En tiempos de crisis sociales profundas hay que tomar medidas excepcionales hasta que la normalidad regrese. ¿No se hace en tiempos de guerra? Pues considerense dichas medidas anti crisis como la mejor defensa de una sociedad contra el riesgo de guerra.
En House of Debt, tomo estos tres ejemplo de cómo en muy diferentes épocas se practicó una política de apoyo eficaz para reducir y/o reestructurar la deuda de las familias entrampadas por las deudas, una vez que la contracción económica redujo las rentas y el valor de los activos. Esta política proto Keynesiana, en tiempos bien lejanos, viene a ser una pruba de que los paraísos liberales nunca han existido.
1) El primer ejemplo es de los años 1810, de esa época mítica para los trujimanes del Juan de Mariana, Rallo & Co, en que, según ellos, la libertad bancaria estableció el paraíso de la estabilidad. Aparte del mito de la banca libre (que fue lo que produjo la burbuja del crédito y su implosión posterior) es interesante este ejemplo porque se trata de una economía fundamentalmente agraria, y sin embargo con una actividad financiera crediticia importante, que se coletarizaba con las tierras agrarias. En la crisis, el valor de estas tierras caia a plomo, mientras que la deuda bancaria mantenía su valor. Un ejemplo perfecto de la asimetría entre agentes (banco-cliente). El gobierno obligó a una quita del 25% al 37,5% de la deuda! largo los plazos y permitió a los agricultores ceder sólo una parte de sus tierras.
"The tipping point came in 1819, when the Bank of the United States precipitated a deflationary crisis by calling in funds from banks to pay off government debt coming due. Simultaneously, commodity prices collapsed due to weaker demand from Europe. The price of cotton fell 50 percent from January 1818 to June 1819.26 These two forces led to a collapse in real estate prices, and leverage exacerbated the problems. As Rothbard notes, "One of the most striking problems generated by the panic [of 1819] was the plight of debtors. Having borrowed heavily during the preceding boom, they were confronted now with calls for repayment and falling prices, increasing the burden of their debts."27 Rothbard wrote these words in 1962, but he easily could have been describing the Great Recession.
That is where the similarities end. In contrast to the Great Recession, governments in 1819 at the state and national level responded aggressively to the needs of indebted individuals, in particular farmers. Many state governments immediately imposed moratoria on debt payments and foreclosures.28 At the national level, an important group of debtors were farmers who had purchased public land using debt from the federal government.29 In 1818–1820, Congress passed postponement laws allowing debtors to delay making payments. In 1820 William H. Crawford, the secretary of treasury under President James Monroe, proposed legislation that would (1) allow farmers to relinquish only some of their land while retaining title in the rest, (2) forgive 25 to 37.5 percent of the total debt, and (3) give permission to borrowers to pay sums due in ten equal annual installments without interest.30 During the debate on the legislation, Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois passionately defended debtors. As Rothbard writes, "Edwards went into great detail to excuse the actions of the debtors. The debtors, like the rest of the country, had been infatuated by the short-lived ‘artificial and fictitious prosperity.’ They thought that the prosperity would be permanent.
He also pointed to the distress prevailing among the debtors . . . all highlighting the need for governmental relief."31 The legislation easily passed Congress.
2) El segundo ejemplo es de la Gran Depresión, una sociedad ya en plena madurez industrial. Por lo tanto, los deudores entrampados son familias con deudas hipotecarias sobre viviendas. Para paliar el problema de las hipotecas, el gobierno de Roosevelt creó una sociedad que redimía dichas hipotecas a cambio de una deuda al doble de plazo de vencimiento y a un tipo de interés más ventajoso.
The Great Depression ultimately witnessed strong government efforts to assist debtors. The most famous of these programs was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The HOLC was a taxpayer-funded government bank that actually bought mortgage loans from private lenders and then made the terms more favorable to borrowers. The benefits to home owners were substantial. Without a modified loan, most home owners could not have made principal repayments and would have ended up in foreclosure. Further, the modified loans sometimes reduced principal and almost always reduced the interest rate and extended the maturity. While most mortgages originated before the Great Depression had a maturity of only five years, HOLC mortgages had a maturity of fifteen years.32 The scale of the HOLC was enormous. By 1936, 10 percent of American home owners were borrowers from the HOLC. The most extensive research of the HOLC to date is a recent book by Price Fishback, Kenneth Snowden, and Jonathan Rose, Well Worth Saving. They conclude by pointing out that while the HOLC involved some losses to taxpayers, the benefits to both lenders and home owners were significantly larger.33
3) El tercer ejemplo es también de la Gran Depresión, en este caso relacionado con el problema de las deudas contraídas el dólares-oro; al devaluar el dólar el gobierno de Rooselvet, los acredores exigían la devolución de sus créditos en el dólar-oro precio a la devaluación. Pero la cláusula pro de los contratos fue derogada por el gobierno.
Esto puede parecer un atraco de un gobierno sospechosamente poco defensor de los contratos y de la propiedad privada. Sin embargo, dicen los autores, los acreedores
a la postre salieron ganando, pues consiguieron recuperar parte del crédito que de otra manera no hubieran recuperado, gracias a la subida de los activos originada por la derogaciónAnother dramatic Depression-era government intervention had to do with gold. Almost all long-term debt contracts in the United States at the time included a clause giving creditors the right to demand payment in gold. When the United States went off the gold standard in 1933, the dollar was worth far less in gold than it had been. As a result, creditors all wanted to be paid the original amount back in gold. But the gold clause in debt contracts was abrogated by Congress. This meant borrowers could pay back in dollars that were worth far less in real terms than what they had borrowed. As former Federal Reserve governor Randall Kroszner points out, "The abrogation of these clauses was tantamount to a debt jubilee." When Congress did this, it was equivalent to a onetime massive debt-forgiveness program on the order of the entire GDP of the country.34
Interestingly, the effects of the gold-clause abrogation were quite positive for both borrowers and lenders. As Kroszner demonstrates, both equity prices and bond prices rose when the Supreme Court upheld the congressional action. In other words, debt forgiveness actually made creditors better off. It is likely that we would have reached a similar outcome during the Great Recession had the government more aggressively facilitated the restructuring of household debt.
Estos ejemplos de política anti crisis no son más que cauces por los que hacer más eficaz la política macro, monetaria y fiscal, para salir antes del agujero. Quiero decir que por sí solos no significan nada si no están encuadrados en una política estratégica de combatir la inflación y la caída del empleo y aliviar el peso de las deudas. En otras palabras, son ejemplo de como vehicular eficazmente una política Keynesiana, que no tiene por qué ser indiscriminada, como algunos deducen de los modelos más simples.
