Sector Financeiro

A City de Londres é o centro financeiro do mundo. O motor da economia britânica, em particular desde a década de 1980 com Margaret Thatcher à frente do país, assenta no sector bancário que representa cerca de 450% do PIB no Reino Unido, contra 300% em França e 100% nos Estados Unidos. Mas há quem duvide da sustentabilidade da City num contexto que mudou significativamente desde o início da crise global, ainda a arrastar-se na Europa. Por outro lado registou-se uma viragem do mundo dos negócios para os mercados asiáticos e emergentes, um fenómeno que já tem uma década. Em paralelo com o desenvolvimento económico desses países, novas plataformas financeiras estão a crescer, especialmente em Hong Kong e Singapura. O economista Scott Summer descreve como o dinheiro é criado na economia moderna. "!..Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy - through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. I hate the term modern.  The money directly produced or printed by the central bank is called base money. I don’t know about Britain, but in America the share of total money that is base money is actually higher than 100 years ago. So there is nothing “modern” about our current system ..."