"antes a morte que tal sorte"

haverá uma resposta satisfatória para a ilusão?

existe um problema perigosissimo em basear uma relação numa ilusão

um dia ela pode acabar

arrastando dessa forma muitas das certezas que assim descobres não serem afinal mais do que ilusões

sonhas, constróis ilusões, prossegues num caminho e de repente esse caminho acaba.

funde-se num mar de ilusões e entras em queda livre por te faltar um chão por onde avançar.

assim, de repente.

ainda mais rápido do que o tempo necessário para construir uma ilusão.

claro que o amor é uma ilusão

não serve portanto para ser a base de uma relação

no entanto acho-me incapaz de fazer um investimento de tipo especulativo em relação a alguém.

quando as acções têm margem de progressão compras e assim que encontras outro investimento

que consideras mais rentável vendes tudo e refazes a tua aposta

nem se trata de retirar mais valias

se sobe, apostas.

''Fragmentos diários''

Há um determinado objecto que pertence ao guarda-fatos.

Cá em casa esse objecto pertence ao guarda-fato.

Fato usado, gasto pelo tempo.

What to Do

Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008

What to Do

By Paul Krugman

What the world needs right now is a rescue operation. The global credit system is in a state of paralysis, and a global slump is building momentum as I write this. Reform of the weaknesses that made this crisis possible is essential, but it can wait a little while. First, we need to deal with the clear and present danger. To do this, policymakers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.

The first task is the harder of the two, but it must be done, and soon. Hardly a day goes by without news of some further disaster wreaked by the freezing up of credit. As I was writing this, for example, reports were coming in of the collapse of letters of credit, the key financing method for world trade. Suddenly, buyers of imports, especially in developing countries, can't carry through on their deals, and ships are standing idle: the Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year.

What lies behind the credit squeeze is the combination of reduced trust in and decimated capital at financial institutions. People and institutions, including the financial institutions, don't want to deal with anyone unless they have substantial capital to back up their promises, yet the crisis has depleted capital across the board.

The obvious solution is to put in more capital. In fact, that's a standard response in financial crises. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize banks by buying preferred stock—stock that had priority over common stock in terms of its claims on profits. When Sweden experienced a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the government stepped in and provided the banks with additional capital equal to 4 percent of the country's GDP—the equivalent of about $600 billion for the United States today—in return for a partial ownership. When Japan moved to rescue its banks in 1998, it purchased more than $500 billion in preferred stock, the equivalent relative to GDP of around a $2 trillion capital injection in the United States. In each case, the provision of capital helped restore the ability of banks to lend, and unfroze the credit markets.

A financial rescue along similar lines is now underway in the United States and other advanced economies, although it was late in coming, thanks in part to the ideological tilt of the Bush administration. At first, after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Treasury Department proposed buying up $700 billion in troubled assets from banks and other financial institutions. Yet it was never clear how this was supposed to help the situation. (If the Treasury paid market value, it would do little to help the banks' capital position, while if it paid above-market value it would stand accused of throwing taxpayers' money away.) Never mind: after dithering for three weeks, the United States followed the lead already set, first by Britain and then by continental European countries, and turned the plan into a recapitalization scheme.

It seems doubtful, however, that this will be enough to turn things around, for at least three reasons. First, even if the full $700 billion is used for recapitalization (so far only a fraction has been committed), it will still be small, relative to GDP, compared with the Japanese bank bailout—and it's arguable that the severity of the financial crisis in the United States and Europe now rivals that of Japan. Second, it's still not clear how much of the bailout will reach the components of the shadow banking system—largely unregulated financial organizations including investment banks and hedge funds—that are at the core of the problem. Third, it's not clear whether banks will be willing to lend out the funds, as opposed to sitting on them (a problem encountered by the New Deal seventy-five years ago).

My guess is that the recapitalization will eventually have to get bigger and broader, and that there will eventually have to be more assertion of government control—in effect, it will come closer to a full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system. Just to be clear, this isn't a long-term goal, a matter of seizing the economy's commanding heights: finance should be reprivatized as soon as it's safe to do so, just as Sweden put banking back in the private sector after its big bailout in the early Nineties. But for now the important thing is to loosen up credit by any means at hand, without getting tied up in ideological knots. Nothing could be worse than failing to do what's necessary out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow "socialist."

The same goes for another line of approach to resolving the credit crunch: getting the Federal Reserve, temporarily, into the business of lending directly to the nonfinancial sector. The Federal Reserve's willingness to buy commercial paper is a major step in this direction, but more will probably be necessary.

All these actions should be coordinated with other advanced countries. The reason is the globalization of finance. Part of the payoff for US rescues of the financial system is that they help loosen up access to credit in Europe; part of the payoff to European rescue efforts is that they loosen up credit here. So everyone should be doing more or less the same thing; we're all in this together.

And one more thing: the spread of the financial crisis to emerging markets makes a global rescue for developing countries part of the solution to the crisis. As with recapitalization, parts of this were already in place during the autumn: the International Monetary Fund was providing loans to countries with troubled economies like Ukraine, with less of the moralizing and demands for austerity that it engaged in during the Asian crisis of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Fed provided swap lines to several emerging-market central banks, giving them the right to borrow dollars as needed. As with recapitalization, the efforts so far look as if they're in the right direction but too small, so more will be needed.

Even if the rescue of the financial system starts to bring credit markets back to life, we'll still face a global slump that's gathering momentum. What should be done about that? The answer, almost surely, is good old Keynesian fiscal stimulus.

Now, the United States tried a fiscal stimulus in early 2008; both the Bush administration and congressional Democrats touted it as a plan to "jump-start" the economy. The actual results were, however, disappointing, for two reasons. First, the stimulus was too small, accounting for only about 1 percent of GDP. The next one should be much bigger, say, as much as 4 percent of GDP. Second, most of the money in the first package took the form of tax rebates, many of which were saved rather than spent. The next plan should focus on sustaining and expanding government spending—sustaining it by providing aid to state and local governments, expanding it with spending on roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.

The usual objection to public spending as a form of economic stimulus is that it takes too long to get going—that by the time the boost to demand arrives, the slump is over. That doesn't seem to be a major worry now, however: it's very hard to see any quick economic recovery, unless some unexpected new bubble arises to replace the housing bubble. (A headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion captured the problem perfectly: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.") As long as public spending is pushed along with reasonable speed, it should arrive in plenty of time to help—and it has two great advantages over tax breaks. On one side, the money would actually be spent; on the other, something of value (e.g., bridges that don't fall down) would be created.

Some readers may object that providing a fiscal stimulus through public works spending is what Japan did in the 1990s—and it is. Even in Japan, however, public spending probably prevented a weak economy from plunging into an actual depression. There are, moreover, reasons to believe that stimulus through public spending would work better in the United States, if done promptly, than it did in Japan. For one thing, we aren't yet stuck in the trap of deflationary expectations that Japan fell into after years of insufficiently forceful policies. And Japan waited far too long to recapitalize its banking system, a mistake we hopefully won't repeat.

The point in all of this is to approach the current crisis in the spirit that we'll do whatever it takes to turn things around; if what has been done so far isn't enough, do more and do something different, until credit starts to flow and the real economy starts to recover.

And once the recovery effort is well underway, it will be time to turn to prophylactic measures: reforming the system so that the crisis doesn't happen again.

Financial Reform

"We have magneto trouble," said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn't working. He also said this: "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Both statements are as true now as they were then.

How did this second great colossal muddle arise? In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we redesigned the machine so that we did understand it, well enough at any rate to avoid big disasters. Banks, the piece of the system that malfunctioned so badly in the 1930s, were placed under tight regulation and supported by a strong safety net. Meanwhile, international movements of capital, which played a disruptive role in the 1930s, were also limited. The financial system became a little boring but much safer.

Then things got interesting and dangerous again. Growing international capital flows set the stage for devastating currency crises in the 1990s and for a globalized financial crisis in 2008. The growth of the shadow banking system, without any corresponding extension of regulation, set the stage for latter-day bank runs on a massive scale. These runs involved frantic mouse clicks rather than frantic mobs outside locked bank doors, but they were no less devastating.

What we're going to have to do, clearly, is relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression. I won't try to lay out the details of a new regulatory regime, but the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn't a crisis so that it doesn't take excessive risks. Since the 1930s commercial banks have been required to have adequate capital, hold reserves of liquid assets that can be quickly converted into cash, and limit the types of investments they make, all in return for federal guarantees when things go wrong. Now that we've seen a wide range of non-bank institutions create what amounts to a banking crisis, comparable regulation has to be extended to a much larger part of the system.

We're also going to have to think hard about how to deal with financial globalization. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis of the 1990s, there were some calls for long-term restrictions on international capital flows, not just temporary controls in times of crisis. For the most part these calls were rejected in favor of a strategy of building up large foreign exchange reserves that were supposed to stave off future crises. Now it seems that this strategy didn't work. For countries like Brazil and Korea, it must seem like a nightmare: after all that they've done, they're going through the 1990s crisis all over again. Exactly what form the next response should take isn't clear, but financial globalization has definitely turned out to be even more dangerous than we realized.

The Power of Ideas

As readers may have gathered, I believe not only that we're living in a new era of depression economics, but also that John Maynard Keynes—the economist who made sense of the Great Depression—is now more relevant than ever. Keynes concluded his masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with a famous disquisition on the importance of economic ideas: "Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

We can argue about whether that's always true, but in times like these, it definitely is. The quintessential economic sentence is supposed to be "There is no free lunch"; it says that there are limited resources, that to have more of one thing you must accept less of another, that there is no gain without pain. Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes's world—and ours—was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding.

We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

—November 20, 2008

Copyright © 2009, 1999 by Paul Krugman

what you see?

Pós materialistas

Vós fazeis viagens sem ter fito no destino
Nós vemos fotografias em revistas ou sofás
Pós de descobertas de lugares tão esquecidas após

Vós correis léguas em escadas rolantes
Nós trepamos colinas em escadas de pedra
Pós que sujam sapatos tão brilhantes já não após

Vós tendes três carros em garagem pessoal
Nós esperamos em filas para o passe mensal
Pós no pára-brisa que esperam sedentos após

Vós viveis cercados, filmando o que é fora
Nós amontoamo-nos em ruas que duram a hora
Pós tão presos que se desprendem das flores após

Vós morreis isolados da matéria fundamental
Nós mortos cansados de etérea ornamental
Pós materialistas somos todos, vós, nós, após

Janelas

São janelas. Tantas, fechadas, abertas, cobertas.
São elas que marcam o ritmo.
Umas seguidas por outras, acima, abaixo, ao lado.
Transformam muros em casas. Dão luz ao interior do sossego.
São a espinha dorsal de uma vida que se esconde, vista de fora.
Abertas, transformam em gruta a morada tão vetusta.
A graça é a minha janela sobre a cidade.
Daqui, vejo o mundo reflectido nas janelas da História,
símbolos erguidos no passado, construídos com suor.
A cada monumento associamos gente, um homem que o sonhou.
Mandado erguer, fez-se.

Nos vossos parapeitos, fincaram cotovelos as testemunhas do passado.
Depois de vós, outros fincaram e nelas se debruçaram.
Namoraram. Esperaram. Choraram. De vós saltaram. Acordaram.
Janelas negras. As do Carmo. Finas as da Estrela e do Castelo. Janelas.
Largas as de seda. Verdes as da Rua. Pequenas nas águas furtadas.
No cimo das casas belas noites passadas.

Cliché de Lisboa. Escrever numa esplanada.
São eles que estão de passagem.
Levarão a memória de um pôr de Sol na Graça.

Como escrever: biliões ou milhares de milhões?

1 000 000 000 000

Como escrever: biliões ou milhares de milhões?

A escrita dos grandes números obedece às regras aprovadas na 9ª Conferência Geral dos Pesos e Medidas (CGPM), em 1948. Estas regras foram adoptadas oficialmente em Portugal, pelas Portarias nºs 14 608 e 17 052, respectivamente de 11 de Novembro de 1953 e 4 de Março de 1959.
Assim, definiu-se que os milhões, biliões, etc. são formados de acordo com a regra “N”1:
Deste modo, tem-se:

1Nos EUA segue-se a regra “n-1”, originando sempre confusão na comunicação social, falado ou escrita, quando se refere “biliões” que na Europa são “milhares de milhões”

Sem o alto patrocínio do IPQ

(364) 365

352

Silêncio

Acabou mais uma vez.
No final apenas um um longo silêncio.
Esta Rocha dura e fria em que me transformei apenas grita o mudo adeus.
Por sabê-la tão perto, temo falar demasiado.
A proximidade amordaçante não permite que diga em voz alta que acabou.
Está tudo redito.

Da caneta não pingam palavras como era costume.
O meu silêncio secou a pena de escriba.
Será uma simples recusa solidária ou falta de tinta?
Se de falta se trata, maior será o meu problema.
Onde vou agora encontrar, à venda, a tinta do amor?
Procuro pacificar a alma escrevendo. Não consigo.
-Silêncio!
-??!
-A vossa vida atribulada perturba o meu silêncio.

Eu sei.

Eu-sô-rio.

Ó rio que corres por entre as pedras!

Foges da turbulência da tua nascente.

Jovem, com pressa em ser grande,

Não sabes que no fim da tua corrida,

Serás mar salgado, enorme, pesado e turbulento?

E que importa ao rio que, grande se desfaz,

Que se entrega de braços abertos ao oceano, em paz.

Terás memória suficiente para reconhecer

de que nascente és filho permanente?

És livre quando rio.

Corres desde fio

Até mar solto, profundo, frio.

Quantas vezes visitaste a nascente!

Diferente de ti sou, eu que embora quente,

Sou superfície sem espelho, tão indiferente.

Só corro, lento, parado por vezes.

Sem certeza de que mar será meu fim.

Diferente de ti, sendo eu água de ti,

Choro-te já turbulento, salgado, sem lamento.

Profunda tristeza nesta melancolia tranquilamente indiferente.

Eu, rio, sou mar e sou desalento.

Cada dia que se acaba eu aumento.

Etnologia

Todos os anos, fazemos uma viajem pelo espaço. Literalmente. Damos a volta ao sol em 365 dias mais seis horas e mais qualquer coisa em minutos e segundos. Alguém se dá conta disso? Passamos os dias a tentar perceber a mais velha de todas as leis, a Lei da Sobrevivência, e esquecemo-nos de que é a viagem em torno do Sol que nos mantém em movimento. A única verdadeira e Global viagem é aquela que fazemos todos os anos. Em torno do Sol, vamos girando como num carrocel de feira, ignorando o tempo e o espaço, as suas múltiplas dimensões, ora menor ora maior, ora mais perto ora mais longe, ignorando por completo as diferentes velocidades que o mundo contém. Temos uma imagem do nosso passado, individual ou colectivo, projectada num espaço, a Terra, num tempo, o da Cultura. Parece que nos esquecemos que a viagem vai mesmo terminar. Obedecemos mais facilmente a outros homens como nós do que às Leis Universais. 

A imagem que fazemos do futuro, ainda está presa pelos constrangimentos do nosso passado, sem entender o que se passa no presente. Viajamos às cegas, pensando que estamos parados.

Adamada

Adamada

.rasnep ervil od siaidnum soduef soa ecaf

oudívidni od oãçatrebil ad avitarran a odal

etse araP. No centro o indivíduo. Para este

lado a narrativa do mercado, capitalista,

aniquilador da liberdade de escolha,

conducente ao monopólio.

Longe...

Em estado de euforia,

Queria testar o desalento

Lembrei-me de recorrer à poesia

Como forma de fugir deste tormento


Longe do estado habitual, poderia?

Aproveito para espalhar ao vento,

Vozes infectadas com douta alegria

Deste lugar em que hoje me sento.


Toca o telefone, atende a velhinha.

Queria alguém mais novo, que fazer!?

Atende uma voz simpática, vizinha.


Posso pensar neste fado e cobri-lo de prazer

Ajuda a ganhar palha para levar a vidinha

Desta ou d'outra forma, estou longe do meu ser.

Em construção II

Todo o mundo e o resto que é nada...

Em construção...

Ah! Poema da minha alma...

Não

Turvo.

Pesado.

Arrastado.

Pendurado pelos suspensórios no ponteiro das horas.

Ainda se fosse no dos segundos!

Nem alucinante viagem nem pausada alegria.

Avanço, por sentir alvescer o pêlo, sei-o.

Cruel tortura. - A hora que não passa!

- Já de nada serve lamentar o avanço, sei-o.

Não servirei para estudo de historiador,

seria uma tarefa monótona, vazia.

A carcaça a ninguém servirá.

Nem abutres em repasto a quererão.

Na marquesa também não me encontrarão.

Vivo sou um peso e depois disso um peso.

Não quero sair deste ano em que completo 35

sem me erguer mais uma vez.

INAUGURAÇÃO

Nós que aqui estamos
Esta praça inauguramos
Vós que cá não estais
Queira Deus que vos salvais

Em honra de Zeca cantamos
Nesta praça estranha dançamos
Os primeiros sempre fomos
Os melhores de vós somos

Neste dia consagrado
O nosso registo fica marcado
Inaugurada praça estás
Por esta gente capaz

INAUGURAÇÃO LUMINOSA

Sombra enfim aqui chegaste
Filha da LUZ que nos faz
Seja este o dia em que por fim
És inaugurada pelo Querubim

O ser dentro de si

Surrealismo.
Perto do real.
Perto ou longe?
O perto que se afasta...
como quem foge,
de si. A sua imagem gasta
ouvi que morreu hoje
lê-lo mesmo sem percebê-lo. Vive. Basta.

26-11-06

Saiu. Não pretendia voltar mais.
A sua capacidade para viver tinha
excedido o limite aceitável.


O ser dentro de si existe.
Cérebro, frio.
Coração, vazio.
Músculos tesos
Ossos presos
A pele, solta, viçosa, é o tudo
que prende o ser dentro de si.
O que lhe dá forma é a memória
que de si tem.