Resuminho [Bastiat na veia!] da crise e dos movimentos anti-wall street MAS pró-governo [Occupy the pia de lavar louça]

http://mises.org/daily/5762/

"[...]The myth of the welfare state spread from France and Germany to the rest of the Western world, leading to an explosion of welfare transfers and an equal explosion of the people's expectations with regard to their so-called social rights.

 

Self-reliance was progressively replaced by a mentality of rights with no duties. As a result, a gigantic disconnect arose between what people are willing to pay in taxes and what they expect in return in the form of government benefits. Because promising welfare is the easiest way to win elections, politicians kept expanding the size of government over the decades. And because the public would not have tolerated an honest increase in taxes to finance the new welfare programs, governments started borrowing the money necessary to finance them. Thus, governments became dangerously in debt. Then the financial crisis came, to a large extent caused by government actions: welfare programs to make true the progressive "homeownership-society" dream in the United States created the structural conditions. Government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who bought and guaranteed around 50 percent of the total US mortgage market, offered the financial vehicle to transfer the wealth; and the Federal Reserve provided the easy money necessary to finance it. In addition, the US government was borrowing and spending money at an all-time record in order to finance its warfare/welfare policies.

 

"For Hessel, if politicians and bureaucrats had more power than they currently have, the system would be less corrupt."In Europe the situation was not that different. The creation of a single currency, again a government decision that in many cases was not even submitted to popular scrutiny through a referendum, enabled countries like Greece, Portugal, and Spain to borrow money at very low interest. The market rightly assumed that if some of these countries defaulted, Germany and France would rescue them. This explains why private investors considered Greek bonds to be as good as German bonds. Using this unique opportunity, politicians in southern countries started an orgy of credit. Their purpose was to win more elections through the promise of more welfare policies. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank was keeping interest rates artificially low, inflating housing bubbles in Spain and Ireland. For a time everyone was happy: politicians were being reelected, the people were getting new government benefits every year, bankers were making tons of money, and industries were booming. It was all an illusion. When the bubble burst in the United States, it quickly became clear that Europe's economic and fiscal situation was also unsustainable.

Now it's time to pay for the party. Inevitably, this means a dramatic reduction in our standard of living. Because people do not understand that the source of the crisis was government, as Bastiat predicted, they now go on the streets demanding even more of what caused the problem in the first place: government. That is the paradox of the outraged

The Fiction of Government

The tragedy of honest left-wing intellectuals who encourage movements such as Occupy Wall Street is that, without realizing it, they are outraged by what is to a large extent the creature of their own thinking. The best example is Hessel himself. He argues that fundamental principles of a free, humanitarian, and democratic society have been replaced by a system in which maximization and uncontrolled financial capitalism prevail. A much better world, he insists, would be one in which individual interest is subordinated to the general interest. This can be best achieved if government plays a larger role in the economy.

 

One should first ask if there is any reason to believe that government really cares about the common good. Are bureaucrats and politicians not people like everyone else? Was Lord Acton wrong when he said that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? And if he was right, is it reasonable to think that those who are in power — and therefore already corrupted — would put their own interest aside in order to serve an abstract ideal called the "common good"?

 

Even Hessel denounces that lobbyists have overtaken government in "the highest spheres." Nevertheless, he seems to believe that if government were to have more control over industries, corruption would not do its harmful work. In other words, for Hessel, if politicians and bureaucrats had more power than they currently have, the system would be less corrupt. History, however, shows that Lord Acton was right: the more power there is in the hands of the rulers the more corrupt the system becomes. The greatest failure of socialism was not that it brought about economic misery to the masses it was supposed to help but that it created a class system more violent and rigid than anything the Western world had ever seen. The central maxim of socialism — namely, equality — was betrayed as soon as the revolutionary leaders consolidated their power over the state. The new elite created a two-class system that rested on systematic coercion: on the one hand there were the party leaders and their friends who lived like kings enjoying all sort of luxuries, many of them imported from the capitalist world; and on the other hand there was everyone else, fighting for survival.

 

We may still ask what would happen if political leaders were not corruptible. Would Hessel's idea work then? Lets suppose for a minute that James Madison was wrong and that we were indeed governed by angels, that is to say, by incorruptible beings who would use their power only to seek the common good. Lets also suppose that these angels had all the material means necessary to achieve their noble ends. Now the question becomes, is the purity of intentions a guarantee for the quality of the results of someone's actions? Would morally superior and powerful men know better than we do what is best for us? And more importantly, would we be willing to accept honest men or even angels forcing us to do what they think is best?

Here it becomes even more evident that Hessel's argument rests on a falsehood: the idea that the common good or the general interest is something different from the sum of all individual interests, and that government is a separate entity that through coercion can elevate society to a higher degree of moral perfection and happiness. Few ideas in history have proved to be more appealing and at the same time more destructive than this one. Those who, like Hessel, endorse it, ignore the fact that the greatest evils are usually not the result of bad men trying to harm others but of good men trying to help others they do not even know. Henry David Thoreau fully grasped this when he wrote, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."[3] If angels were to govern humans, none of us would be spared from death for the greater good.

The fiction that government can safeguard a common good that transcends the diverse and irreducibly complex world of individual interests necessarily entails the idea that it can also provide for our necessities. This fallacy is the origin of the fatal myth of the welfare state — an idea brought about by French rationalist liberalism. This kind of liberalism, as Friedrich von Hayek noted, saw no limits in the power of human reason to plan social life and the economy, becoming thus the predecessor of collectivist movements such as socialism and fascism.

No one understood the implications of this myth better than Frédéric Bastiat, a French intellectual who is barely known in his own country. Writing shortly after the constitution of 1848 was created, Bastiat argued that unlike the Americans, who did not expect anything but from themselves, the French had transferred the province of social construction on to the abstraction of government. It was the responsibility of the state to elevate society to a higher level of morality, happiness, and material well-being. An example of this false belief, according to Bastiat, was to be found in the French constitution of 1848, which declared, "France has constituted itself a republic for the purpose of raising all the citizens to an ever-increasing degree of morality, enlightenment, and well-being." Bastiat observed that this new government was a "chimerical creation from which the citizens may demand everything." For Bastiat this could only lead to endless crisis and revolutions:

I contend that this deification of Government has been in past times, and will be hereafter, a fertile source of calamities and revolutions. There is the public on one side, Government on the other, considered as two distinct beings; the latter bound to bestow upon the former, and the former having the right to claim from the latter, all imaginable human benefits.[4]

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The global protest movement does not resemble the Communist movement, which declared that the world had to be overturned according to its viewpoint," Hessel said in an interview a year ago.

"This is not an ideological revolution. It is driven by an authentic desire to get what you need. From this point of view, the present generation is not asking governments to disappear but to change the way they deal with people's needs"

A Inflaçao de 2012 foi medida em quanto mesmo?

Para o BaCen, 16% é o ponto de partida [isso em relação ao já feito [alavancado] ano passado. O total real chegou FÁCIL em 20%].

"[A] pressão do governo surtiu efeito e os bancos públicos despejaram crédito na economia brasileira em 2012. No Banco do Brasil, que divulgou na última quinta-feira o balanço anual, a expansão ficou perto de 25%. Terça-feira (19.02.013), a Caixa Econômica Federal informou um avanço ainda mais expressivo: 45%. No sistema financeiro em geral, a alta foi de 16%, segundo o Banco Central (BC). Quando a comparação é feita com as instituições privadas, a diferença é maior. No Itaú, líder do segmento, os empréstimos subiram apenas 6%. No Bradesco, 8,3%, e no Santander, 7,6%."***

 

 

*** [dados divulgados 19 de fevereiro de 2013]

Copa do Mundo e Minha-Casa, Minha Vida

"Brazil Ignores World Cup Costs to Lift Housing: Mortgages

By Gabrielle Coppola 

The Brazilian government isn’t letting an economic slowdown, the World Cup or the Olympics get in the way of its efforts to help everyone from slum dwellers to young professionals buy homes.

President Dilma Rousseff is using federal subsidies and state-bank loans to boost housing after economic expansion slowed for a second year in 2012 and mortgage growth declined. Home price gains are also decelerating after rising 58 percent since 2010.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is pumping more money into the housing market even as interest rates remain at the lowest in Brazil's history, and annual inflation is running above the central bank's target for 29 months.

“The market is trying to correct itself” and “the government is throwing more money at it to keep it expanding,”said Adolfo Sachsida, an economist in Brasilia at the Institute for Applied Economic Research, a federal government agency that evaluates public policy. “This market employs a lot of people and they want to keep it heated so employment doesn’t drop.”

Rousseff is pumping more money into the housing market even as interest rates remain at the lowest in Brazil’s history, and annual inflation is running above the central bank’s target for 29 months. As economic growth fell to the slowest pace among major emerging-market economies last year, she nearly doubled spending on Brazil’s plan to build 2 million low-income homes by 2014, a goal made more expensive as preparations for the World Cup being held that year, and the Olympics in 2016 contribute to higher construction costs.

Home Lending

The amount of home loans outstanding grew 38.2 percent in 2012, down from a pace of 44.5 percent in 2011 and 51.1 percent in 2010, which was the fastest since 1992, according to central bank data. Total credit outstanding increased by 16.2 percent last year.

The government’s measures are helping to sustain prices, setting the stage for a fall once interest rates climb from record lows, according to Sachsida, who co-authored an IPEAreport last August that said the government is fostering a real-estate bubble.

“When rates rise abroad, Brazil will be forced to raise rates here too. When they do that, it’s going to hit a population that is already very indebted, and that’s going to pop the bubble,” he said.

The views expressed in the report don’t reflect the opinion of the organization, according to a press official at IPEA in Brasilia, who asked not to be identified in accordance with their policy.

“The majority of analysts have concluded that there is no risk of a real estate bubble,” Dyogo Oliveira, deputy executive secretary at the Finance Ministry, told reporters in Brasilia Jan. 31. “At the moment there is no need for concern.”

The Finance Ministry didn’t respond to a request for further comment.

Middle Class

While 35 million Brazilians entered the middle class in the past decade, according to the Rio de Janeiro-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, the government estimates there is a housing deficit of 6.3 million homes.

Rousseff increased spending on her low-income housing initiative, dubbed Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My Home, My Life), by 93 percent to 11.2 billion reais ($5.7 billion) from January through November 2012, according to the Treasury.

The government has twice lifted price caps on homes that are eligible for program subsidies since 2009, to as much as 190,000 reais in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as soaring land prices prompted homebuilders to lobby for higher payouts to cover construction costs.

World Cup

Preparations for the World Cup and Olympics also have increased demand, the IPEA report said.

“The program of public works trying to modernize and invigorate some cities for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in Rio in 2016 has been contributing to the appreciation of real estate prices.”

Rising prices are undermining the original goal of the government’s program to reach Brazil’s poorest, because homebuilders are focusing on building more expensive homes that are still within the subsidy scheme, according to Claudia Magalhaes Eloy, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Sao Paulo.

“While those increases may be partially credited to improvements in the housing units, they seem to be mainly explained by developers’ pressures to accommodate escalating costs, due in part to land speculation,” Eloy, Fernanda Costa and Rossella Rossetto wrote in a fall 2012 article for the journal Housing Finance International. “This imposes threats to the continuity of the subsidy policy and causes important impacts on the housing market, reducing affordability.”

From April 2009 to May 2012, just 40 percent of the homes contracted to be built were destined for families in the lowest income tier, according to Eloy.

Price Limits

Minha Casa, Minha Vida has price limits to ensure that homes remain affordable for beneficiaries of the program, Patricia Gripp, head of communications for the Ministry of Cities, which administers the program, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions.

“The program stimulates not just demand for real estate credit, but it also expands the production of new units on a large scale,” she wrote. “An increase in supply tends to control the price of units.”

The government has delivered 1 million homes under the program, generating 1.4 million jobs as of December 2012, according to Caixa Economica Federal, the largest mortgage lender in Latin America and the main conduit for Brazil’s federal housing subsidies.

Delays Plague

Minha Casa, Minha Vida also isn’t immune to the delays that typically plague infrastructure projects in Brazil. Marcelo Montenegro, the 65 year-old founder of Fortaleza-based homebuilder Montenegro Construtora, waited five months last year for state-owned Caixa and the city to sign off on final approvals for his low-income housing development in Jurema, a suburb of Fortaleza.

During the wait, he said, he was forced to hire private security guards at a cost of 200,000 reais to protect the buildings after squatters took over a neighboring building with plans to rent or sell the apartments.

“It was absurd, I suffered a lot,” said Montengero, who said he has since met with representatives from Caixa and the police to try and resolve bottlenecks and improve security.“The police and city did nothing to stop it,”.



A press official for Caixa in Brasilia, who asked not to be named in accordance with internal policy, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions that Caixa approved the project in a timely fashion. Caixa has worked with the municipality and the state secretary of public security so that they act with agility in the issuance of documents and help to solve the situation mentioned, according to the official.

Accelerate Construction

In an effort to accelerate construction under the program, Rousseff in 2011 tapped Brazil’s other federally-owned lender, Banco do Brasil SA, to begin lending in the lowest-income tier of the program.

Banco do Brasil offered financing for 114,000 new housing units in 2012, including 50,349 units for the lowest income tier, and 64,000 units for the second and third more expensive tiers. Its goal is to finance 450,000 units by the end of 2014, Gueitiro Matsuo Genso, the bank’s head of real estate credit, said in an interview in November.

Banco do Brasil, which entered the home loan market in 2009, increased overall mortgage lending 75 percent to 11.35 billion reais last year. Brasilia-based Caixa increased home lending 33.8 percent last year to 101 billion reais.

Falling Investment

Brazil’s unemployment rate fell to a record low 4.6 percent in December as companies anticipated lower borrowing costs, tax breaks and increased public spending to fuel growth. Still, the second-largest emerging economy grew just 1 percent last year, the central bank estimates, less than the U.S., China, and Japan.

Investment in Brazil’s economy dropped 3.9 percent in the first three quarters of 2012 from the year-earlier period, after a 4.7 percent increase in 2011, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

With local industry struggling to compete globally and a more aggressive stance on rooting out corruption spurring delays in infrastructure investment, the government is leaning on home construction as a means to boost growth, according to Jefferson Finch, an analyst at political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group.

“They see it as an important driver for investment and growth, and it pays a political dividend,” Finch said by phone from New York. “There’s a focus on addressing the housing deficit but also the focus on home ownership in the new middle class, which is going to be a really important sector for any government in the future to have the support of.”

Home Prices

Brazilian home prices are likely to keep pace with inflation rather than appreciate beyond it for the next three to six months as buyers look for stronger signs of an economic recovery, according to Eduardo Schaeffer, chief executive officer of Sao Paulo-based Zap Imoveis, which publishes the FipeZap home price index in partnership with the Foundation for Economic Research.

“The market is not exactly cooling off, but it’s being a little more conservative,” Schaeffer said by phone from Sao Paulo. “There’s no longer that fever to buy a home at any price and sell shortly after. It’s more in line with inflation, which is reasonable.”

Luxury Apartments

The average price per square meter in 16 Brazilian cities rose 0.9 percent in January to 6,350 reais, according to the FipeZap index.

In Sao Paulo’s Pinheiros neighborhood, homebuilder Even Construtora e Incorporadora SA will begin construction in April on a 47-unit luxury apartment building with an indoor and outdoor pool and a tennis court. The average price of the 332 square-meter units, which have four bedrooms, six bathrooms, including maid’s quarters, and a glassed in patio, is 4 million reais. About 30 percent of the units have been sold since efforts began in October, according to Izilda Albanez, a broker for Even.

Residential areas like Pinheiros, or the beachfront neighborhood of Leblon, in Rio de Janeiro, represent the extreme in home price appreciation, according to Octavio Lazari Junior, president of the mortgage lenders association known as Abecip and executive director at Banco Bradesco SA.

The rise in property prices in Brazil since 2009 was caused by a series of factors, including the stabilization of the economy, stronger foreclosure laws so banks could gain possession of homes in default, which made them more willing to make mortgage loans, improvement in the quality of homes being built, and investments for the World Cup and Olympics, Lazari Junior said.

Brazilian Homebuyer

The typical Brazilian homebuyer makes a down payment of about 60 percent on a new home purchase, which reduces the chance of default if the value falls, Lazari Junior said. At the same time, slow economic recoveries in the U.S. and Europe make the chance of a sharp increase in interest rates unlikely, he said.

“There is not the slightest risk of a real estate bubble in Brazil,” Lazari Junior said by phone from Sao Paulo. “What we will have going forward is real estate prices adjusted for inflation. They will not fall.”

The Brazilian government’s housing policy would be more effective if it donated some of the land it controls for low-income housing construction, rather than handing over more cash to homebuilders to keep up with price increases, according to Sachsida of IPEA. The government is unlikely to relinquish that power, he said.

“Brazilians’ biggest dream is to have their own home, so of course any policies that make this easier are welcome,” he said. “This is worsening access to home ownership, because the way it’s being done is increasing home prices.”

Copa do Mundo e casas populares

 

 

 [Photographer: Jonathan Ernst/Bloomberg]

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Brazil Ignores World Cup Costs to Lift Housing: Mortgages

 

The Brazilian government isn’t letting an economic slowdown, the World Cup or the Olympics get in the way of its efforts to help everyone from slum dwellers to young professionals buy homes.

 

President Dilma Rousseff is using federal subsidies and state-bank loans to boost housing after economic expansion slowed for a second year in 2012 and mortgage growth declined. Home price gains are also decelerating after rising 58 percent since 2010.

 

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is pumping more money into the housing market even as interest rates remain at the lowest in Brazil's history, and annual inflation is running above the central bank's target for 29 months.

 

“The market is trying to correct itself” and “the government is throwing more money at it to keep it expanding,”said Adolfo Sachsida, an economist in Brasilia at the Institute for Applied Economic Research, a federal government agency that evaluates public policy. “This market employs a lot of people and they want to keep it heated so employment doesn’t drop.”

Rousseff is pumping more money into the housing market even as interest rates remain at the lowest in Brazil’s history, and annual inflation is running above the central bank’s target for 29 months. As economic growth fell to the slowest pace among major emerging-market economies last year, she nearly doubled spending on Brazil’s plan to build 2 million low-income homes by 2014, a goal made more expensive as preparations for the World Cup being held that year, and the Olympics in 2016 contribute to higher construction costs.

Home Lending

The amount of home loans outstanding grew 38.2 percent in 2012, down from a pace of 44.5 percent in 2011 and 51.1 percent in 2010, which was the fastest since 1992, according to central bank data. Total credit outstanding increased by 16.2 percent last year.

The government’s measures are helping to sustain prices, setting the stage for a fall once interest rates climb from record lows, according to Sachsida, who co-authored an IPEAreport last August that said the government is fostering a real-estate bubble.

“When rates rise abroad, Brazil will be forced to raise rates here too. When they do that, it’s going to hit a population that is already very indebted, and that’s going to pop the bubble,” he said.

The views expressed in the report don’t reflect the opinion of the organization, according to a press official at IPEA in Brasilia, who asked not to be identified in accordance with their policy.

“The majority of analysts have concluded that there is no risk of a real estate bubble,” Dyogo Oliveira, deputy executive secretary at the Finance Ministry, told reporters in Brasilia Jan. 31. “At the moment there is no need for concern.”

The Finance Ministry didn’t respond to a request for further comment.

Middle Class

While 35 million Brazilians entered the middle class in the past decade, according to the Rio de Janeiro-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, the government estimates there is a housing deficit of 6.3 million homes.

Rousseff increased spending on her low-income housing initiative, dubbed Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My Home, My Life), by 93 percent to 11.2 billion reais ($5.7 billion) from January through November 2012, according to the Treasury.

The government has twice lifted price caps on homes that are eligible for program subsidies since 2009, to as much as 190,000 reais in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, as soaring land prices prompted homebuilders to lobby for higher payouts to cover construction costs.

World Cup

Preparations for the World Cup and Olympics also have increased demand, the IPEA report said.

 

“The program of public works trying to modernize and invigorate some cities for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in Rio in 2016 has been contributing to the appreciation of real estate prices.”

Rising prices are undermining the original goal of the government’s program to reach Brazil’s poorest, because homebuilders are focusing on building more expensive homes that are still within the subsidy scheme, according to Claudia Magalhaes Eloy, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Sao Paulo.

“While those increases may be partially credited to improvements in the housing units, they seem to be mainly explained by developers’ pressures to accommodate escalating costs, due in part to land speculation,” Eloy, Fernanda Costa and Rossella Rossetto wrote in a fall 2012 article for the journal Housing Finance International. “This imposes threats to the continuity of the subsidy policy and causes important impacts on the housing market, reducing affordability.”

From April 2009 to May 2012, just 40 percent of the homes contracted to be built were destined for families in the lowest income tier, according to Eloy.

Price Limits

Minha Casa, Minha Vida has price limits to ensure that homes remain affordable for beneficiaries of the program, Patricia Gripp, head of communications for the Ministry of Cities, which administers the program, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions.

“The program stimulates not just demand for real estate credit, but it also expands the production of new units on a large scale,” she wrote. “An increase in supply tends to control the price of units.”

The government has delivered 1 million homes under the program, generating 1.4 million jobs as of December 2012, according to Caixa Economica Federal, the largest mortgage lender in Latin America and the main conduit for Brazil’s federal housing subsidies.

Delays Plague

Minha Casa, Minha Vida also isn’t immune to the delays that typically plague infrastructure projects in Brazil. Marcelo Montenegro, the 65 year-old founder of Fortaleza-based homebuilder Montenegro Construtora, waited five months last year for state-owned Caixa and the city to sign off on final approvals for his low-income housing development in Jurema, a suburb of Fortaleza.

During the wait, he said, he was forced to hire private security guards at a cost of 200,000 reais to protect the buildings after squatters took over a neighboring building with plans to rent or sell the apartments.

“It was absurd, I suffered a lot,” said Montengero, who said he has since met with representatives from Caixa and the police to try and resolve bottlenecks and improve security.“The police and city did nothing to stop it,”.



A press official for Caixa in Brasilia, who asked not to be named in accordance with internal policy, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions that Caixa approved the project in a timely fashion. Caixa has worked with the municipality and the state secretary of public security so that they act with agility in the issuance of documents and help to solve the situation mentioned, according to the official.

Accelerate Construction

In an effort to accelerate construction under the program, Rousseff in 2011 tapped Brazil’s other federally-owned lender, Banco do Brasil SA, to begin lending in the lowest-income tier of the program.

Banco do Brasil offered financing for 114,000 new housing units in 2012, including 50,349 units for the lowest income tier, and 64,000 units for the second and third more expensive tiers. Its goal is to finance 450,000 units by the end of 2014, Gueitiro Matsuo Genso, the bank’s head of real estate credit, said in an interview in November.

Banco do Brasil, which entered the home loan market in 2009, increased overall mortgage lending 75 percent to 11.35 billion reais last year. Brasilia-based Caixa increased home lending 33.8 percent last year to 101 billion reais.

Falling Investment

Brazil’s unemployment rate fell to a record low 4.6 percent in December as companies anticipated lower borrowing costs, tax breaks and increased public spending to fuel growth. Still, the second-largest emerging economy grew just 1 percent last year, the central bank estimates, less than the U.S., China, and Japan.

Investment in Brazil’s economy dropped 3.9 percent in the first three quarters of 2012 from the year-earlier period, after a 4.7 percent increase in 2011, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

With local industry struggling to compete globally and a more aggressive stance on rooting out corruption spurring delays in infrastructure investment, the government is leaning on home construction as a means to boost growth, according to Jefferson Finch, an analyst at political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group.

“They see it as an important driver for investment and growth, and it pays a political dividend,” Finch said by phone from New York. “There’s a focus on addressing the housing deficit but also the focus on home ownership in the new middle class, which is going to be a really important sector for any government in the future to have the support of.”

Home Prices

Brazilian home prices are likely to keep pace with inflation rather than appreciate beyond it for the next three to six months as buyers look for stronger signs of an economic recovery, according to Eduardo Schaeffer, chief executive officer of Sao Paulo-based Zap Imoveis, which publishes the FipeZap home price index in partnership with the Foundation for Economic Research.

“The market is not exactly cooling off, but it’s being a little more conservative,” Schaeffer said by phone from Sao Paulo. “There’s no longer that fever to buy a home at any price and sell shortly after. It’s more in line with inflation, which is reasonable.”

Luxury Apartments

The average price per square meter in 16 Brazilian cities rose 0.9 percent in January to 6,350 reais, according to the FipeZap index.

In Sao Paulo’s Pinheiros neighborhood, homebuilder Even Construtora e Incorporadora SA will begin construction in April on a 47-unit luxury apartment building with an indoor and outdoor pool and a tennis court. The average price of the 332 square-meter units, which have four bedrooms, six bathrooms, including maid’s quarters, and a glassed in patio, is 4 million reais. About 30 percent of the units have been sold since efforts began in October, according to Izilda Albanez, a broker for Even.

Residential areas like Pinheiros, or the beachfront neighborhood of Leblon, in Rio de Janeiro, represent the extreme in home price appreciation, according to Octavio Lazari Junior, president of the mortgage lenders association known as Abecip and executive director at Banco Bradesco SA.

The rise in property prices in Brazil since 2009 was caused by a series of factors, including the stabilization of the economy, stronger foreclosure laws so banks could gain possession of homes in default, which made them more willing to make mortgage loans, improvement in the quality of homes being built, and investments for the World Cup and Olympics, Lazari Junior said.

Brazilian Homebuyer

The typical Brazilian homebuyer makes a down payment of about 60 percent on a new home purchase, which reduces the chance of default if the value falls, Lazari Junior said. At the same time, slow economic recoveries in the U.S. and Europe make the chance of a sharp increase in interest rates unlikely, he said.

“There is not the slightest risk of a real estate bubble in Brazil,” Lazari Junior said by phone from Sao Paulo. “What we will have going forward is real estate prices adjusted for inflation. They will not fall.”

 

The Brazilian government’s housing policy would be more effective if it donated some of the land it controls for low-income housing construction, rather than handing over more cash to homebuilders to keep up with price increases, according to Sachsida of IPEA. The government is unlikely to relinquish that power, he said.

 

“Brazilians’ biggest dream is to have their own home, so of course any policies that make this easier are welcome,” he said. “This is worsening access to home ownership, because the way it’s being done is increasing home prices.”

Como a intervenção estatal cria conflitos.

 Virou moda afirmar que "conservadores" como John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) "previram" a doutrina marxista de exploração de classes.  Mas a doutrina marxista sustenta, erroneamente, que no livre mercado há "classes" cujos interesses colidem e conflitam.  A percepção de Calhoun era quase o oposto disso.  Ele viu que era a intervenção estatal que criava, por si mesma, as "classes" e o conflito[1].  Calhoun se deu conta disso, em especial, no caso da intervenção binária dos impostos, pois viu que o montante arrecadado em impostos é empregado em gastos e que alguns indivíduos na comunidade deveriam ser contribuintes finais dos fundos fiscais, enquanto outros, recebedores finais.  Calhoun definiu os recebedores como "classe dominante" de exploradores e os contribuintes como explorados ou classe "dominada"; e a distinção é bastante convincente.  Eis como Calhoun brilhantemente demonstrou sua análise:

Mesmo sendo poucos se comparados com a comunidade, os agentes e funcionários do governo constituem uma parcela composta, exclusivamente, de beneficiários da receita dos impostos.  Qualquer montante arrecadado da comunidade na forma de impostos, se não for perdido, volta para eles como despesas ou bens publicamente financiados.  Ambos — financiamentos e tributação — constituem a ação fiscal do governo.  São mutuamente dependentes.  O que é arrecadado da comunidade sob a forma de imposto é transferido para aquela parte que é beneficiada com tais financiamentos.  Mas como os beneficiários constituem apenas uma parte da comunidade, entende-se que, tomando as duas partes do processo fiscal, a ação deva ser desigual entre os que pagam impostos e os que recebem a receita deles proveniente.  Nem poderia ser diferente, a menos que o montante arrecadado de cada indivíduo sob a forma de impostos retornasse para o próprio na forma de financiamentos, o que tornaria o processo inútil e absurdo. [...]

Sendo esse o caso, entende-se necessariamente que uma parte da comunidade deva pagar uma quantia em impostos maior do que o valor recebido de volta em bens publicamente financiados, enquanto outra parte recebe em financiamentos mais do que pagou em impostos.  É evidente, então, levando em conta todo o processo, que os impostos sejam, na realidade, benesses para a parcela da comunidade que recebe mais bens publicamente financiados do que paga em impostos, ao passo que aos que pagam mais impostos do que recebem em financiamentos públicos, tais despesas são verdadeiros impostos — ônus e não liberalidades.  Esta consequência é inevitável, e resulta da natureza do processo, ainda que os impostos sejam distribuídos da maneira mais equilibrada possível. [...]

Então, o resultado inevitável da desigual ação fiscal do governo é dividir a comunidade em duas grandes classes: a daqueles que, na realidade, pagam impostos e, é claro, suportam de maneira exclusiva o encargo de sustentar o governo; e a outra daqueles que recebem o montante arrecado por meio de bens publicamente financiados e são, na verdade, sustentados pelo governo; ou, em poucas palavras, classes de dos pagadores de impostos e dos consumidores de impostos.

Entretanto, o resultado disso é colocá-las em relações antagônicas face à ação fiscal do governo e a todo o curso da política imediatamente decorrente.  Pois, quanto maiores forem os impostos e financiamentos públicos, maior será o ganho de um e a perda de outro, e vice-versa[2].

[1]  O termo "castas" seria mais bem empregado aqui do que "classes".  Classes são grupos de pessoas com certas características em comum.  Não há razão para entrarem em conflito entre si.  A classe de homens que se chamam Jones não precisa entrar, necessariamente, em conflito com a classe de homens que se chamam Smith.  Por outro lado, castas são grupos criados pelo estado, cada qual com seu próprio conjunto de privilégios e tarefas estabelecido por meio de violência.  Castas entram necessariamente em conflito porque algumas são instituídas para dominar as outras.

[2] CALHOUN, John C. A Disquisition on Government. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953. pp. 16-18.  No entanto, Calhoun não entendeu a harmonia de interesses no livre mercado.

Titulo do original inglês: Power and Market: Government and the Economy 

Autor: Murray N. Rothbard

helio beltrão no mises institute, março de 2011