A tempestade perfeita

O renomado Olivier Blanchard, professor do MIT e, hoje, economista-chefe do FMI, revê as quatro condições que fizeram a crise de 2008 se agigantar e tragar o mundo de surpresa. O artigo não traz novidades mas, embora escrito em economês, é uma pérola de precisão.
Blanchard lista quatro elementos fundamentais à crise:

The trigger for the crisis was the decline in housing prices in the United States. But the initial losses from the subprime crisis were not huge in comparison with a measure such as U.S. stock market capitalization and were greatly overshadowed by subsequent world stock market declines (see chart). However, over the years, the stage was being set for a much larger crisis. Blanchard cited four preconditions: the underestimation of risk contained in newly issued assets; the opacity of the derived securities on the balance sheets of financial institutions; the interconnection of financial institutions, both within and across countries; and the high degree of leverage of the financial system as a whole.

Os números chocam:

In 2006, the value of the off-balance-sheet assets of Citigroup, $2.1 trillion—exceeded the value of the assets on the balance sheet, $1.8 trillion. The problem went far beyond banks. For example, at the end of 2006, “monoline insurers,’’ which insured a particular risk—such as default on municipal bonds—and operated outside the perimeter of regulation, had capital equal to $34 billion to back insurance claims against assets valued at more than $3 trillion.