O Brasil parece querer chatear o mundo - Samantha Pearson (Financial Times)

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A brief history of Brazilian bolshiness

by Samantha Pearson

Beyond Brics, July 31, 2013

Brazil has been putting its weight about again, this time throwing a spanner into the IMF’s efforts to secure an €11bn bailout for Greece from the eurozone countries. Even if Brazil’s economic weight is not what it used to be, it seems it can still rile the old world when it feels like it.

So for the benefit of beyondbrics readers, here is a timeline of Brazilian bolshiness:

• October 2009 – Brazil becomes a net creditor of the IMF for the first time after providing $10bn of financing to help developed nations hit by the financial crisis. In a gleeful press conference, finance minister Guido Mantega, says the “radical change” is proof that Brazil is faring much better in the crisis than other countries.

• May 2010 – Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president at the time, takes it upon himself to help Turkey broker a nuclear fuel swap deal with Iran. His cosy relationship with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including lots of public hugging and hand-holding, is seen as an attack on US foreign policy.

• September 2010 – On a roll now, Brazil’s Mantega declares the world is engaged in a global “currency war”, criticising US monetary stimulus and the subsequent weak dollar for ruining the competitiveness of other countries’ exports. “Everybody wants the US economy to recover, but it does no good at all to just throw dollars from a helicopter,” he declares.

• April 2012 – Mantega takes the face-off between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world to a new level. He says the Brics countries are working together to elect a candidate from the developing world as president of the World Bank. However, the Russian government soon declares its support for Jim Yong Kim, the US candidate.

• March 2013 – Undeterred, Brazil goes one step further announcing that it and the other Brics countries have agreed to create their own development bank to rival the World Bank and the IMF. However, the countries struggle to agree on the bank’s funding or its location.

• July 2013 – Brazil asks the IMF to change its methodology for calculating nations’ gross debt, complaining it inflates Brazil’s own liabilities. Under the IMF’s methodology, Brazil’s gross debt at the end of last year accounted for 68 per cent of GDP, while the country’s central bank puts the number at 59 per cent.

• July 2013 – Paulo Nogueira Batista, Brazil’s executive director at the IMF, abstains from approving the fund’s new €1.8bn contribution to Greece’s bailout, in a sign of growing frustration over the bailout of debt-ridden Europeans. Nogueira, who also represents 10 nations from Central and South America and the Caribbean, said he was dissatisfied with almost all areas of Greece’s reform programme.
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Related reading:Latin American countries rail against IMF over Greek bailout, FT
A win for Brazil’s WTO rainbow diplomacy – now for the hard part, FT
Brazil: showing Africa some love, beyondbrics
Brazil file, beyondbrics,