas de administração mais respeitadas em todo o globo e que suas publicações são a fonte de informação de grandes tomadores de decisões mundo a fora. Boa Leitura:

“There is a long list of professions that failed to see the financial crisis brewing. Wall Street bankers and deal-makers top it, but banking regulators are on it as well, along with the Federal Reserve. Politicians and journalists have shared the blame, as have mortgage lenders and even real estate agents.

But what about economists? Of all the experts, weren’t they the best equipped to see around the corners and warn of impending disaster?

Indeed, a sense that they missed the call has led to soul searching among many economists. While some did warn that home prices were forming a bubble, others confess to a widespread failure to foresee the damage the bubble would cause when it burst. Some economists are harsher, arguing that a free-market bias in the profession, coupled with outmoded and simplistic analytical tools, blinded many of their colleagues to the danger.

Lessons Not Learned

Prior to the latest crisis, there were two well-known occasions when exotic bets, leverage and inadequate modeling combined to create crises, the paper’s authors say, arguing that economists should therefore have known what could happen. The first case, the stock market crash of 1987, began with a small drop in prices which triggered an avalanche of sell orders in computerized trading programs, causing a further price decline that triggered more automatic sales.

The second case was the 1998 collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund. It had built up a huge position in government bonds from the U.S. and other countries, and was forced into a wave of selling after a Russian government bond default knocked bond prices down.

“When there’s a default in one kind of bond, it causes reassessment of all the risks,” says Wharton economics professor Richard Marston. “I don’t think we have really fully learned from the LTCM crisis, or from other crises, the extent to which things are illiquid.” These crises have shown that market participants can rely too heavily on the belief they can quickly unload securities that decline in price, He says. In fact, the downward spiral can be so rapid that it leaves investors with losses far larger than they had thought possible.

In the current crisis, he says, economists “should get blamed for the overall unwillingness to take into account liquidity risk. And I think it’s going to force us to reassess that.”

Academics also are beginning to reassess business-school curricula. Wharton management professor Stephen J. Kobrin recently moderated a faculty panel that talked about a wide range of possible responses to the crisis. Among the issues discussed, he says, was whether Wharton’s curriculum should include more on regulation and risk management, as well as executive education programs for regulators and other government officials.

Kobrin said he believes many academics share “an ideological fixation with free markets and lack of regulation” that should be reexamined. “Obviously, people missed the boat on a lot of the risks that a lot of financial instruments entailed,” he says. “We need to think about what changes are needed in the curriculum.”

Fonte: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2234

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