Cât timp vom mai avea TVA de 19%
Executivul ar putea fi nevoit să majoreze taxa pentru a-şi rotunji veniturile bugetare. Pentru a scăpa de scumpiri, trebuie tăiate cheltuielile bugetare cu personalul şi investiţiile.
Angajamentul ambiţios pe care actualul guvern şi l-a luat în faţa naţiunii că în 2010 nu va creşte niciunul dintre impozitele importante devine tot mai greu de îndeplinit.
În fapt, în loc să ne revenim, criza se adânceşte pe zi ce trece: şomajul creşte, firmele îşi închid porţile, iar „arbitrii” îşi reduc miza pe care au pus-o pe România. Dacă iniţial Fondul Monetar Internaţional (FMI) prognoza o creştere economică de 1,3% pentru anul acesta, joi, şi-a redus-o la 0,8%.
Rezultatele din trimestrul al patrulea din 2009 au fost mai proaste decât s-au aşteptat economiştii, a explicat Mihai Tănăsescu, reprezentantul României la FMI. El a mai spus, citat de Mediafax, că serviciile au continuat să performeze slab, consumul încă nu dă semne de revenire şi „în aceste condiţii, nici TVA nu va evolua bine”.
Bilanţul primelor două luni din an arată deplorabil: un deficit bugetar de 1,1% din PIB, cheltuieli cu 5,8% mai mari şi venituri cu 3% mai mici decât în aceeaşi perioadă din 2009. Încasările din TVA s-au redus, în mod ironic, chiar cu 19%.
Când va creşte taxa?
În acest sens, părerile analiştilor şi ale consultanţilor sunt împărţite. Analistul economic Ilie Şerbănescu este foarte categoric: „Creşterea TVA este obligatorie. Ar fi fost mult mai bine să o fi făcut demult. Că le convine sau nu politicienilor e o altă problemă”.
La argumentul că ar aduce o lovitură consumului, Şerbănescu răspunde că „supraconsumul în raport cu posibilităţile şi producţia României este prima boală a ţării”.
Cu cât să crească? „Cu 5 puncte procentuale: două să le folosim pentru a creşte încasările bugetare, iar trei pentru a reduce contribuţiile sociale care ar face mai prietenoasă impozitarea forţei de muncă”, explică analistul.
Hotărârea privind majorarea TVA mare dublată de cea privind reducerea contribuţiilor sociale sunt soluţiile pe care le recomandă şi specialiştii companiei de consultanţă şi audit KPMG.
„Decizia trebuie luată, spre exemplu, în combinaţie cu scăderea contribuţiilor sociale. Creşterea TVA cu un punct procentual trebuie însoţită de scăderea cu două puncte a contribuţiilor sociale”, a declarat recent Ramona Jurubiţă, partener al diviziei de servicii fiscale a KPMG. În opinia sa, nu vom putea evita creşterea TVA din 2011.
Factură socială uriaşă
Emlian Duca, partener al BDO Tax, susţine că, dacă autorităţile decid să crească taxele importante, trebuie să o facă repede.
„Orice întârziere ne va costa mai mult ulterior, căci dacă nu reuşim să reducem cheltuielile trebuie să creştem veniturile”, a explicat Duca.
La rândul său, Ionuţ Dumitru, economistul- şef al Raiffeisen Bank, speră că guvernul va reuşi să taie cheltuielile „cu factura socială prea mare” şi că, astfel, nu va mai fi nevoie de creşterea veniturilor la vistieria statului.
„Creşterea TVA în perioadă de recesiune economică este o soluţie care nu e deloc optimă. Este cel mai prost moment posibil”, comentează Dumitru.
Decade
This week, ABC News World News with Diane Sawyer is airing a series about the struggling middle class. The show's producers posed the following question to a few of the nation's leading economic and financial analysts, including UMKC's own William K. Black.
QUESTION: As the nation's largest banks have regained their footing, what, if anything, can or should they do to help Americans still struggling as a result of the financial crisis and recession? Are there specific solutions or actions the banks should take or HAVE they already done enough? Do the banks have an "ethical obligation" to help those average American families still struggling?
ANSWER: First, banks have not recovered. It is essential to remember that the banks used their political clout last year to induce Congress to extort the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the accounting rules such that banks no longer have to recognize losses on their bad assets unless and until they sell them. Absent this massive accounting abuse, hiding over a trillion dollars in losses, banks would (overall) not be reporting these fictional "profits" and would not be permitted to award the exceptional executive bonuses that they have paid out.
Second, banks have, in reality (as opposed to their fictional accounting ala Lehman) been suffering large losses for at least five years. They only appeared to be profitable in 2005-2007 because they provided only trivial loss reserves (slightly over 1%) while making nonprime loans that, on average, suffer roughly 50% losses. Loss reserves fell for five straight years as bank risks exploded during those same five years. Had they reserved properly for their losses the industry would have reported large losses no later than 2005.
Third, banks have performed dismally when they were supposedly profitable. They funded the nonprime and the commercial real estate (CRE) bubbles that not only cause trillions of dollars of losses and the Great Recession, but also misallocated assets (physical and human) during those bubbles. Far too few societal resources went to productive investments that would increase productivity and employment. Our nation has critical shortages of workers with expertise in physics, engineering, and mathematics -- precisely the categories that we misallocated to finance instead of science and production. In finance, they (net) destroyed wealth by creating "mark to myth" financial models that maximized executive bonuses by inflating asset values and understating risk.
Fourth, when finance seems to be working well in the modern era it is working badly. Finance is a "middleman." Its sole function is to allocate capital to the most useful and productive purposes in the real economy. As with any middleman, the goal is to have the middleman be as small and take as little profit as possible. Finance has not functioned that way. It has gone from roughly 5% of total profits to roughly 40% of total profits. That means that finance has, increasingly, become wildly inefficient. It is a morbidly obese parasite (in economics terms) that drains capital from the productive sectors of the economy.
Fifth, the things that finance is good at are harmful to our nation. Finance is very good at exporting U.S. jobs to other nations. Finance is very good at fostering immense speculation. When banks "win" their speculative bets Americans suffer, e.g., when their speculation increases gas and food prices. When they lose their bets the American people bail them out. (The least they could do would be to support the proposed Volcker rules. In reality, of course, they will gut them.) For the overwhelmingly majority of Americans, increased speculation simply causes economic injury. In very poor countries, however, "successful" speculation by hedge funds that runs up the price of basic food kills people. Speculation has also become intensely political. The right wing Greek parties engaged in accounting fraud to allow Greece to issue the Euro. When a left wing Greek party defeated the right at the polls the banks and hedge funds decided to engage in a speculative frenzy designed to cripple the nation's recovery from recession. Finance is also superb at increasing inequality.
Sixth, the rise of "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs) that the government will not allow to fail optimizes moral hazard (fraud and speculation) and means that future crises will be common and unusually severe.
Seventh, while lending by smaller banks is flat, funding by SDIs fell by over $1/2 trillion.
Eighth, banking theory is horribly flawed. Financial markets are normally not "efficient", markets do not inevitably "clear," and banks fund "accounting control frauds" rather than providing effective "private market discipline."
To sum it up, whether I'm wearing my economics, law, regulatory, or white-collar criminologist hat the situation in banking demands prompt, fundamental reform so that banking will stop being so harmful. Then we have to keep working to make it helpful.
Banks cannot do many of the things that need to be done to fix our economy. In the interest of limiting space, I'll talk about only five economic priorities. I think banks can be helpful in only a few of these priorities. The most important thing we can do with financial institutions is reduce the damage they cause.
1) It is nuts that we think it is OK for 8 million Americans to lose their jobs (and far more lose their ability to work full time) and that we think that it makes sense to pay people not to work but is "socialism" to pay them to work during a Great Recession. We need a government-funded jobs program.
2) It is a disgrace that well over 20% of American children grow up in poverty. It is a greater moral failing that ending this is not a national priority. The banks have done a terrible job in this sphere. They caused the greatest loss of working class wealth since the Great Depression and have made tens of thousands homeless. This is overwhelmingly the product of what the FBI began warning of in 2004 -- and "epidemic" of mortgage fraud. The FBI states that 80% of the fraud is driven by finance industry insiders.
3) It is insanity to the nth to run our state and local governments into massive cutbacks during a Great Recession when that undercuts the need for stimulus. The obvious answer is a public policy with impeccable Republican origins -- revenue sharing. It passes all understanding that the Republicans and blue dog Democrats targeted revenue sharing for attack and reduced it to a pittance (relative to the scale of the crisis). The best things the banks could do in this regard are to stop (a) all participation in "pay to play" corruption involving state & local bond issuances, and (b) stop all sales of unsuitable financial products to governments (and the public). The opposite is happening: Goldman fleeces its public sector clients, the SDIs sell toxic derivatives to small Scandinavian cities, the investment bankers are all over public pension funds desperate for higher yields (on their underfunded pension funds) selling them grotesquely unsuitable financial products (typically, the "dogs" they can't unload on more sophisticated investors), and the inimitable Goldman Sachs helping Greek governments deceive the EU.
4) Related to points two and three above, the most productive investment we can make is educating superbly the coming generations. The best thing the banks can do is get out of student lending. The governmental lending program for college students was administered in a much cheaper fashion. The privatized lending program is an inefficient scandal that keeps on giving.
5) Banks could put the payday lenders out of business by outcompeting them. That would be a real public service.
And, on a level of fantasy, banks as a group could tell FASB to restore honesty in accounting. Individual banks could report their real losses and change their executive compensation systems to accord with the premises that purportedly underlie performance pay. They could start making criminal referrals against the mortgage frauds (a mere 25 banks and S&Ls make over 80% of the total criminal referrals for mortgage fraud) -- most banks refuse to file and help us jail the crooks. They could stop adding to the glut in commercial real estate. They could support the Kaptur bill to authorize the FBI to hire an additional 1000 agents so that we can investigate and jail elite financial felons. They could support a prompt end to the existence of systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) by supporting rules and regulatory policies to require them to shrink to the point that they no longer endanger the global economic system. Pinch me if any of these dreams come true. I'd like to be awake to experience and celebrate the miracle
Source:http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-do-our-nations-biggest-banks-owe.html
European Debts Wars
Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia's debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.
All these debts are unpayably high because most of these countries are running deepening trade deficits and are sinking into depression. Now that real estate prices are plunging, trade deficits are no longer financed by an inflow of foreign-currency mortgage lending and property buyouts. There is no visible means of support to stabilize currencies (e.g., healthy economies). For the past year these countries have supported their exchange rates by borrowing from the EU and IMF. The terms of this borrowing are politically unsustainable: sharp public sector budget cuts, higher tax rates on already over-taxed labor, and austerity plans that shrink economies and drive more labor to emigrate.
Bankers in Sweden and Austria, Germany and Britain are about to discover that extending credit to nations that can't (or won't) pay may be their problem, not that of their debtors. No one wants to accept the fact that debts that can't be paid, won't be. Someone must bear the cost as debts go into default or are written down, to be paid in sharply depreciated currencies, but many legal experts find debt agreements calling for repayment in euros unenforceable. Every sovereign nation has the right to legislate its own debt terms, and the coming currency re-alignments and debt write-downs will be much more than mere "haircuts."
There is no point in devaluing, unless "to excess" – that is, by enough to actually change trade and production patterns. That is why Franklin Roosevelt devalued the US dollar by 41% against gold in 1933, raising its official price from $20 to $35 an ounce. And to avoid raising the U.S. debt burden proportionally, he annulled the "gold clause" indexing payment of bank loans to the price of gold. This is where the political fight will occur today – over the payment of debt in currencies that are devalued.
Another byproduct of the Great Depression in the United States and Canada was to free mortgage debtors from personal liability, making it possible to recover from bankruptcy. Foreclosing banks can take possession of collateral real estate, but do not have any further claim on the mortgagees. This practice – grounded in common law – shows how North America has freed itself from the legacy of feudal-style creditor power and the debtors' prisons that made earlier European debt laws so harsh.
The question is, who will bear the loss? Keeping debts denominated in euros would bankrupt much local business and real estate. Conversely, re-denominating these debts in local depreciated currency will wipe out the capital of many euro-based banks. But these banks are foreigners, after all – and in the end, governments must represent their own home electorates. Foreign banks do not vote.
Foreign dollar holders have lost 29/30th of the gold value of their holdings since the United States stopped settling its balance-of-payments deficits in gold in 1971. They now receive less than a thirtieth of this, as the price has risen to $1,100 an ounce. If the world can take that, why shouldn't it take the coming European debt write-downs in stride?
There is growing recognition that the post-Soviet economies were structured from the start to benefit foreign interests, not local economies. For example, Latvian labor is taxed at over 50% (labor, employer, and social tax) – so high as to make it noncompetitive, while property taxes are less than 1%, providing an incentive toward rampant speculation. This skewed tax philosophy made the "Baltic Tigers" and central Europe prime loan markets for Swedish and Austrian banks, but their labor could not find well-paying work at home. Nothing like this (or their abysmal workplace protection laws) is found in the Western European, North American or Asian economies.
It seems unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that large sectors of the New European population can be made subject to salary garnishment throughout their lives, reducing them to a lifetime of debt peonage. Future relations between Old and New Europe will depend on the Eurozone's willingness to re-design the post-Soviet economies on more solvent lines – with more productive credit and a less rentier-biased tax system that promotes employment rather than asset-price inflation that drives labor to emigrate. In addition to currency realignments to deal with unaffordable debt, the indicated line of solution for these countries is a major shift of taxes off labor onto land, making them more like Western Europe. There is no just alternative. Otherwise, the age-old conflict-of-interest between creditors and debtors threatens to split Europe into opposing political camps, with Iceland the dress rehearsal.
Until this debt problem is resolved – and the only way to resolve it is to negotiate a debt write-off – European expansion (the absorption of New Europe into Old Europe) seems over. But the transition to this future solution will not be easy. Financial interests still wield dominant power over the EU, and will resist the inevitable. Gordon Brown already has shown his colors in his threats against Iceland to illegally and improperly use the IMF as a collection agent for debts that Iceland doesn't legally owe, and to blackball Icelandic membership in the EU.
Confronted with Mr. Brown's bullying – and that of Britain's Dutch poodles – 97% of Icelandic voters opposed the debt settlement that Britain and the Netherlands sought to force down the throat of Althing members last month. This high a vote has not been seen in the world since the old Stalinist era. It is only a foretaste. The choice that Europe ends up making will likely drive millions into the streets. Political and economic alliances will shift, currencies will crumble and governments will fall. The European Union and indeed, the international financial system will change in ways yet to be seen. This will be especially the case if nations adopt the Argentina model and refuse to make payment until steep discounts are made.
Paying in euros – for real estate and personal income streams in negative equity, where the debts exceed the current value of income flows available to pay mortgages or for that matter, personal debts – is impossible for nations that hope to maintain a modicum of civil society. "Austerity plans" IMF and EU style is an antiseptic, technocratic jargon for life-shortening and killing impact of gutting income, social services, spending on health on hospitals, education and other basic needs, and selling off public infrastructure for buyers to turn nations into "tollbooth economies" where everyone is obliged to pay access prices for roads, education, medical care and other costs of living and doing business that have long been subsidized by progressive taxation in North America and Western Europe.
The battle lines are being drawn regarding how private and public debts are to be repaid. For nations that balk at repayment in euros, the creditor nations have their "muscle" waiting in the wings: the credit rating agencies. At the first sign a nation is balking in paying in hard currency, or even at the first hint of it questioning a foreign debt as improper, the agencies will move in to reduce a nation's credit rating. This will increase the cost of borrowing and threaten to paralyze the economy by starving it for credit.
The most recent shot was fired n April 6 when Moody's downgraded Iceland's debt from stable to negative. "Moody's acknowledged that Iceland might still achieve a better deal in renewed negotiations, but said the current uncertainty was hurting the country's short-term economic and financial prospects."
The fight is on. It should be an interesting decade.
Source: Financial Times
