Desde Brasilia, Mangabeira analiza las grandes líneas de la vida política, social y económica de Brasil y las grandes corrientes internacionales, pero eso no le parece suficiente. "Lo que intento es definir iniciativas concretas que encarnen o anticipen ese cambio en la trayectoria institucional del país. Escoger iniciativas en políticas públicas sectoriales que tengan efecto práctico inmediato pero que también prefiguren el cambio de rumbo que necesita el país". Uno de los últimos libros de Mangabeira se titula ¿Qué debería proponer la izquierda?
Pregunta. ¿Qué debería proponer hoy la izquierda en el mundo?
Respuesta. Básicamente hay tres izquierdas en el mundo. Hay una vendida, que acepta el mercado y la globalización en sus formas actuales y que quiere simplemente humanizarlas por medio de políticas sociales. Para esa izquierda, sólo se trata de humanizar lo inevitable. Su programa es el de sus adversarios, con un descuento social y una renta moral y narcisista. Hay otra izquierda, recalcitrante, que quiere desacelerar el progreso de los mercados y la globalización, en defensa de su base histórica tradicional (los trabajadores sindicalizados de grandes industrias). Y hay una tercera izquierda, la que me interesa, que quiere reconstruir el mercado y reorientar la globalización con un conjunto de innovaciones institucionales. Para esa izquierda, lo primero es democratizar la economía de mercado, lo segundo capacitar al pueblo y lo tercero, profundizar la democracia. Yo entiendo ese proyecto como una propuesta de la izquierda para la izquierda. Diría, con un lenguaje provocativo y algo teológico, que la ambición de esa izquierda no es humanizar la sociedad, sino divinizar la humanidad. El objetivo es elevar la vida común de las personas comunes al plano más alto.
P. ¿Cómo analiza hoy día la crisis económica internacional?
R. Yo diría que hace mucho tiempo que el mundo está sometido al yugo de una dictadura de falta de alternativas y que, en general, en la historia moderna, los cambios fueron forzados por las guerras y los colapsos económicos. El trauma fue el requisito de la transformación. Hoy hay una gran pobreza de ideas sobre las alternativas en el mundo. Las ideas que orientaron la izquierda históricamente, como el marxismo, son fallidas, y la respuesta a la crisis financiera internacional revela de una forma muy dramática las consecuencias de esa pobreza de ideas. No hay nada que no sea una versión momificada del keynesianismo vulgar, es la única luz en esta oscuridad. Hasta ahora, el debate ha estado casi enteramente dominado por dos temas superficiales: el imperativo de regular los mercados financieros y la necesidad de adoptar políticas fiscales y monetarias expansionistas. Son ideas muy por debajo de la dimensión del problema.
P. ¿De qué habría que debatir entonces?
R. Todo lo que se puede hacer en materia de regulación de los mercados financieros y de expansionismo fiscal y monetario depende, para su eficacia, del enfrentamiento de tres temas más importantes. Primero, la necesidad de superar los desequilibrios estructurales en la economía mundial entre los países con superávit en comercio y ahorro, empezando por China, y los países deficitarios en comercio y ahorro, comenzando por EE UU. El motor del crecimiento mundial, en los últimos años, fue el acuerdo implícito entre esos dos elementos. Ese motor se ha roto y vamos a tener que conseguir otro. Eso exigirá grandes cambios en EE UU, en China y en la organización de la economía mundial.
P. ¿No se trata de regular, sino de reorganizar?
R. Efectivamente. Vamos al segundo punto: la necesidad de que la regulación de los mercados financieros sea parte de una tarea mayor, que es reorganizar la relación entre el sistema financiero y la producción. De la forma en que se organizan hoy las economías de mercado, el sistema productivo está básicamente autofinanciado. ¿Cuál es entonces el propósito de todo el dinero que está en los bancos y en las bolsas de valores? Teóricamente sirve para financiar la producción, pero en realidad sólo va oblicuamente a ese cometido. Eso es el resultado de las instituciones existentes. En este sistema, las finanzas son relativamente indiferentes a la producción en tiempos de bonanza y son una amenaza destructiva cuando surge una crisis como ésta. Es decir, son indiferentes para el bien y eficaces para el mal.
P. ¿Y el debate sobre la distribución de la riqueza?
R. Ése es el tercer punto. El vínculo entre recuperación y redistribución. Todos admiramos la construcción en la segunda mitad del siglo XX en EE UU de un mercado de consumo en masa. En principio, la construcción de ese tipo de mercado exige la democratización del poder adquisitivo y, por lo tanto, redistribución de la renta y de la riqueza, pero en EE UU sucedió lo contrario, hubo una violenta concentración de la renta y de la riqueza. ¿Cómo consiguieron la construcción de un mercado de consumo en masa? Parte de la respuesta está en lo que sucedió con la supervalorización inmobiliaria ficticia. Ha habido una falsa democratización del crédito, que hizo las veces de la democratización de redistribución la renta, que no hubo. Y ahora que ese sistema está destruido, es necesario crear una nueva base para el mercado. Lo que les digo a mis conciudadanos es que quiero una dinámica de rebeldía, que necesita como aliada la imaginación institucional.
P. ¿Cómo son las relaciones entre Brasil y Estados Unidos?
R. Yo digo siempre que Brasil es el país del mundo más parecido a EE UU. Son dos países con tamaños semejantes, fundados con población europea y esclavitud africana, multiétnicos. Muy desiguales, pero donde la gente común sigue pensando que todo es posible. EE UU está buscando, en este momento de inflexión histórica, un sucedáneo al proyecto de Roosevelt. En Brasil estamos en una búsqueda paralela de un modelo de desarrollo. Mi propuesta es que construyamos experimentos comunes en las instituciones que definen la economía de mercado y la democracia (FMI, Banco Mundial, OMC, ONU).
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
"Brasil es el país del mundo más parecido a EE UU" · ELPAÍS.com
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Leaders' Statement: The Pittsburgh Summit
In a historic shift, the G20 emerged from its summit in Pittsburgh today as the world’s official forum on global economic issues, replacing the outdated G8.
As expected, the group addressed two main crisis-related challenges—supporting the recovery by maintaining stimulus packages and rebalancing the global economy, and applying lessons learned from the crisis to financial regulations and international financial institution (IFI) reform. In addition—and in keeping with its new-found status—it approached a crucial long-term issue, climate change, for the first time. While the G8 may continue to deal with issues of foreign relations, the G20 has clearly stepped into its role as the main economic global forum. This shift is the single most important result to come out of the summit, but is not its only achievement.
Here the Leaders' Statement:
1. We meet in the midst of a critical transition from crisis to recovery to turn the page on an era of irresponsibility and to adopt a set of policies, regulations and reforms to meet the needs of the 21st century global economy.2. When we last gathered in April, we confronted the greatest challenge to the world economy in our generation. 3. Global output was contracting at pace not seen since the 1930s. Trade was plummeting. Jobs were disappearing rapidly. Our people worried that the world was on the edge of a depression. 4. At that time, our countries agreed to do everything necessary to ensure recovery, to repair our financial systems and to maintain the global flow of capital. 5. It worked. 6. Our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in global activity and stabilize financial markets. Industrial output is now rising in nearly all our economies. International trade is starting to recover. Our financial institutions are raising needed capital, financial markets are showing a willingness to invest and lend, and confidence has improved. 7. Today, we reviewed the progress we have made since the London Summit in April. Our national commitments to restore growth resulted in the largest and most coordinated fiscal and monetary stimulus ever undertaken. We acted together to increase dramatically the resources necessary to stop the crisis from spreading around the world. We took steps to fix the broken regulatory system and started to implement sweeping reforms to reduce the risk that financial excesses will again destabilize the global economy. 8. A sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency. 9. The process of recovery and repair remains incomplete. In many countries, unemployment remains unacceptably high. The conditions for a recovery of private demand are not yet fully in place. We cannot rest until the global economy is restored to full health, and hard-working families the world over can find decent jobs. 10. We pledge today to sustain our strong policy response until a durable recovery is secured. We will act to ensure that when growth returns, jobs do too. We will avoid any premature withdrawal of stimulus. At the same time, we will prepare our exit strategies and, when the time is right, withdraw our extraordinary policy support in a cooperative and coordinated way, maintaining our commitment to fiscal responsibility. 11. Even as the work of recovery continues, we pledge to adopt the policies needed to lay the foundation for strong, sustained and balanced growth in the 21st century. We recognize that we have to act forcefully to overcome the legacy of the recent, severe global economic crisis and to help people cope with the consequences of this crisis. We want growth without cycles of boom and bust and markets that foster responsibility not recklessness. 12. Today we agreed:13. To launch a framework that lays out the policies and the way we act together to generate strong, sustainable and balanced global growth. We need a durable recovery that creates the good jobs our people need.14. We need to shift from public to private sources of demand, establish a pattern of growth across countries that is more sustainable and balanced, and reduce development imbalances. We pledge to avoid destabilizing booms and busts in asset and credit prices and adopt macroeconomic policies, consistent with price stability, that promote adequate and balanced global demand. We will also make decisive progress on structural reforms that foster private demand and strengthen long-run growth potential. 15. Our Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth is a compact that commits us to work together to assess how our policies fit together, to evaluate whether they are collectively consistent with more sustainable and balanced growth, and to act as necessary to meet our common objectives.16. To make sure our regulatory system for banks and other financial firms reins in the excesses that led to the crisis. Where reckless behavior and a lack of responsibility led to crisis, we will not allow a return to banking as usual. 17. We committed to act together to raise capital standards, to implement strong international compensation standards aimed at ending practices that lead to excessive risk-taking, to improve the over-the-counter derivatives market and to create more powerful tools to hold large global firms to account for the risks they take. Standards for large global financial firms should be commensurate with the cost of their failure. For all these reforms, we have set for ourselves strict and precise timetables. 18. To reform the global architecture to meet the needs of the 21st century. After this crisis, critical players need to be at the table and fully vested in our institutions to allow us to cooperate to lay the foundation for strong, sustainable and balanced growth. 19. We designated the G-20 to be the premier forum for our international economic cooperation. We established the Financial Stability Board (FSB) to include major emerging economies and welcome its efforts to coordinate and monitor progress in strengthening financial regulation. 20. We are committed to a shift in International Monetary Fund (IMF) quota share to dynamic emerging markets and developing countries of at least 5% from over-represented countries to under-represented countries using the current quota formula as the basis to work from. Today we have delivered on our promise to contribute over $500 billion to a renewed and expanded IMF New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB). 21. We stressed the importance of adopting a dynamic formula at the World Bank which primarily reflects countries’ evolving economic weight and the World Bank’s development mission, and that generates an increase of at least 3% of voting power for developing and transition countries, to the benefit of under-represented countries. While recognizing that over-represented countries will make a contribution, it will be important to protect the voting power of the smallest poor countries. We called on the World Bank to play a leading role in responding to problems whose nature requires globally coordinated action, such as climate change and food security, and agreed that the World Bank and the regional development banks should have sufficient resources to address these challenges and fulfill their mandates.22. To take new steps to increase access to food, fuel and finance among the world’s poorest while clamping down on illicit outflows. Steps to reduce the development gap can be a potent driver of global growth. 23. Over four billion people remain undereducated, ill-equipped with capital and technology, and insufficiently integrated into the global economy. We need to work together to make the policy and institutional changes needed to accelerate the convergence of living standards and productivity in developing and emerging economies to the levels of the advanced economies. To start, we call on the World Bank to develop a new trust fund to support the new Food Security Initiative for low-income countries announced last summer. We will increase, on a voluntary basis, funding for programs to bring clean affordable energy to the poorest, such as the Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program. 24. To phase out and rationalize over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies while providing targeted support for the poorest. Inefficient fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption, reduce our energy security, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with the threat of climate change. 25. We call on our Energy and Finance Ministers to report to us their implementation strategies and timeline for acting to meet this critical commitment at our next meeting. 26. We will promote energy market transparency and market stability as part of our broader effort to avoid excessive volatility. 27. To maintain our openness and move toward greener, more sustainable growth. 28. We will fight protectionism. We are committed to bringing the Doha Round to a successful conclusion in 2010. 29. We will spare no effort to reach agreement in Copenhagen through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. 30. We warmly welcome the report by the Chair of the London Summit commissioned at our last meeting and published today.31. Finally, we agreed to meet in Canada in June 2010 and in Korea in November 2010. We expect to meet annually thereafter and will meet in France in 2011.
G-20 to take a bigger role in global economy
President Obama, hosting his first Group of 20 summit, managed to achieve most but not all of his top objectives, including getting member nations to agree to review one another’s economic policies to ensure they do not provoke a repeat of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
“Because our global economy is now fundamentally interconnected, we need to act together to make sure the recovery creates new jobs and industries while preventing the kind of imbalances and abuses that led us into this crisis,’’ Obama said at a news conference at the close of the two-day meeting.
The summit was the third gathering of G-20 leaders since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year triggered a global economic free fall. Since then, early signs of recovery have emerged around the world, and in the weeks leading up to the summit, the G-20 leaders faced questions about whether it was time to tighten interest rates and withdraw hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus spending. They arrived in Pittsburgh already in agreement that the global economy was still too fragile to warrant a pullback.
“A sense of normalcy should not lead to complacency,’’ the leaders said in a joint statement. “The process of recovery and repair remains incomplete.’’
The global economy has become stable enough, however, for the leaders to turn their attention to preventing future financial crises. The United States and European nations were able to settle differences over how best to stem irresponsible risk-taking by financial companies. The United States had emphasized the need to raise the quality and quantity of capital that banks must hold to cover potential losses. The Europeans had stressed restrictions on bankers’ pay, including hard limits. In the end, the leaders agreed to those principles - but without the hard limits - as well as better aligning executive compensation with long-term performance and more transparency for trading in complex securities known as derivatives.
Obama was also able to get Europe and China to commit to avoid pursuing economic policies that fuel the huge global imbalances blamed by economists for helping spark the current crisis. Under the agreement, countries with large deficits such as the United States would promise to borrow less while major exporters such as China and Germany would pledge to stimulate domestic consumption. The members agreed to use the International Monetary Fund to help review their economic policies to make sure they do not generate harmful imbalances.
While other G-20 members signed off on the US proposal, many remained skeptical of its effectiveness and its purpose.
What made it easier to sign on is that countries that fail to adhere to the agreement face no penalties.
Critics noted that similar arrangements have been tried before, with little impact on national decisions.
But Edwin Truman, a fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Treasury official, said this latest attempt at rebalancing global growth is promising because it puts leaders on the record and potentially raises the political stakes for them if they fail to comply.
The G-20 also agreed to make itself the principal forum for global economic issues, eclipsing the older, West-dominated Group of Eight and further institutionalizing the new economic order. The Obama administration sees increasing the clout of emerging economies in international institutions as essential to getting developing nations to play a bigger role on other issues such as climate change.
To better reflect the growing role of China, Brazil, and other emerging nations, the G-20 leaders also approved a change of the governance structure of the IMF and World Bank. Summit participants agreed to increase developing nations’ quota of representation shares by 5 percent at the IMF and 3 percent at the World Bank.
Changing the structure of those institutions is key to helping prevent future crises, said Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist and Peterson Institute fellow. Countries such as China, South Korea, and Japan began building huge reserves after the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s and their bad experiences with the IMF.
“They have to believe in the IMF so they don’t build huge reserves,’’ Johnson said.
