The Congress paper

The USA Congress BEHAVIOR regarding the help program to the finance market involves a dispute between powers that, in the future, is going to have consequence in the execution of the monetary politics and in the regulation improvement of the financial sector.

At the end of 2007, for example, the Senate asked to the "Congressional Budget Office" a study on executive's fiscal politics (the taxes devolution). In this report, Cbo lifts the hypothesis that subprimes problem" could be more profound that it seemed. It suggests your facing with some political even already used in the USA (in 1933, with the "Home Owners Loan Corporation" -HOLC-, and, in the, with the "Resolution Trust Corporation" -RTC): the purchase of the doubtful mortgages for a government's agency, sold after if it reestablished its precificação. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the Congress, by Cbo's Work, perhaps had a problem gravity clearer idea than Fed itself, under whose political laxista the things happened.

Fed's palliative measures, who just gave liqüidez (that if empoçava), produced, in the final, a "cheers itself who can". After the intervention in Lehman, we practically extinguished a species: The one of the investment banks.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley put, wisely, the sauce beards and sheltered itself under the regulation protection of the commercial banks. Ahead of this, the Executive and Fed presented a program (without a doubt reasonable and already suggested by Cbo) and they tried to approve him with peel and everything in the Congress. A program of US$ 700 billion (40% of the Brazilian GDP of 2008), with serious distributive consequences for the American taxpayer, should be approved in a week, once the financial world fell to the pieces and the Congress would enter September recess on the 26th...

Almost there was no discussion on the need to program, necessary condition, but not enough, to reestablish the finance market operation. He will be, without a doubt, expensive, but even would be expensive for the taxpayers (in terms of GDP and job loss) do him.

Put in a trap, the Congress gave signals that it is not willing to continue to be only the passive supporting in the mistakes correction committed by some few people (the members of Fed, supposedly bearers of the "monetary science"), to the which ones he, Congress, delivered the task of stabilizing the coin value, subtracting her of the Executive elect.
That points to an institutions future reform that control the monetary system.

Antonio Delfim Netto is former-minister of the Planning and Federal deputy.