A moeda como fato social total na crise Argentina de 2001/02 e na sua resolução
| Autor | Jaime Marques Pereira |
| Cargo | Professor da Université de Picardie Jules Verne ? CRIISEA |
| Páginas | 53-78 |
Page 54
Starting from the vision of money as total social fact, this work studies the 2001/2002 Argentine monetary crisis as a coordination crisis. It re-examines in this way the question of market adjustments at the level of the money functions’ integration.
The setting of a definition of money as a total social fact poses the unit of account as a variable and not as a data. The account function may in this way be studied as an organizer of the price system: it specifies how prices depend on the confidence into money, operating in credit and titles’ evaluation. The information delivered by prices is therefore a coordination of knowledge about the economy (the plans of agents). The object of the anticipation cannot from then be reduced to a simple calculus of futures’ utilities. It’s about interpretations — the economy is a hermeneutic. Reversals of anticipations operating in a financial crisis must be, in this sense, defined as reevaluations revealing erroneous interpretations.
This analytical grid of a particular systemic crisis shows what it has in common with other cases: an ignorance of the systemic risk at the basis of distributive compromises constitutive of a monetary regime. These compromises are about promises of revenues that economic theory justifies. In this cognitive performance, the neo-quantitative theory of money is the lever of a major institutional change as to the governing of anticipations.
The monetarist norm was in Argentina a social faith. In the 2001/2002 crisis, it suddenly became a central object of the public debate. This reveals the practical senses of the norm, what each one attributes to the norm and that, in this manner, guides its actions. Capital flees, which triggers the collapse of the payment system, appears to be immoral. Beyond political responsibilities, the crisis highlights the responsibility of a belief — the necessary neutrality of money. In practice, leaving to markets the power of monetary issuance has excluded from the field of vision of decision-makers the monetary dangers of over-indebtedness. The economic theory is, in the very same way, indirectly responsible for the crisis.
The acting of a theory is here its performance to establish the governing upon the maintained ignorance of systemic risk. Beyond diverse forms of over-indebtedness, this ignorance may be described as a general cognitive norm of a political logic organizing wage deflation or, at best, its contention. Before developing this analysis, we specify the methodological implication of the conceptualization of money at the basis of this interpretation of the crisis and its outcome.
***
Considered as a total social fact, money is a fundamental mechanism of society reproduction which determines its economic functions. Money in this way is defined as unit of account which symbolizes the value that objectifies in means of payments a regime of debts monnayage1. The interaction between these three functional forms of money implies
Page 55
a contingent interdependence between account and payment community and political community.
This definition comes within the tradition that focuses the analysis of money as a debt counterpart and more precisely the fact stressed by Schumpeter (1970) on its property to express credit by a fixed nominal value. Money makes the operation of a bank balance-sheet a social accountability of each individual contribution to the creation of wealth and of the part of it he can claim. O. Lakomski-Laguerre (2004) points out the limits to this analysis: the essence of money as institution of this accountability implies the consideration of the existence of an authority defining «legal money» and its convertibility into central money. In this sense, it is in money itself that lies the power of coordination that Schumpeter attributes to bank evaluation of enterprises’ bets enabling a revival of debts and, thus, the innovating dynamic of capitalism.
The definition of money as a total social fact highlights the nature of this monetary power as sovereign power. It allows specify market’s coordination through the unit of account and the creation of means of payments. So, it breaks with an instrumental vision of money functions that ignores the legitimacy of a monetary regime on which depends its permanence. It shows that this legitimacy stems from the fact that the possibility of exchanges supposes a social agreement on the convertibility of units of account, peculiar to the diverse networks of debts. We take in consideration that it exists, despite appearances, a plurality of units of account beyond currencies. This plurality is not only a plurality of issuers — for example, provincial moneys that were issued in Argentina to overcome the means of payment shortage after 1998. The plurality can be otherwise detected in the fixation of relative prices when it mobilizes various units of account. We show that desired profits are calculated in Argentina with reference to the currency. The exchange risk covering — whether by inflation or by indexation — is included in sales prices, and thus determinate capital revenues.
It is then the uniqueness of a system of account that transforms money into a social accountability. It implies consequently, as much as the issuance of means of payments, a regulation power on which depends the legitimacy of the incomes’ distribution. The confidence in their permanence commits the monnayage of debts. The latter is the cog where forms the coordination of decentralized decisions. In this way, the confidence translates into a pacification of the conflicts of interests inherent to promises concealed by a monetary regime.
The conciliation of interests mobilizes a cognitive function of economic theory. The nexus that it establishes between monetary policy and structural reforms marks off collective action to a representation of the economy where employment and salaries depend on the political compatibility between structural reforms and price stability2. This nexus is inspired by the contemporary revision of money neutrality’s postulate. In this paper, we seek understand on the Argentine case how this representation of the future imposes
Page 56
itself de facto as a coordination model in collective action where forms distributive compromises, constitutive of a regime of debts monnayage. We will analyze successively the model that establishes coordination on the reputation of rigor with the currency board issuance regime (1991-2001) and afterward the current model which coordination is based on an exchange rate said to be «competitive and foreseeable» (since 2002).
The first part of the paper identifies the mark of the postulate of money neutrality in these two types of regimes. The second deciphers its performance as a cognitive referent of illusionary incomes promises in the long term. From a comparative viewpoint, the Argentine case suggests that the committing of speculation excesses on trial in the current bank intermediation world paralysis level points out likewise the crisis of an accounting system by which over-indebtedness is the counterpart of salary regression. Only the Ponzi agent varies: households, enterprises and/or financial institutions, state.
The problem of coordination has encouraged a substantial reformulation of the analysis of the relation between micro and macro-economics. Neo-classical models release some of their axioms to integrate socio-technical parameters more in accordance with the reality of contemporary economies, such as information asymmetry or increasing returns. It has then been possible to provide a more realistic representation of the economy but the question of micro/macro relation has not been elucidated. In the absence of a positive theory of collective action that includes time and money3, the micro/macro relation in the long term is undetermined. Reducing collective action to actuarial calculus of a representative agent for whom money is just some number only eliminates the problem.
The economist then can only resort to ad hoc hypothesis to report from the real world by partial non-unified theories and the neo-classical approach would not be more than a methodological individualism, deprived of axiomatic (Amable, Boyer and Lordon, 1995). These ad hoc hypotheses are nevertheless justified as a description of macroeconomic correlations which allow decision-makers to forecast their choices’ effects. The question is then that of the persistence of prescriptive deductions from the dynamic general equilibrium model. The institutional conditions of partial equilibriums only have, indeed, a normative value in so far as the dynamic general equilibrium can hold as «true» model of the economy and the micro-institutional prescriptions (postulated) thus offer the neoclassical methodology a new axiomatic strength. Such a methodology is questionable but does not prevent it from being the foundation of authorized knowledge4. Institutions that the «true» model leads to prescribe are...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃO