Economic facts Vanishing

Justin Fanti

By Soto Hernando

In the second half of the 19th century, the major global economies have endured a series of brutal recession. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized in relations feudal, heritage and tribues. If you want to know who owned land or a debt, it is saved locally - and very probably from outsiders. At the same time, the world was in full expansion. Travel between cities and countries has become the most common and global trade has increased. The result was a huge gap between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a market economy globalizing and growing.

To avoid the breakdown of the industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of reformers creative concluded that the world needed a common set of facts. Knowledge must be gathered for the occasion, organized, standardized, registered, continuously updated and easily accessible - so that all players in the world of the enlargement of markets could, under the terms of the champion of the free banking of France Charles Coquelin, "pick up thousands of filaments which create companies between them."

The result was the invention of the first mass "systems of public memory" to record and classify - in records of rule-bound, certified and accessible to the public, titles, balance sheets and statements of account - all available relevant knowledge, if intangible (stocks)(, actesgrands books, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes, commercial paper), or tangible (land, buildings, ships, machinery, etc.). Knowing who owned and backwards and fixing these information in public documents, allowed investors to deduct the value, take risks and monitor the results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts".

Over the past 20 years, the Americans and Europeans have quietly passed on the destruction of these facts. Systems which could provide Governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis - and to prevent another - and markets are being eroded. Governments have allowed the shadow markets develop and attain a size beyond understanding. Mortgages have been granted and registered with this inattention that owners and banks often does not know and cannot prove ownership of their homes. A few decades Western undermine the 150 years of legal reforms that made possible the world economy.

The results are hardly surprising. To the United States trust is broken in between banks and holders of mortgages; between arresting officers and the courts; between banks and their investors - even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin "Trust") continues to run regularly, but closer examination shows that a contract of non-governmental credit. Private lending fell from 21 per cent since 2007. Outstanding loans to small businesses last more than 6% last year, while loans to large enterprises, measured in commercial loans in addition to $ 1 million, declined by 9%.

The importance of the economic facts may not be obvious to Americans. "That fish knows on the water in which it swims?" asked Albert Einstein. But it is easy to grasp in the perspective of the developing countries and former Communists where I live and work. In these countries, most of our assets and relationships are in the informal sector, outside the legal economy. Because they are not saved in memory public systems, they cannot be written as facts and are, indeed, invisible. We do the shadow markets.

Without standardization, the values of assets and relationships are so variable that they can not be used to ensure the credit, to generate mortgage loans, and to group them in securities, to represent the shares to raise capital. Neither them they correspond to the standard slots required to enter global markets. That is why credit crunches and massive unemployment are chronic diseases for most of the people forced to operate in the informal economy. It is those who you see for protesting in the streets of Arab countries or living in tents around Port - au-Prince. We do know that too well that the facts speak for themselves: they must be built through legal and kept process transparent. They must be defended, too.

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