La destrucción de los datos económicos

En un reciente ensayo, el economista peruano Hernando de Soto (director del Instituto para la Libertad y la Democracia) argumenta que una de las principales causas de la crisis financiera 2008 fue el debilitamiento de los sistemas de información de la propiedad privada en las principales economías.

Aquí encuentras el texto.

Aquí algunas de las principales ideas presentadas:

... The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts".

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded... Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible...

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