Pensando alto

O BR deve ser o país mais fácil de se evitar (adiar) uma crise.

Tem uma taxa de juros altíssima e impostos idem. Se o consumo cai, tem duas frentes onde pode-se atuar pra estimular os mercados. A primeira já começou.

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Projeto atingirá o crédito imobiliário e os depósitos FGTS

Possíveis mudanças importantes na poupança, FGTS e crédito imobiliário:
http://www.ecofinancas.com/noticias/projeto-atingira-credito-imobiliario-depositos-fgts

Brasília – A determinação da presidente Dilma Rousseff de mexer nos rendimentos da caderneta de poupança para facilitar a queda da taxa básica de juros (Selic) dos atuais 9% para até 8% nas próximas reuniões do Comitê de Política Monetária (Copom) implicará mudanças em outros pontos sensíveis: o financiamento da casa própria e o Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço (FGTS). As razões são claras. O crédito imobiliário para a classe média é bancado exclusivamente pelos depósitos na caderneta. De cada R$ 100 aplicados na mais tradicional modalidade de investimentos do país, no mínimo, R$ 65 devem ser obrigatoriamente destinados à casa própria. Além disso, as prestações são atualizadas pela Taxa Referencial (TR), que também corrige os recursos da poupança.

Pelos dois projetos preparados pelo Ministério da Fazenda, para alterar o ganho da caderneta, a TR será extinta. É aí que entra o FGTS. Por lei, o dinheiro dos trabalhadores é remunerado em 3% ao ano mais a TR. A tendência é de que os depósitos feitos pelas empresas passem a ter somente a taxa fixa, compatível, no entender de técnicos da equipe econômica, com a nova realidade de juros no país. “Todos terão de dar a sua cota de sacrifício, pois se ganhará de outro lado, com a diminuição dos juros dos empréstimos e financiamentos”, diz um assessor do Palácio do Planalto. “Não se pode esquecer que a possível diminuição do rendimento da caderneta e do FGTS será depois da vírgula. Já nos juros do crédito, o impacto é bem maior. Assim, a economia com as prestações cobrirá qualquer perda de rentabilidade”, acrescenta. Ele lembra que será esse o discurso difundido pelo governo para convencer a população de que está “fazendo o melhor para o país” e não um confisco da poupança, como houve em 1990, no governo Collor.

O Palácio do Planalto acredita que terá boas notícias a dar à classe média, que tanto preserva o patrimônio na poupança e recorre aos financiamentos habitacionais. Se a remuneração da caderneta diminuir um pouco e a TR for extinta, os juros cobrados no crédito imobiliário também poderão cair. “É com essa realidade que estamos trabalhando”, afirma um técnico do Ministério da Fazenda. A seu ver, tudo está apontando para o governo pôr fim ao entulho que ainda resta no mercado financeiro , ou seja, a indexação decorrente dos tempos de hiperinflação. “A TR é um deles”, acrescenta.

Distorção Para o economista Carlos Thadeu de Freitas Gomes, ex-diretor do Banco Central, as mudanças propostas pelo governo são bem-vindas. Mas para que realmente a população tire proveito delas é preciso que, efetivamente, a taxa básica caia e permaneça em um patamar baixo por um longo período. E isso exige um controle efetivo da inflação . “Se os ganhos da caderneta forem realmente atrelados à Selic, como estão dizendo, em um momento de elevação dessa taxa os ganhos da poupança vão aumentar assim como as prestações da casa própria”, ressalta.

Na sua avaliação, o debate sobre mudanças na estrutura de um sistema financeiro criado para conviver com uma inflação alta é importantíssimo. Mas, a seu ver, o governo deveria propor as alterações somente a partir do segundo semestre, quando, efetivamente, os consumidores terão a exata noção se o prometido corte de juros pelos bancos públicos e privados é para valer.

Trégua ao FMI

O ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega, aplaudiu ontem o compromisso anunciado pelo Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) de fazer reformas para ampliar o peso político dos emergentes no organismo. “É do jeito que nós queremos”, disse. Mas ele disse que não revelará o tamanho da contribuição do Brasil em um futuro aporte de recursos ao Fundo. O FMI tinha informado que levantou mais de US$ 430 bilhões junto a seus membros, sendo US$ 362 bi garantidos pelo Japão e países europeus.

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Off: IPCA x Deflator de PIB

Inspirado pelo equivalente argentino feito pelo Drunkeynesian, segue o brasileiro:

Fontes:
http://www.economaster.com.br/economia/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=255
http://www.portalbrasil.net/ipca.htm

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Is Brazil's property bubble about to burst?

Imprensa internacional ainda falando na possível bolha brasileira:

http://www.moneyweek.com/blog/is-brazils-property-bubble-about-to-burst-58412

This time four years ago, I wrote an article here about Brazilian property. I suggested that there was a reasonable chance that it might see the kind of boom that Spain saw back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Brazil was booming. Credit was becoming more freely available and property across the country looked relatively cheap. All the conditions were in place for a boom. No wonder then that Brazil got one.

Since 2008, GDP per head in Brazil has risen by not far off 50%. Wages have risen by roughly the same amount and employment is at record highs. The FT reports that head-hunted executives don’t get out of bed for less than a 30-50% increase in pay.

At the same time, mortgage lending has, in the words of Capital Economics, “exploded”, more than doubling as a percentage of GDP since 2005.

Brazil’s financial markets have deepened, but things have also been helped along, as is the modern way, by government efforts to increase homeownership among the 'less well off'. The 'Minha Casa Minha Life' scheme provides all manner of familiar-sounding incentives, from 100% loans, very low interest rates, loans for deposits and so on.

The result? Prices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have gone up 140% since 2008, while those in Brazil’s seven most important districts are up around 25% in the last year alone, says Capital.

Rents are up too. In Rio, average rents per square foot are up 35%. Clearly, house-price rises make sense given rising incomes and an expanding money supply. But might Brazil’s boom have now gone too far?

Capital thinks so. Look at a price-to-incomes ratio for São Paulo and Rio from 2008 and you will see that “house prices have increased at a far faster pace than incomes in recent years”. They have also out run nominal GDP quite substantially (50% vs 140%). “Ominously for Brazil” that was also the case for the UK, the US, Spain and Ireland before their own boom and busts. Moreover, while it is only one city (national data is hard to come by), prices in São Paulo are now above the average of emerging world city prices, while rental yields are below average.

So if it is a bubble, what might make it end? The hope is that it won’t have to end nastily – that it will deflate slowly via an adjustment in real prices (ie, average prices rise more slowly than nominal prices) as has sort of happened in the UK so far.

However, there is one thing that might make the transition nastier – a derailing of the Brazilian economy by a hard landing in China.

Either way, if you didn’t buy into Brazil four years ago, I suspect now might not be the time to take the plunge. It is fair to say that Capital Economics (rather like us) is prone to calling the end to bubbles a bit too early – Forbes reckons the bubble “has legs” until 2017. But better too early than too late.

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Motley Fool: History Says Your House May Not Be a Good Financial Investment

Com Robert Shiller:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/04/11/history-says-your-house-may-not-be-a-good-financia.aspx

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The Telegraph: Swimming naked in Brazil's bubbly waters

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9205775/Swimming-naked-in-Brazils-bubbly-waters.html

The Latin Tiger may have overtaken France, Italy, and Britain to become the world’s fifth largest economy on some measures but it has also been relegated to 126th place by the World Bank for 'ease of doing business', behind much of Africa. Cyclical warning signs are flashing amber across the board.

It is far from clear whether this 195m-strong cub of the BRICs quartet has broken out of the "middle income trap" after half a century of tantalizing efforts, each dashed by events.

Has Brazil’s profile been flattered once again by a resource boom, this time juiced by exports of iron-ore and soya to China, and a property bubble of Irish proportions?

The jury is out, even if we all accept that Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva - ex-Fiat car worker turned apostle of orthodoxy - did slay inflation and establish the Banco Central do Brasil as the Bundesbank of the Americas, and if we accept that the deep-water fields of the Campos Basin will eventually turn Brazil into the world’s fourth largest oil producer.

Knight Frank’s global survey shows that Brazil’s house prices rose 26pc last year, leading the world by far. The global average was 0.5pc.

"Prices are crazy," said Eduardo Paes, Rio’s mayor. Even 'favelas' are frothy as developers close in. A good slum is worth a four-bedroom house in Arizona - if you can prove ownership.

"Brazil is experiencing a typical housing bubble," said Samy Davy from the Getulio Vargas Foundation. "It risks widespread damage to the Brazilian financial system and economy as occurred in the US."

This is a hotly-disputed subject, explored on websites such as 'bolha imobiliaria' and 'Brazilian bubble'. Bulls say mortgage debt is low, so US comparisons are invalid. Yet the Minha Casa/Minha Vida scheme of 100pc mortgages from state-run Caixa Federal for poor families has a strong whiff of Fannie, Freddie, and America’s subprime.

Consultants Secovi-RJ said Rio property has risen 400pc to 700pc over the last decade, albeit from a low base. Average prices in the major cities have jumped 140pc since 2008, diverging from income growth in much the same way as the US, UK, and Spanish booms.

"We estimate that the market is overvalued by as much as 50pc," said Neil Shearing from Capital Economics. With luck, the bubble will "deflate slowly" as the economy motors at 3pc to 4pc and inflation erodes real debt.

The fear is that a Chinese hard-landing/credit contraction will intrude.

Brazil’s economy ground to halt late last year. It has since rebounded, but may struggle to repeat the great leap forward of the Lula years given the headwinds of a super-strong real (20pc overvalued says Goldman Sachs).

It is certainly far too strong for a country that has seen scant productivity gains for thirty years. Benjamin Steinbruch, head of Brazil’s steel group CSN, said it is now cheaper to bash metal in Germany.

Labour productivity has not remotely kept pace with China or the Asian tigers, which is why industrial output has almost halved to 14.6pc of GDP, a level last seen before the great industrialization drive of the of late 1950s. The country is becoming 'post-industrial' before it is rich.

President Dilma Rousseff - an urban guerrilla during the military dictatorship of the early 1970s - has blamed the real’s strength on a "monetary tsunami" of funds fleeing Anglo-Saxon QE in search of yield.

Her response is to throw up a screen of 40 protectionist barriers, with import surcharges and a Buy Brazil edict for procurement even where local products are 25pc more expensive. "We have to take measures to defend ourselves. We cannot let our manufacturing sector be cannibalized."

Ex-central bank chief Gustavo Franco said the policies are retrograde, damning the government’s "currency war" mantra as escapism. "They don’t seem to understand the real issues."

It is true that hot money has flooded the country, but this is because the central bank has kept rates at nose-bleed levels to offset the inflationary effects of government spending.

The fiscal error is not obvious at first sight since the budget deficit is under 3pc of GDP, but this was the case in Britain before the bubble burst. The commodity and credit cycle has disguised the rot.

Roberto Rigobon from MIT’s Sloan School said Brazil should have copied Chile and Norway, running fiscal surpluses of 8pc or 9pc of GDP - rotating the money into global assets through wealth funds.

Instead, Brazil has wasted much of its commodity bonanza subsidizing a bloated state, with "Greek" retirement at 54 and ruinous pension costs. A Santander study said Brazil has still "Cambodian-style" infrastructure.

Defenders of Lula retort that the GINI coefficient of social inequality has at least fallen to 54 from feudal levels of 60 a decade ago, and infant mortality rates have plummeted from the mid-20s to 17.

Brazil is not in imminent danger. Private credit will reach 58pc of GDP this year, up from 25pc of GDP in 2005. Debt service costs are 22pc of household disposable income, up from 18pc three years ago. These are not extreme levels by global standards.

Yet stress is showing. Non-performing loans for banks have reached 10.3pc, worse than during the post-Lehman shock of 2008-2009. Arrears of over 90 days on car loans have risen to 5pc.

"A recession next year is in the cards. Once the liquidity tide turns we will be able to see who is swimming naked," said Marcelo Ribeiro from Pentagono Asset Management.

Brazil has a hand of trump cards. Public debt is just 37pc of GDP. The central bank can slash rates - now 9.75pc - if need be. The country no longer owes debts in dollars. It holds $353bn (£223bn) in foreign reserves. It is an agrarian superpower in an era of scarce food supply.

Yet there is a jejune enthusiasm among those predicting that Brazil and fellow BRICs will keep advancing at breakneck pace and soon claim their crowns as the world’s dominant economic powers. Such extrapolations defy the time-honoured grip of political anthropology.

The equally plausible outcome is that the credit cycle in the emerging economies will turn down before the Old World has fully recovered. If so, pray.

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Brazilian Bubble: Capital Economics says “Brazil property market is overvalued by 50%”

Link Original

A research report called “Why Brazil’s property boom looks like a bubble”  was just published by our friends at Capital Economics (CE), and it notes that (surprise, surprise) Brazil is in the grip of a fully fledged house price bubble, with prices in Sao Paulo doubled since 2008 and in Rio tripled. The excellent 10-page report is probably  the best we’ve read about the issue, offering relevant data and thorough analysis, with no strings attached.
One can only imagine the challenges that Mr. Neil Shearing and company faced in writing such a report, considering that “data on residential property prices are patchy” and “any analysis of Brazil’s property market is more of an art than a science,” as they put it. We share some of their views below:
“There are several reasons why we would have expected to have seen a sharp rise in Brazilian house prices over the past five years. But even so the sheer scale of the recent jump in prices is difficult to justify. As things stand, we estimate that the market is overvalued by as much as 50%.For a start, the boom in Brazil’s economy over past few years has resulted in a surge in household incomes…. At the same time, the rapid development of a mortgage market has made housing finance easier and cheaper to access for millions of Brazilians… Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Brazil’s housing boom has gone too far.… our analysis suggests that house prices have increased out of all proportion to the rise in household incomes and the spread of mortgage finance. As a result, Brazilian housing now looks expensive relative to both incomes and rents, as well as property in other EMs.… history suggests that structural shifts in the availability of mortgages – both in terms of the volume of loans and the terms on which they are made – often lead to a sharp rise in the price of property. Given this, it is very likely that the spread of mortgage finance has justified at least part of the jump in house prices in Brazil over the past few years.Here [compared to the US and UK housing bubbles] it seems that the adjustment in the housing market will be more slow and gradual, with nominal prices falling moderately (or even stagnating) as incomes catch up. Looking ahead, Brazil’s ability to register relatively strong rates of nominal income growth should make it easier for the housing bubble to deflate slowly via an adjustment in real prices.”

Comentários:
- Observação sobre porcentagens: se algo está sobre-avaliado em 50% então precisa cair 33% pra voltar pro valor "justo".
- Comentário do Drunk lá no próprio post do Brazilian Bubble:
        “Will deflate slowly” = not a bubble.

Esse relatório (muito bom, diga-se de passagem) confirma uma impressão de alguns: tá tudo (muito) caro, mas não é uma bolha imobiliária no sentido tradicional (atenção bolhistas, não venham com 10 pedras na mão...).

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Dados de financiamento (ABECIP)

Dando prosseguimento à tediosa tarefa de acompanhar os dados do mercado, seguem os dados de financiamento imobiliário da ABECIP:

Total 2011:Valor total em R$ Milhoes: 79.916,9 (+42% sobre 2010)
Total de unidades: 492.908 (+17% sobre 2010)

Gritante a disparidade entre o aumento de valores e de quantidades...

Lembrando que são só os financiamentos com recursos de poupança, ainda tem outras fontes de recursos, sendo a principal o FGTS. E claro, não inclui os imoveis comprados à vista.

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Bola de cristal (ou jogando os dados)

Já que as pessoas gostam tanto de previsões, uma feita por mim mesmo há uns 7 meses:

jonas,
acho muito complicado prever esse tipo de coisa. Bolha só é óbvia depois de estourada (hindsight bias).
Mas... se eu fosse OBRIGADO (tipo, com uma arma na cabeça) a sair de cima do muro, eu chutaria que sobe mais uns 10% em 10 meses, depois cai uns 30% ou um pouco mais se as nuvens negras se tornarem uma tempestade mesmo. Chutes baseados na curva do Fipe-zap e na relação preço-aluguel.
Atenção: isso é só um exercício de futurologia, tão furado qto qq outro, e ninguém (além de mim mesmo) deve se basear apenas nisso pra tomar qq decisão.

Caso dê certo, colherei os louros da fama e capitalizarei em cima da sorte, caso esteja indo mal, posso ir ajustando a previsão de tempos em tempos pra calibrar a mira, conforme for chegando o prazo. (Qual o problema? Os profissionais do setor financeiro fazem isso direto, heheeh)

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Mudança de foco

Prezados leitores, venho fazer um comunicado muito importante:
a partir de hoje, o blog tomará um novo rumo, após muito pensar constatei que estava totalmente errado em minha visão e transformarei este espaço em um "site de torcida e consolo coletivo" (*), nos moldes do nosso guru.

Por isso, nada mais de gráficos, balanços, dados demográficos, ratios, yields, medianas, essas coisas chatas. Somente assistência psicológica e pseudo-análises de economistas de boteco para acalentar os ânimos daqueles que, como eu, levaram uma invertida do mercado e não quiseram se endividar "pra sempre", e agora não tem mais opção além de torcer.

Sendo assim todos os dados, fatos ou números contrários ao imaginário bolhista serão solenemente ignorados e seus autores detratados com toda a gentileza e educação que somente os "primeiro-mundistas" possuem, ao se referirem aos pobres desgraçados bananenses.

Depoimentos pessoais são bem vindos e valem muito mais do que pesquisas (afinal todo mundo sabe que amostra de 1 é melhor que de 10.000...).

Espero que entendam.

Abs

(*) aka Site de covardes que criticam tudo e todos, somente pelas costas, ou reduto de arrogância e desajuste ou ainda confraria de lunáticos. Obrigado leitores pelas definições.

Update:
Olha o que acontece quando se é linkado no bolha:

E a quantidade de comentários relevantes/inteligentes que agregam? Percebeu o meu ponto Carlos Wagner?

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