Irmãos Martins estão de saída da Martifer

[salvadorveiga]

Tomei liberdade de postar aqui um post de um user de um forum que costumo frequentar...bastante interessante e boa leitura...

It has been a long time now since the day when kids playing youth sports have had to earn a trophy. At some point in time in our culture the need to "build a child's self esteem," and to make sure the kids have "fun" over took the value of hard work, perseverence and dedication as the measure by which we reward children.

Failure, in our day, has become intolerable.

You know how it goes, Johnny's little league team comes in last place for the season and all the kids still get a banquet and a trophy and a slap on the back: "Atta boy! Great job!" Doesn't matter if Johnny never worked on his skills, put in the time with the glove to improve, if he and his mates showed up to practice or dedicated themselves to improving the team and themselves. Nope, that is no longer what matters. What matters is that the kids "have fun," "get playing time," and "feel good about themselves." A deeply abiding sense of entitlement in the late 1990's and right up to the end of 2007 expressed itself best in what we have come to expect (and more importantly not expect) from our young people. Now, we give them the prize before they've even earned it. We rewarded our youth just for being there.

During the same time period, and in a similar way, many people in America came to expect to have it all. To get what they were "entitled" to without really having to prove they deserved it. The ideals of the American Dream: hard work and savings, living within your means, avoiding risky credit, building your self worth and assets through careful planning and self betterment went out the window. Instead all you needed more recently was a way to get yourself a house andyou could majically transform it into your own little ATM cash machine. Just put a little cash in and !VOILA! so much more came out-- a new kind of dream, not like the American Dream, but, more like a...well...a dream...detached from all reality, really...I remember a particular moment a few years ago when I took a look around in my town and wondered how the h*ll so many people could afford so many things. Many of my neighbors, acquaintances and friends seemed to be on buying binges: bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger boats, bigger pools, bigger weddings, bigger vacations...Now I can confirm what I always expected, it came down to one word: LEVERAGE.

Easy money, like crack cocaine for the consumer middle class, served up by mortgage men in shiny suits with "don't worry about the documents" terms, backed by a system of middle men Fed pushers providing easy access to whatever we craved, processed in meth-mill-like white collar mixing shops where simple mortgages were brewed into powerful Walls St. CDO crank, stamped with the Prime A stamp of approval by the foxes in the rating agency's put in place to guard the investor hen house, all set in motion and moving in dazzling lockstep with Presidents and Congresses that thought it best to keep voters happy and the good times rolling.

When crisis hit--9/11 and war--one might expect our leaders to reassess, to move the nation to a more sure footing, to begin to instill a different ethic of unity, sacrifice, collective purpose...one might expect it, but what we got from our fearless leader was: "Be patriotic, go out and shop." Easy money had become the opium of the people...and why not? We deserve it...its our right! Just like Johnny and his mates deserve a trophy at the end of the season...just because.

But what are the lessons we teach little Johnny when we give him a trophy "just because?" When handed the trophy so easily, what really did Johnny learn about the virtues of hard work, sacrifice, risk and dedication?

What's wrong with providing people easy money over and over again just because they owned a house (don't they always go up in value?)? What was wrong with building an entire nation's economy on the foundational belief that consuming to "no end" was the way to prosperity? Look around at what is occuring today in our economy and in the financial sector to find your answer. It is the worse financial crisis in decades.

What we have witnessed over that last few months is the failure of markets that lost sight of the importance of valuing risk. Individuals are not "entitled to homeownership," they should have to earn it. And institutions like banks and investment houses were not entitled to excellent ratings and backing just becuase they were able to create vehicles so hard to understand that smart investors were willing to buy them. As a culture and society we have collectively lost our sense of "moral hazard".

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

So Johnny, knowing he is going to get the trophy anyway...no risk there...doesn't feel motivated to work hard for it. Mr. Homeowner, fed a steady diet of "consume more" and "debt is good" from government and lending intitutions, sees no risking in leveraging his home to the hilt...Mr. Loan officer who sells the loan but then quickly bundles it up with other loans and sell it to Mr. Financier and therefore faces no risk that that payments won't be made by the borrower ....Mr. Financier packages up thousands of loans into a CDO vehicle that gets the blessing of the bonding agencies (where's the risk in giving a good rating, Moody's?) and sells them to Mr. Investor who, making extraordinary profits on 'em, see no risk in buying more and more...

What you and I are witnessing in the markets and economy is a moral hazards house of cards tumbling down before our eyes.

And what does our government do? We reward those who took unreasonable risk. The high flyers at Bear Stearns--give 'em a bail out...give away the assets to a private entity JPM Chase and stick the taxpayers with the worthless debt. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, whose lobbying bills would make Big Pharma blush...bail 'em out. My neighbor who leveraged his house to the hilt to get the big car, big pool, big house, big vacations...let's bail him out too...Indy Macs' mortgage holders who took rediculous terms...bail 'em out.

What, might I ask, is the message that our Gov't is sending in all of this. It is this: if you take unreasonable risk, even risk that threatens the very fabric of our nation's financial institutions and infrastructure, we will be there to bail you out.

Failure has become intolerable. To which I say: God help the American taxpayer.

Roger Lowenstein (Buffett Biographer) wrote a great piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, entitled, "No Free Bubble." I recommend it to you all. It is about the government bailout of Fannie and Freddie. He concludes with this sentence:

The goal [of government intervention] should be to ensure not that they never fail, but that for Frannie and Freddie and for other institutions, failure reacquires its proper status in a capatalist society: that of a tolerable event."

Best, HardRain