Crisis, desigualdad y pobreza: Aprendizajes desde el mundo en desarrollo ante los recortes sociales en España

Con las medidas de austeridad y la especulación sobre la deuda, España –como otros países sacudidos por la codicia de los mercados financieroscae en una espiral de más crisis, más pobreza y más desigualdad muy peligrosa, similar a la que vivieron América Latina y el Este Asiático en las últimas décadas del siglo XX a consecuencia del ajuste estructural.

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The Coface economic publications: Country risk overview

In Southern Europe, the recession is deepening, particularly in Spain, Italy and Cyprus. Coface is forecasting a recession rate of 2%, 1.8% and 1.3% in these countries respectively in 2012. Another source of concern is the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, which is now affecting growth in emerging countries, where Coface has noted a slowdown in activity.

In this more difficult context for companies, Coface has lowered its country risk assessment for Cyprus, Spain, Guatemala, India, Italy and the Czech Republic. However, it has upgraded its assessment for the Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Nicaragua and Slovakia. This Risk Overview outlines the reasons why Coface has made these adjustments. It gathers the updated risk assessments on these 10 countries, and on 25 other countries too, whose situation has changed without requiring a modification of their risk assessments.

Coface has included two articles in the introduction. The first provides an update of the situation in Spain, a country where companies – all sectors and not just construction – are suffering from excessive debt and difficulties in the banking sector. The article outlines the methods to stem the dangerous deflationary spiral trapping the country. A second article gives an update on Chinese companies and their vulnerability to the choice of economic policy. The authorities have two objectives: support activity with a targeted budget policy and stay on course for a rebalancing of growth towards consumption.

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The iceberg concept of culture

"The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics" by Burton G. Malkiel

Ageneration ago, the efficient market hypothesis was widely accepted by academic financial economists; for example, see Eugene Fama’s (1970) influential survey article, “Efficient Capital Markets.” It was generally believed that securities markets were extremely efficient in reflecting information about individual stocks and about the stock market as a whole. The accepted view was that when information arises, the news spreads very quickly and is incorporated into the prices of securities without delay. Thus, neither technical analysis, which is the study of past stock prices in an attempt to predict future prices, nor even fundamental analysis, which is the analysis of financial information such as company earnings and asset values to help investors select “undervalued” stocks, would enable an investor to achieve returns greater than those that could be obtained by holding a randomly selected portfolio of individual stocks, at least not with comparable risk.

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Benjamin Graham and Risk

In “Benjamin Graham and Risk”, Brandes Institute Advisory Board member Bruce Grantier examines the similarities and differences between the modern portfolio theory concept of risk and the writings of Benjamin Graham and other prominent value investors.

Spain: Financial Sector Reform. First Progress Report

This report has been prepared by IMF staff at the request of Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Bank of Spain, and the European Commission. The report aims to provide independent advice on Spain’s efforts to recapitalize and restructure its financial sector with support from the European Stability Mechanism. Spain and its European partners specified their commitments to support these efforts in their Memorandum of Understanding on Financial Sector Policy Conditionality (MoU) of July 20, 2012. IMF staff is not a party to the MoU, nor responsible for the conditionality or implementation thereof.

Diez años para digerir el stock de pisos

El paro y el desplome de la creación de hogares obstaculizarán la venta de las viviendas de Sareb. El cambio sociológico en España impulsará un mercado potente de alquiler en el futuro.

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La resolución de activos bancarios a través de "Bancos Malos"

Los llamados «bancos malos» constituyen un elemento bastante común en los procesos de saneamiento, reestructuración y recapitalización de entidades financieras en dificultades. Este artículo repasa el papel de estas instituciones y, en particular, los argumentos económicos que justifican su creación y algunos condicionantes y elementos esenciales de su diseño. Asimismo, sin ánimo de exhaustividad, se revisan algunos casos relevantes de bancos malos con especial atención a los desarrollados durante la crisis actual.

Conferencia de Alvaro Guzmán de Bestinver en el Instituto Juan de Mariana

The role of financial panics in early and not so early.

Financial panics appear as the reactions to a fear of capital losses that cause a dumping of assets by investors and the collapse of a financial institution or market. Where social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1995 [1895]) in his theory of crowd psychology argued that a distinct and distinctly irrational collective mind forms through the contagious transformation of the individual into a member of the “herd,” Floyd Allport (1924) suggests that the crowd mind is simply the aggregated feelings of individuals reacting to the same external stimulant. More recently, theories of collective behavior explore the sociality of human cognition. This paper examines the semantic and theoretical roles for “panic” in select treatments of financial crises and the extent to which any underlying collective behavior may be contagious, convergent, or emerging from the social interactions that shape a crowd mind.

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