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Vinícius Mota, Folha de SP

    

A presidente Dilma Rousseff atolou na resposta ao semanário britânico "The Economist", que na última edição pediu a cabeça do ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega. Revista estrangeira não influencia o governo eleito pela população brasileira, parece ter dito a mandatária, em fraseado confuso.

Além de ter mobilizado o velho repertório do nacionalismo bravateiro para contrapor-se a uma simples opinião, Dilma tentou atingir a revista criticando o desempenho da economia na Europa. Como se a "Economist" fosse o órgão central de propaganda da União Europeia.

Esse pequeno vexame foi manifestação eloquente da falta de traquejo com o contraditório por parte da presidente da quarta maior democracia mundial. Como se diz popularmente, o uso prolongado do cachimbo entorta a boca.

Na primeira metade do mandato, Dilma Rousseff expôs-se pouquíssimas vezes a entrevistas com a imprensa, quer individuais, quer coletivas. Sob a batuta dos marqueteiros que administram a imagem presidencial, permanece tempo demais cercada de bajuladores e de gente incapaz de questionar suas decisões.

Daí o despreparo para enfrentar a crítica --e para entender que ela é da natureza do jogo democrático.

O hiperpresidencialismo brasileiro do século 21 avança pouco, para não dizer que retrocede, nesse aspecto. A palavra do chefe de Estado surge quase como uma graça a ser oferecida com parcimônia e benevolência aos súditos --de preferência em ambientes controlados, onde o presidente discursa, mas não dialoga.

Era de esperar o contrário. Prestar contas é uma obrigação do governante, a quem foi concedido o mandato popular, e um direito da sociedade, que o concedeu. Parte dessa prestação de contas precisa ser feita no entrechoque com perguntas críticas às decisões, aos resultados e aos rumos do governo. Do contrário, será mera propaganda.

Sai daí, Mantega!

A dupla está rindo de que? 

Rodrigo Constantino, para o Instituto Liberal

A ficha já caiu para quase todo mundo. A política econômica do governo Dilma é terrível. Excessivamente intervencionista – conseqüência da ideologia arrogante daqueles que pensam ser possível controlar os mercados de cima para baixo –, a postura do governo afugentou os investidores, enquanto a estratégia de estimular o consumo com o crédito público já se esgotou.

O resultado é esse que está aí: crescimento pífio com inflação elevada. Alguns ainda tentam salvar a imagem de pragmática da presidente, alegando que o problema está na comunicação com o mercado. E dizem que ela é pró-mercado, oferecendo como evidência as demandas atendidas dos grupos de interesse como a Fiesp (mercado?).

A revista britânica The Economist, que já foi usada pelos petistas como prova do sucesso de seu governo na época das vacas gordas, resolveu colocar a presidente contra a parede: se ela é mesmo pragmática, então precisa demonstrar isso demitindo o ministro Guido Mantega. Claro que a reação dos petistas, dessa vez, não será tão amigável. Já tem gente mandando o recado de que não é a revista quem cuida da economia brasileira.

De fato não é. Quem cuida tampouco é o Mantega, mais perto de uma marionete. Sabemos que é a própria Dilma quem toca o barco e chancela tamanho intervencionismo arbitrário. Ela acredita nisso, e deve insistir no erro. Portanto, não basta demitir o Mantega. Sim, ele deveria pedir para sair. Mas tinha que levar junto com ele a presidente Dilma também. Só assim nossa economia teria uma chance de sair da mediocridade completa.

Economist recomenda demissão de Mantega

Deu na The Economist: "Business is cautious because the government meddles too much. A prime example is its apparent desire to drive down the return on investment by diktat, not just for banks but also for electricity companies and other infrastructure-providers. Even more than her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Ms Rousseff seems to believe that the state should direct private investment decisions. Such micro-meddling undermines trust in macroeconomic policy as well. […] The worry is that the president herself is meddler-in-chief. But she insists she is pragmatic. If so, she should fire Mr Mantega, whose over-optimistic forecasts have lost investors’ confidence, and appoint a new team capable of regaining the trust of business."

E então, qual vai ser, presidenta? Vai demitir o Mantega, ou vai confessar que não é pragmática coisa alguma, e sim uma crente do estatismo tosco?

Eu nunca caí nessa. Dilma é quem manda. Leiam:

O fator ideológico

Here we go again

Buttonwood, The Economist

THE pattern is eerily familiar. Investors start the year in a blaze of optimism, hoping that the euro zone has been stabilised and that the American economy is growing strongly. By the late spring, the latest example of euro-zone “make and mend” policies shows signs of fraying and the American recovery is proving less robust than hoped. The same description of events applies to both 2011 and 2012, even if last year’s market correction was also triggered by special factors—the terrible damage resulting from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, along with the Libyan civil war.

This year’s rally really began in late November, and got much of its impetus from the €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) in three-year loans made by the European Central Bank to the region’s banking system. But the effect of the ECB’s liquidity package has quickly worn off. The MSCI World stockmarket index had gained 12.6% at one stage this year but has seen that advance cut to 2.7%. In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 has fallen by 6% in dollar terms; Spanish shares are off by 21%.

Investors have retreated to the safety of selected government bonds. Since the start of 2012, the yields on British and German ten-year government bonds have fallen to levels that are pretty much unprecedented; French yields are a third of a point lower. American yields have fallen, too, but not by as much. The yields on ten-year Bunds are now almost 40 basis points lower than those on Treasuries.

In the periphery the government of Mario Monti in Italy has been more successful in calming the markets than that of Mariano Rajoy in Spain. At the start of the year Italian ten-year yields were almost 150 basis points higher than those of Spain; now they are around 45 basis points lower (see chart). But both are again moving in the wrong direction.

In many ways, the debt crisis confronts euro-zone leaders with a dilemma similar to that facing governments when the banking sector crumbled in 2007 and 2008. Back then, policymakers were forced to distinguish between those banks that were illiquid and just needed emergency loans, and those that were insolvent and needed injections of capital. For a time the authorities appeared to be clueless about this distinction, causing investor alarm. But the American authorities in particular managed to draw a line under their financial crisis by injecting new capital into the (sometimes unwilling) banks and by showing that those banks could pass fairly rigorous stress tests in May 2009. A vigorous equity rally duly occurred.

In contrast, Europe’s leaders have spent much of the past two years treating Greece as a liquidity problem when it is really insolvent. Some of the country’s debts have been forgiven, but not enough. Of course, Europe’s problems are more deep-seated than America’s, thanks to the principal flaw in the euro’s design: that it is a single currency operating in a continent without fiscal union. Politically, it is very hard to reach quick decisions when 17 governments are involved.

But even those countries that are not in the zone have failed to generate the kind of rapid economic growth that has marked previous recoveries. Corporate profits have held up pretty well in the circumstances, which is one reason why the markets are still well ahead of their 2009 levels. But the corollary of those high profits has been depressed real wages, which have weighed on consumer demand. And companies have so far tended to sit on their cash, rather than invest in new plant and equipment or hire new workers.

All this has left the markets desperately waiting for a new “hit” from their central banks, in the form of quantitative easing or additional liquidity support. Each central-bank statement is closely analysed for signs of change, rather as Kremlinologists used to study Politburo photographs for hints of leadership reshuffles.

Like the adrenalin injected into an overdosing Uma Thurman’s heart in “Pulp Fiction”, these central-bank boosts usually provoke an immediate market reaction. But a repeated regime of heroin and adrenalin injections hardly makes for a healthy lifestyle. While it lasts central-bank action means that equity markets are unlikely to crash, since the yields on cash and bonds are so low. At a conference this week organised by Morningstar, a research firm, one fund manager pointed out that Royal Dutch Shell shares yield 4.8%, whereas its bonds pay just 1.5%. But the prospect of markets standing on their own two feet—of surviving without the crutch of massive monetary easing—looks as far away as ever.

Leviatã capitalista

Rodrigo Constantino

A revista The Economist traz em sua última edição uma reportagem de capa sobre o avanço do capitalismo de estado nos países emergentes. A matéria disseca em várias páginas este “novo” modelo, fazendo um grande esforço para enxergar o lado positivo dele. Argumenta que há mudanças em relação ao passado, como uma maior profissionalização nas estatais ou o uso dos mercados de capitais para alavancar estas empresas.

Mas, mesmo sob uma lente obsequiosa, as conclusões da revista britânica não são nada favoráveis ao capitalismo de estado. Ele fomenta o “capitalismo de compadres”, onde governantes escolhem os amigos vencedores, prejudicando todas as outras empresas. Ele acaba engessando a “destruição criadora”, limitando as inovações dinâmicas. Ele causa grandes estragos sob governos incompetentes. Ele estimula bastante a corrupção e o autoritarismo, concentrando poder demais em poucos governantes. E por aí vai.

A revista conclui, portanto, que as desvantagens superam as vantagens, e que as falhas do modelo levam alguns anos até ficarem evidentes. Se as estatais são tão eficientes e competitivas como se argumenta, então mais um motivo para que não precisem do apoio estatal. Subsídios e protecionismo servem para garantir sobrevida aos incapazes de competir no livre mercado.

A conclusão da revista é óbvia para qualquer brasileiro mais atento, cansado de conhecer as desgraças do capitalismo de estado. Podem ter algumas mudanças no cenário que limitam o estrago do modelo, como uma maior abertura comercial e a presença de investidores estrangeiros atentos. Mas nada disso pode alterar sua essência, que será sempre a ineficiência. Faltam os mecanismos adequados de incentivo, presentes somente no capitalismo de livre mercado.

Para quem tiver interesse em se aprofundar no tema, recomendo a leitura do livro “The Commanding Heights”, de Daniel Yergin e Joseph Stanislaw. Ele não é novo, mas tampouco o agora reverenciado capitalismo de estado o é.

The dangers of demonology

Coluna Schumpeter, The Economist

Hatred of bankers is one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous prejudices

HURLING brickbats at bankers is a popular pastime. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement and its various offshoots complain that a malign 1%, many of them bankers, are ripping off the virtuous 99%. Hollywood has vilified financiers in “Wall Street”, “Wall Street 2”, “Too Big to Fail” and “Margin Call”. Mountains of books make the same point without using Michael Douglas.

Anger is understandable. The financial crisis of 2007-08 has produced the deepest recession since the 1930s. Most of the financiers at the heart of it have got off scot-free. The biggest banks are bigger than ever. Bonuses are flowing once again. The old saw about bankers—that they believe in capitalism when it comes to pocketing the profits and socialism when it comes to paying for the losses—is too true for comfort.

But is the backlash in danger of going too far? Could fair criticism warp into ugly prejudice? And could ugly prejudice produce prosperity-destroying policies? A glance at history suggests that we should be nervous.

Scorn for moneymen has a long pedigree. Jesus expelled the moneychangers from the Temple. Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Muhammad banned usury. The Jews referred to interest as neshek—a bite. The Catholic church banned it in 1311. Dante consigned moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell—the one also populated by the inhabitants of Sodom and “other practisers of unnatural vice”.

For centuries the hatred of moneylending—of money begetting more money—went hand in hand with a hatred of rootlessness. Cosmopolitan moneylenders were harder to tax than immobile landowners, governments grumbled. In a diatribe against the Rothschilds, Heinrich Heine, a German poet, fumed that money “is more fluid than water and less steady than air.”

This prejudice has proven dangerous. Without money to grease them, the wheels of commerce turn slowly or not at all. Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty. In 1000 western Europe’s share of global GDP was 11.1% compared with the Middle East’s 8.6%. By 1700 western Europe had a 13.5% share compared with the Middle East’s 3.4%.

The rise of banking has often been accompanied by a flowering of civilisation. Artists and academics railing against the “agents of the Apocalypse” might also learn from history. Great financial centres have often been great artistic centres—from Florence in the Renaissance to Amsterdam in the 17th century to London and New York today. Countries that have chased away the moneylenders have been artistic deserts. Where would New York’s SoHo be without Wall Street? Or the great American universities without the flow of gold into their coffers?

Prejudice against financiers can cause non-economic damage, too. Throughout history, moneylenders have been persecuted. Ethnic minorities—most obviously the Jews in Europe and America but also the Chinese in Asia—have clustered in the financial sector first because they were barred from more “respectable” pursuits and later because success begets success. At times, anti-banking prejudice has acquired a strong tinge of ethnic hatred.

In medieval Europe Jews were persecuted not only because they were not Christians but also because killing them was a quick way to expunge debts. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family, regarded Jews as the embodiments of capitalism who could only be rescued from their ancestral curse through revolution. The forgers of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” wanted people to believe that Jewish financiers were engaged in a fiendish global conspiracy. Louis McFadden, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930s, claimed that “the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” The same canards have been used against Chinese minorities across Asia.

This is not to say that the Occupy protesters are guilty of ethnic prejudice: they belong to a class and a generation that is largely free from such vices. But demonisation can easily mutate into new forms. In the August issue of the Journal of Business Ethics one Clive Boddy argues that the financial sector has been taken over by psychopaths: “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry”, lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings of sympathy or empathy for other people”.

Caged emotions

Railing against the 1%—particularly when so many of them work for companies with names like Goldman Sachs and N.M. Rothschild—can unleash emotions that are difficult to cage. A survey in the Boston Review in 2009 found that 25% of non-Jewish Americans blamed Jews for the financial crisis, with a higher percentage among Democrats than Republicans. Ethnic hatreds are even rawer in parts of Asia. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 sparked murderous riots against rich Chinese in places such as Indonesia. Today, the combination of hard times and harsh rhetoric could also produce something nasty.

The crisis of 2008 showed that global finance requires tough medicine. Banks must be forced to hold bigger reserves. “Weapons of mass destruction” must be defused. The culture of short-term incentives needs to be revised. But demonising bankers will not solve these problems—and may well, if unchecked, bring a lot of ancient ugliness back to life.

Among the dinosaurs

France’s Socialists have yet to come to terms with the modern world

The Economist

BLISS is it in a financial crisis to be a socialist. Or so it ought to be. In speculators and ratings agencies, Europe’s left has a ready cast of villains and rogues. In simmering social discontent, it has an energising force. A recent issue of Paris-Match inadvertently captured the mood: page after full-colour page on Britain’s rioting underclass were followed by gory visual detail of the bling yachts crowding into the bay near Saint-Tropez. Time, surely, to put social inclusion before defiant decadence.

The oddity is that almost everywhere the European left is in decline. Among the large countries, Socialist parties rule only in Spain, where they look likely to lose November’s election. The only big place where the left has a good chance of returning to power is France, at next spring’s presidential election. Yet France’s Socialist Party also stands out as Europe’s most unreconstructed. Hence the contorted spectacle of a party preparing for power at a time when the markets are challenging its every orthodoxy.

For a hint of French Socialist thinking, consider recent comments from some of the candidates who will contest a primary vote in October. Ségolène Royal, who lost the 2007 presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, argued this week that stock options and speculation on sovereign debt should be banned. Denouncing “anarchic globalisation”, she called for human values to be imposed on financial ones, as a means of “carrying on the torch of a great country, France, which gave the world revolutionary principles about the emancipation of the people.”

Ms Royal, believe it or not, is considered a moderate. To her left, Arnaud Montebourg, a younger, outwardly sensible sort, argues for “deglobalisation”. He wants to forbid banks from “speculating with clients’ deposits”, and to abolish ratings agencies. Financial markets want “to turn us into their poodle”, he lamented at a weekend fete in a bucolic village, celebrating the joys of la France profonde with copious bottles of burgundy. No one seems to have told him that there is a simple way to avoid the wrath of bond markets: balance your books and don’t borrow.

Next to such patent nonsense, promises by the two front-running candidates, Martine Aubry and François Hollande, seem merely frozen in time, circa 1981. They want to return to retirement at the age of 60 (it has just been raised to 62), and to invent 300,000 public-sector youth jobs. Each supports Mr Sarkozy’s deficit-reduction targets, but refuses to approve his plan to write a deficit rule into the constitution. More taxes, not less spending, is their underlying creed.

The party is not out of tune with public opinion. The French are almost uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them one of the world’s richest people. Fully 57% say France should single-handedly erect higher customs barriers. The same share judge that freer trade with India and China, whose consumers snap up French silk scarves and finely stitched leather handbags, has been “bad” for France. The right has held the presidency since 1995 partly by pandering to such sentiments.

The causes of French left-wingery are various, but a potent one is the lingering hold of Marxist thinking. Post-war politics on the left was for decades dominated by the Communist Party, which regularly scooped up a quarter of the votes. In the 1950s many intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, clung to pro-Soviet idealism even after the evils of Stalinism emerged. Others toyed with Trotskyism well into the 1970s. François Mitterrand, who mentored Ms Royal, Ms Aubry and Mr Hollande, was swept to the presidency in 1981 by offering a socialist Utopia as a third way between “the capitalist society which enslaves people” and the “communist society which stifles them”.

Given such a tradition, it is possible that today’s Socialist leaders believe what they say. At any rate, there is a debate to be had about the right amount of market regulation and fiscal consolidation. Yet the problem with their promises is this: for every bit of conviction, there is a shameful share of pure posturing.

In truth, France’s Socialists have often had to be pragmatic in power. As prime minister between 1997 and 2002 Lionel Jospin, himself an ex-Trotskyist, privatised more assets than any of his right-wing predecessors. Even Mitterrand was forced to abandon nationalisation and embrace austerity. Should the Socialists win in 2012, it would take them “about a month, or maybe a week” to confess that they “have no choice but to keep the deficit under control”, says one well-placed party figure. Retirement at 60? Nice idea but, quel dommage, we can’t afford it.

Please allow us a moment of madness

All this requires heroic faith among centrists considering voting Socialist that reason will triumph over fiscal folly. Moreover, experience suggests that the Socialists, if elected, may feel compelled to introduce some signature policy as a sop to their disappointed base. Under Mitterrand, it was the wealth tax. Under Mr Jospin, it was Ms Aubry’s 35-hour working week. With France’s recovery fragile, the prospect of more such lunacy is chilling.

A further danger touches Europe, where France traditionally generates many ideas for integration. At a time when leaders are inching towards more economic co-ordination, with oversight of budgets and even tax harmonisation, a Socialist victory would put the shaping of such a project into uncertain hands.

With Dominique Strauss-Kahn out of the running there is just one French Socialist primary candidate who understands all this. Manuel Valls, a deputy and mayor with a refreshingly modern view of the left, says Socialists are not being straight by promising retirement at 60. He dares utter such truths as “we need to tell the French that the [budgetary] effort…will be as great as that achieved after Liberation”. Alas, the 49-year-old Mr Valls is considered too young to be a serious contender. The day the paleo-Socialists of the Mitterrand generation allow such figures to emerge would be the dawn of a real revolution.

Rising power, anxious state

Tensions between China’s prosperous middle classes and its poor will make it a harder country to govern

The Economist

AMONG those with most to celebrate as the Chinese Communist Party marks its 90th birthday on July 1st are the country’s bourgeois reactionaries. Perhaps now the most important pillar of the party’s support, China’s middle class was virtually non-existent until it was recreated in the late 1990s. So far, the communists have amply fulfilled their side of a tacit bargain in which well-off city-dwellers have traded political choice for fast-growing prosperity. But as the economy slows over the next decade, the party will struggle to keep its word. Indeed, peace and prosperity may depend on the very sort of political reform the party has tried so hard to avoid.

An affair to remember

In the past 15 years the middle classes have supported the party because of what it has done for them. Its rule has produced incredible economic progress, asserted China’s rightful role as a global power and, crucially, kept the country from falling back into the chaos that plagued it during so much of the 20th century. The post-Communist travails of the former Soviet Union have been valuable as what the party used to call “teaching by negative example”.

However, the love affair between a party that calls itself the vanguard of the proletariat and its actual, middle-class supporters is now under threat. At the root of this is an inevitable slowing in economic growth. As our special report on China in this issue explains, the first decade of the century, with its relentless double-digit growth, may well have seen the peak of China’s economic exuberance. A sudden crash is not impossible: there could be a botched attempt to tackle either the property bubble or what the prime minister calls the “uncaged tiger” of inflation (now at 5.5%, its highest level in nearly three years). But an immediate upset is still unlikely: inflation is not yet out of control, still far below the 27.7% it reached in 1994. The danger is more in the medium term: growth will inevitably slow over the next decade, as China settles into its status as a middle-income country, and the burden of caring for an ever larger number of elderly people in a slower economy may make middle-class life far more uncomfortable.

To compensate, the party will have to usher in wrenching change. It is struggling to shift China away from the current unsustainable model, where growth is propelled by vast investment and export-led manufacturing, towards one where domestic consumption plays a bigger role. The country still has a long journey ahead in its efforts to build health-care, pension and social-security systems to reassure citizens: all of these are necessary to persuade the middle class to save less.

In addition, China’s state-owned businesses have an insatiable appetite for capital, which many of them waste. Curbing state companies means taking on all of the well-connected people who ride on their coat-tails, including parts of the middle class. The party’s creed (“Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought”) means nothing to most such people. The party is secretive about recruitment to its 80m-strong ranks. But an official report in 2008 said that, of new applicants for membership, by far the biggest category comprised university students over the age of 18. Although the decision by these young careerists to sign up shows the party’s clout, they have very different ambitions from those of the old ideologues.

The party will also have to work harder to sustain the urbanisation that has fuelled the economy. China has done the easy part: attracting underemployed young rural residents to urban jobs. But the supply is beginning to slow. It would help if farmers could sell or mortgage their rural land and use the money to help gain a stronger foothold in the cities. But the party remains overly fearful of privatising farmland, partly for atavistic fears of a destitute peasantry, and partly for ideological reasons.

Worse still, the system of household registration, or hukou, defines even long-staying urban migrants as rural residents, cutting them out of housing, education and other benefits. No wonder that the migrants are increasingly restive. Of the tens of thousands of protests each year, most are still rural, typically by farmers enraged by inadequate compensation for land appropriated for development. However, urban unrest, such as recent riots by factory workers in the southern province of Guangdong, is now more common. If the party is to keep the peace in cities and if it is to continue to attract migrants in sufficient numbers, it needs to find ways to turn them into full-fledged city-dwellers, with the consumer power to match.

Of taxation and representation

Here it runs up against the middle class most directly. To give migrants the same housing and other benefits as urban hukou holders, and to build a proper social safety-net will be expensive. And if more tax is the solution, then the middle class could well begin demanding a greater political say.

That is a day the party dreads. Since the nationwide student-led protests of 1989, the educated urban elite has mostly been politically quiescent. But the party fears them far more than it does unruly farmers or migrants. Beijing’s centre was flooded with police earlier this year when calls for an Arab-style “jasmine revolution” circulated on the internet.

The middle class’s anxieties have not yet fermented into a broader anti-government rage. But then the inevitable erosion of some of their privileges has barely begun. If the bourgeoisie does start to protest, the party will be faced with an old dilemma: liberalise or step up repression. All the evidence of the past—and of the recent crackdown—is that it will choose repression. But that in itself may help politicise the middle class. In other Asian countries a taste for democracy has risen with income; and repression would mean withdrawing freedoms from people used to their liberty gradually increasing.

In 2012 the party’s leadership—and the task of managing these tensions—is to pass to a new generation. The most recent leadership transition, in 2002, went smoothly. But every previous generational shift in the party’s 90 years has been chaotic, and, a decade on, the tasks faced by the leaders who took over in 2002 look almost easy by comparison with today’s.