Ettore Tedeschi, director do Banco do Vaticano,
declarou recentemente as suas sérias reservas em relação à política monetária dos EUA e da UE, que ele reputa de ferozmente keynesianas:
He is known as a staunch capitalist with a deep concern for the Church’s social teaching. He is also a former professor of financial ethics at the Catholic University of Milan.
(...)
In Europe, he said, the issue is the opposite. Because of the lack of widespread private debt, a "privatization" effort is being enacted to absorb the large public debt of banks and businesses.
This also is Keynesian policy, which "perseveres against the scorned savings," Tedeschi said.
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic, he said, are committed to Keynes' policy of increasing public debt to sustain levels of economic production, consumption, and employment.
He said artificially low interest rates are another key to the strategy of increasing spending and discouraging saving. With no incentive to keep money in the bank, those who would have otherwise been savers are pushed to spend.
"Zero interest rates factually equal a de facto transfer of wealth from he who was a virtuous saver (although not for Keynes) to he who has become virtuously (for Keynes) indebted," he said. "Practically, it's about a hidden tax on poor savers, a tax transferred to the wealthy, (that is), over-indebted states, business people and bankers.”
Although the alternative to zero interest in such a situation is economic collapse and eventual default, the zero-rates "are not sustainable and are dangerous," Tedeschi warned.
"They destroy savings, which is an essential resource to create the base for bank credit; they promote speculation on real estate and securities, create illusory artificial values rather than scaling them down; they push consumption to more risky debt; they alter the market with artificial values and thus lead to belief that the very markets do not know how to correct themselves."
The biggest danger, Tedeschi said, is that zero interest rates "permit, or impose governments into management of the economy, without correcting inefficiency and facilitating distortions in the competition."
