Jeremy Warner nos leva a uma viagem que parte de uma ideia coletiva de que tudo estava acabado no velho e cansado ocidente e que o futuro se projetava para o crescimento rápido dos mercados emergentes da Ásia e além. Afirma que a crise financeira global serviu ainda para turbinar a fuga de capitais para fora.
Rompe a matéria com uma afirmação categórica : “Este foi o ano em que a história de crescimento do mercado emergente finalmente morreu, e para a surpresa de muitos, o Ocidente ressurge”.
Surpreende-se ao ver que mundo desprezou a máxima de que “Quase por definição, os mercados emergentes tendem a ser politicamente e economicamente instáveis” . Também destaca que este mesmo mundo defendeu a fantástica “ideia de que a China e outros poderiam enfiar 20 anos o que levou as economias avançadas do Ocidente 150 anos para alcançar”.
Mas esse mercado em desenvolvimento enfrenta a "armadilha da renda média"; a ideia de um primeiro estágio de desenvolvimento - em que os mercados se abrem para o comércio global, adaptam-se em infra estrutura básica local e adotam tecnologias ocidentais e sistemas, seguido por elevação dos salários começam a subir e perda de competitividade nos mercados de exportação.
Entretanto, destaca que para alcançar o status de economia avançada você precisa de uma educação e formação de primeira classe , mercado de capitais estáveis e líquidos, funcionamento correto dos sistemas fiscais, instituições confiáveis, níveis excepcionais de inovação e empreendedorismo, e por último, mas não menos importante, o Estado de direito e sólida proteção dos direitos de propriedade. Segundo ressalta: "Estas não são as características de muitos mercados emergentes".
Trazendo-nos para o presente demonstra que “praticamente todas as moedas de mercados emergentes e os mercados de ações tem projeção forte de queda para este ano”. E justifica: “O componente compartilhado em sua miséria é a recuperação econômica no EUA, Reino Unido e uma série de outros mercados ocidentais. Todos estão sentindo as consequências da retirada, por conta dos Estados Unidos da impressão de dinheiro.
Com o benefício da retrospectiva, a crise foi surpreendentemente bem tratada, tanto pelo EUA como pela Grã-Bretanha. Parece que aprenderam alguma coisa com o desastre da Grande Depressão.
Acompanhem o último parágrafo de sua matéria:
As quatro palavras mais perigosas do investimento, de acordo com o investidor lendário Sir John Templeton, são "desta vez é diferente". Que estranho que precisávamos de outra crise dos mercados emergentes para nos ensinar novamente a sabedoria de que a observação.
Boa leitura:
By Jeremy Warner 6:40AM GMT 19 Dec 2014
The sun is setting on the emerging market miracle
As the emerging markets’ bubble burst, Western capitalism defied the pessimists
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but at some stage in the early to mid-Noughties, a corporate tipping point was reached – a kind of collective epiphany among globe-trotting chief executives that it was all over for the tired old West and that the future lay with the fast growing emerging markets of Asia and beyond.
From Unilever to GlaxoSmithKline, investment plans were turned on their heads. On a hitherto unprecedented scale, capital poured into Brazil, Russia, India, China – the Bric countries – and just about any other developing economy worthy of the name. Low-growth home economies were neglected as all eyes turned East. The corporate charge was followed by an even bigger shift in portfolio investment; everyone wanted a share of the promised riches of the developing world.
The global financial crisis served further to turbocharge the rotation out of the old and into the new; the West was finished, it seemed, incapacitated by its modern day crisis of capitalism. As Western economies contracted, Asia stormed ahead in a seemingly generational catch-up that would see financial and geopolitical power shift irreversibly from the old hegemonies of America and Europe to the centres of population in China, India, South East Asia and Latin America.
Western central bank money-printing – designed to counter the crisis – meanwhile created a wall of money to feed the craze. As returns in established markets sank virtually to zero, the excess flowed East and South in its search for yield, creating bubbles and unsustainable investment booms, just as loose money had once done in Western markets.
Extrapolation is a form of analysis much loved by investment bankers, and pretty soon, the supposed inevitability of emerging market ascendency became the dominant mantra; the miracle of the Brics was born, and largely believed.
As the end of the year approaches, it is traditional to revisit the dominant themes of the past 12 months and project them forward to instruct a view of the future. As far as the global economy is concerned, there is to my mind only one worthy of the history books. This was the year in which the emerging market growth story finally died, and to the astonishment of many, the West came surging back. I should give myself a long ladder to climb down here, for nothing is certain, and I’m not about to argue that the catch-up for the world’s poorer nations is over for good. Enlightened political leadership allowing, this will no doubt continue, but at a much slower pace than foreseen by the starry-eyed predictions of a few years back.
Nor, as renewed economic and financial crisis in Russia reminds us, is progress likely to proceed in a straight line. Almost by definition, emerging markets tend to be politically and economically unstable. This truism was forgotten, or in any case largely ignored, in the scramble for developing world assets.
The idea that China and others could cram into 20 years what it took the advanced economies of the West 150 years to achieve was always fanciful. As the economist George Magnus points out, there are no precedents for populous countries sustaining double-digit growth for more than a 10-year period, yet such fantastical assumptions became the basis for many predictions about China and others.
The reality is that almost everywhere, emerging markets are bumping up against the so-called “middle income trap”, the idea that the first stage of development – where markets open themselves up to global trade, put in place basic infrastructure and adopt Western technologies and systems – is relatively easy, but can only be done once. Eventually, wages start to rise, eroding competitiveness in export markets.
The next stage, where nations ascend the value chain beyond commodity manufacturing, is more difficult, as China, with a dramatically slowing growth rate, is now discovering. To achieve advanced economy status you need top-class universal education and training, deep and liquid capital markets, properly functioning tax systems, trusted institutions, exceptional levels of innovation and entrepreneurship, and last but not least, rule of law and rock-solid protection of property rights. You need to know, in the words of Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, that you can sue your own government and expect to get a fair hearing. These are not the characteristics of many emerging markets.
The disillusionment among Western business leaders is palpable, with intellectual property rights widely ignored, local producers routinely favoured over foreign ones, and Western businesses frequently hung out to dry in pursuit of domestic political ends. Many are finding that the difficulty of doing business far outweighs any advantage there might have been in access to cheap labour.
Meanwhile, the promise of a bountiful new market of middle-class consumers is proving very slow to arrive. In any case, Western investors are fast having to come to terms with an old truism about the developing world – that the definition of an emerging market is one from which it is impossible to emerge in a crisis.
The present cycle of boom and bust finds its origins in the very nature of the development model pursued by most emerging markets, which in nearly all cases initially relies heavily on exporting to Western consumers. As a source of growth, this ground to a halt with the global financial crisis, forcing China and others into a debt-fuelled investment boom to keep the economy buoyant. Oil and commodity prices rose accordingly, fuelling parallel booms in other emerging markets such as Russia and Brazil which are dependent on natural resources for their livelihood. This phase, too, has drawn to a close.
What we see in Russia bears all the hallmarks of a classic emerging-market crisis. It’s not quite as bad as the one that occurred in 1998, because today Russia enjoys much bigger foreign exchange reserves and a considerably stronger position in its public finances. But it is essentially the same crisis. Emboldened by the high oil price, capital has flowed into Russia, confident that the oil surplus would underpin the exchange rate. But with the collapse in Chinese demand, and parallel increase in supply caused by American shale, the oil price has cratered, resulting in a mad dash to get the money out before Russia can start defaulting on its foreign creditors.
This is now as certain as night follows day, and is basically the pattern with all emerging market crises; Western money flows in, creating a bubble, then in a panic it is withdrawn, causing a deep economic contraction.
Russia is the current focus of attention, but in lesser form, its afflictions are common to most emerging markets, even those such as Turkey, which is not obviously blessed – or should that be cursed – by abundant natural resources.
Virtually all emerging market currencies and equity markets are strongly down on the year. The shared component in their misery is economic recovery in the US, the UK and a number of other Western markets. As monetary policy is tightened, and Western investment opportunities multiply, once bountiful liquidity is being drained from the developing world. All are feeling the consequences of America’s withdrawal from money-printing.
In any case, the advanced world is spluttering back to life. In the past year, both the US and Britain have enjoyed their strongest run of data since the onset of the financial crisis, defying predictions of “secular stagnation”. News this week of a return to real wage growth and a 6.4 per cent surge in UK retail sales is hardly evidence of an economy starved of demand.
Far from marking the end of Western capitalism as we knew it, the financial crisis has demonstrated just how resilient, adaptable, and reactive Western economies really are. With the benefit of hindsight, the crisis was surprisingly well handled, both in the US and Britain. It seems we learnt something from the disaster of the Great Depression. That the same cannot be said about much of Europe is down only to the economic and political stupidities of monetary union, which have prevented the sort of solutions applied to Anglo-Saxon economies.
The four most dangerous words in investment, according to the legendary investor Sir John Templeton, are “this time it’s different”. How odd that we needed another emerging market crisis to teach us again the wisdom of that remark.