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My appreciated colleague Daniel Kostzer posted a
message about "Argentina and the IMF" complaining about how "silently banks were
inducing capital flights". Daniel´s argument is based on a report presented by
Mario Cafiero, a congresman from the ARI. Unfortunately, the conclusions of the
report are wrong because the misunderstood banks balance sheets: though this is
not the place to develop the story in full (many answers are available, in
spanish unfortunately), they made the mistake of confusing parallel reductions
in asset and liabilities because of lower trading and a change in Central Bank
regulations with a reduction in banks funding. More impressive is the fact that
suggesting the opposite implies a huge misunderstanding on how the banks
multiplier works. The conclusion about what cause the mess in the Argentine
banking system continues to be: a massive withdrawal of deposits to which the
policy makers reacted with liquidity restrictions. By any means I would like to
suggest that banks made not mistakes -e.g., not opposing when they were forced
to buy increasingly amounts of public debt appears to be one of them- but
definitely not the one Daniel is mentioning (or more precisely, the Cafiero
report that can be read at http://www1.hcdn.gov.ar/dependencias/ari/Principal/SUBVERSION%20ECONOMICA/Subversion.htm).
I hope that the fact that I am a bank economist does not make my
counter-argument less reliable: after all, what is being discussed in this very
limited sense is accounting not subject to "ideological" spectacles. Best
regards.
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