Venezuela fora do Mercosul (finalmente) - Mac Margolis (Bloomberg)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-09/mercosur-turns-its-back-on-a-diminished-venezuela

LATIN AMERICA

Mercosur Turns Its Back on a Diminished Venezuela

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DEC 9, 2016 10:30 AM EDT

By

Mac Margolis

When Hugo Chavez took office in Venezuela in 1999, he promised his compatriots many wonders, from a hemispheric “Bolivarian” alliance against gringo imperialism to 21st-century socialism. Free trade was not part of the deal. So it couldn’t have come as a total shock when on Dec. 2, four South American nations ruled to suspend Venezuela from the continental trade compact to which it never ought to have been admitted.

And yet, for the keepers of the Bolivarian Republic, the ouster from Mercosur might have been a diplomatic outrage. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who succeeded Chavez in 2013, called the move a “coup”; Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez denounced it as “an illegal action” and vowed to appeal. Assorted sympathizers and fringe militants as far away as Uruguay and Paraguay joined the chorus.

What’s at stake isn’t the future of regional commerce. Venezuela’s economy is such a shambles -- merchants have taken to weighing currency instead of counting it -- that trade in any conventional sense of the word ceased to matter long ago. But the choler in Caracas and the initiative by Venezuela’s once-accommodating neighbors said a good deal about the state of play in Latin American relations, where over a decade of diffidence and indulgence before the region’s stumbling autocracy has given way to umbrage and confrontation.

Sure, Chavez, had long pushed for a seat in the region’s signature commercial union, but less to join the compact than to subvert it. As early as 2007, he spoke of trying to “decontaminate” the block of its “neoliberal” bent. Instead, he saw Mercosur membership as a credential to raise Venezuela’s standing in the Americas even as his government eroded democratic rights, jailed opponents, and stunted economic liberty at home. Such behavior ran counter to Mercosur’s charter, which by the Ushuaia Protocol restricted membership to countries with “fully functioning democratic institutions,” and called for sanctions in case of a breakdown of democracy.

Clearly, Venezuela was an outlier. And yet, because criticizing an allied nation was long an unstated taboo in Latin America -- and practically a code of honor during the left’s governing heyday over the last decade -- neither Chavez nor Maduro needed to worry about diplomatic blowback, much less the migraine-inducing fine print of trade treaties. Four years after its backdoor induction to the trade bloc -- a legally questionable maneuver that badly roiled hemispheric diplomacy -- Venezuela still hadn’t bothered to adhere to adhere to Mercosur’s basic precepts, including the founding Treaty of Asuncion and the common external tariff. “Venezuela never should have been allowed to join,” said Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida, who heads the International Relations Research Institute.

That dereliction was serious enough to exclude Venezuela from Mercosur’s negotiations to strike a trade agreement with the European Union, but drew little more than a shrug from the trade group’s controlling partners. The waiver was not a show of Latin bonhomie. Under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil nursed global ambitions, and promoting national champions abroad was part of the game. Flush with oil money, Venezuela was a plum client for contractors like the Odebrecht Group, which took on an estimated $25 billion in sometimes dubious public works with soft loans from Brazil’s national development bank.

Now all that has changed. As Venezuela’s economy tanked, unpaid debts (totaling some $2 billion in 2014) to Brazilian contractors piled up. Tolerance also faded as leftists leaders across the hemisphere lost traction, including in Mercosur. Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay are run by free market centrists, who quickly unfriended the Maduro regime. “The mess in Venezuela has hurt Brazil’s own international reputation especially,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a scholar of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “Brazil has not fulfilled its role as a regional leader.” They were backed by Luis Almagro, the outspoken head of the Organization of American States, who in a break with that body’s anodyne diplomacy threatened to invoke the compact’s democracy charter against Venezuela’s excesses.

How much the hardening of Latin attitudes will sway the Maduro government is debatable. Street protests, pressure by the opposition-led legislature, censure by the O.A.S, appeals by Pope Francis -- so far nothing has deterred the bus driver-turned-president from his economic collision course or trashing what’s left of Venezuelan democracy. Ousting Venezuela from Mercosur may have been a symbolic gesture, but at least that’s one credential that Latin America’s outlier government no longer gets to wave.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Mac Margolis at mmargolis14@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

1998 crisis and now: differences and similarities - Ye Xie (Bloomberg News)

Why 1998 Was Different, and Same, to Emerging-Market Crisis Now

By Ye Xie 

Bloomberg News, December 15, 2014

Oil prices were tanking. Emerging-market currencies were in a freefall. Venezuela was mired in a financial crisis and Russia had sunk into a debt default and devaluation. 

The year was 1998.

Emerging markets today look a lot like they did back then. Yet there have been key changes that could help most of them escape full-blown crises. Here’s a look at the similarities and differences between now and then. 

Similarities

*Falling Oil Prices 

Crude has dropped 48 percent since June to about $55 a barrel, squeezing exporters from Venezuela to Russia and Nigeria. Credit default swaps show a 97 percent probability that Venezuela will default on its bonds within five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Russian economy, which is under sanctions by the U.S. and the European Union over the Ukraine conflict, will contract as much as 4.7 percent next year if oil remains at $60, the central bank said. 

*Currencies Sink 

A Bloomberg index tracking 20 of the most traded emerging-market currencies fell to the lowest since 2003 on Dec. 15. The ruble tumbled past 64 per dollar for the first time, Turkey’s lira fell to an all-time low while Indonesia’s rupiah retreated to levels last seen in 1998. 

During the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998, countries from Thailand to Malaysia capitulated on defending their currency pegs, leading the Thai baht to lose half its value in six months. South Koreans lined up in the streets to donate gold jewelry to help the government refill their depleting foreign reserves amid the currency slump. 

*Fed Policy

The U.S. Federal Reserve is laying the ground for its first interest rate increase since 2006, threatening to drain capital from developing nations. The World Bank estimated last year that private capital inflows to developing nations could drop 50 percent should long-term U.S. bond yields rise one percentage point. 

Countries with large current account deficits, including Turkey, South Africa and Brazil, are vulnerable, according to Credit Agricole CIB. So are nations such as Malaysia, where foreign investors account for 30 percent of local government debt. A series of Fed rate increases in the mid-1990s helped trigger the run on Asian currencies that would in turn lead to Russia’s default. 

Differences: 

*Flexible Exchange Rates 

Developing countries have allowed their exchange rates to fluctuate, moving away from the fixed exchange-rate regimes prevailing during the crisis in the late 1990s. While weaker currencies fuel inflation, they can also stimulate economic growth by making exports cheaper. 

*Foreign Reserves 

Developing countries’ foreign reserves dwarf the amount they had in the late 1990s, which will help them weather the volatility in financial markets. As a group, emerging markets hold $8.1 trillion, compared with $659 billion in 1999, according to data compiled by the International Monetary Fund. 

*Debt

Instead of borrowing in dollars, the governments now mostly raise financing in local currencies, allowing them to pay back the debt without having to draw down foreign reserves. External debt amounted to 26 percent of developing nations’ gross domestic product last year, down from 40 percent in 1999, the IMF data show. 

One caveat is that companies have replaced governments as a source of concern on debt issuance. Corporations in developing countries sold about $375 billion of international debt between 2009 and 2012, more than double the amount in the four years before the 2008 financial crisis, the Bank for International Settlements said in September. 

*Interest Rates 

While rates are rising in some developing nations, they remain a fraction of the levels seen in 1998. Russia raised its benchmark rate 6.5 percentage points to 17 percent effective Dec. 16 at a late-night meeting. Some short-term rates soared over 100 percent back in 1998. In Brazil, policy makers have raised benchmark rates to 11.75 percent. That’s still less than half the rate levels from 1998. 

To contact the reporter on this story: Ye Xie in New York at yxie6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nikolaj Gammeltoft at ngammeltoft@bloomberg.net David Papadopoulos

Brasil: ambiente de negocios tende a deterioracao, dizem investidores estrangeiros (Bloomberg)

Pessimism on Brazil Soars to Record in Poll

By Raymond Colitt - Bloomberg News, Nov 20, 2013 9:00 PM ET

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Investors have never been more pessimistic about Brazil President Dilma Rousseff’s policies, with only 10 percent saying the nation can avoid a credit-rating downgrade in the next year, a Bloomberg Global Poll shows.

Fifty-one percent say they are pessimistic about Rousseff’s policies, compared with 22 percent when she took office in January 2011, according to the poll of 750 analysts, investors and traders who are Bloomberg subscribers. The world’s second-largest emerging market will offer one of the worst opportunities over the next year compared with the U.S., U.K., European Union, Japan, India, Russia and China, respondents say.

Attachment: Bloomberg Global Poll

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The government has been struggling to revive the economy as above-target inflation and a widening budget deficit erode investor and consumer confidence. Photographer: Gregg Newton/Bloomberg

The government has been struggling to revive the economy as above-target inflation and a widening budget deficit erode investor and consumer confidence. Rousseff will end her first term next year with the slowest four-year expansion of gross domestic product since 1990, according to the latest central bank survey of economists. Standard & Poor’s in June placed Brazil’s rating on negative outlook, citing weak growth.

“Confidence in Ms. Rousseff’s policies has fallen for a number of reasons, chief of which is perhaps the dramatic slowing of the real GDP growth rate in the country at the same time inflation has remained high,” survey respondent James Craske, a global equity analyst with Victory Capital Management in New York, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions. “We are underweight in the country at the moment and will most likely remain as such for some time.”

Fiscal Accounts

Moody’s Investors Service last month followed S&P in lowering its outlook on Brazil to stable from positive. Moody’s cited the country’s 59 percent government debt-to-GDP ratio, compared with a 45 percent median for other nations whose sovereign bonds have the same rating. The two rating companies highlighted the increase in public lending.

The week after Brazil posted its biggest budget deficit since 2009, S&P Managing Director Regina Nunes on Nov. 8 said a downgrade of its rating may occur sooner if its fiscal accounts worsen. S&P and Moody’s assign Brazil’s sovereign debt the second-lowest investment grade rate, BBB and Baa2, respectively.

Economic growth slowed to 0.9 percent last year from 2.7 percent in 2011 and 7.5 percent in 2010. GDP will climb 2.5 percent this year before easing to 2.1 percent in 2014, according to about 100 economists surveyed by the central bank on Nov. 14.

Deteriorating

Latin America’s largest economy is deteriorating, according to 43 percent of those questioned in the Nov. 19 Bloomberg Global Poll, against only 10 percent who see it improving and 27 percent who forecast stability.

Brazil probably or certainly will be downgraded over the next 12 months, according to 39 percent of the Bloomberg customers who were surveyed.

“Brazil will get an S&P downgrade by 2015,” survey participant Carlos Saccone, Head Investment Advisory at HSBC Bank SA in Montevideo, Uruguay, said in an e-mail. He cites low economic growth, high corporate taxes and investment flow reversals as some of the reasons.

Policy makers have boosted the benchmark Selic interest rate by 2.25 percentage points since April to 9.5 percent, the biggest increase among 49 of the major world economies tracked by Bloomberg. While inflation has slowed for four straight months, it has remained above the mid-point of the 2.5 percent to 6.5 percent target range for three years.

Only 22 percent of those surveyed say the central bank will bring inflation back to or below the 4.5 percent target in the next 12 or 18 months. The target will be reached in the next two or three years, 37 percent of the respondents say.

Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based public opinion research company, conducted the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

To contact the reporter on this story: Raymond Colitt in Brasilia Newsroom atrcolitt@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andre Soliani at asoliani@bloomberg.net

China: entre Tocqueville e Bismark na modernizacao - Pankaj Mishra(Bloomberg)

What Germany’s Iron Chancellor Can Show Red China

By Pankaj Mishra
Bloomberg, Jun 2, 2013 6:00 PM ET

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More than a century and a half after it was published, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the Revolution” has become an unlikely best-seller in China.

Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption czar, is reportedly among the senior leaders obsessed with what he sees as the book’s cautionary message: that increasing prosperity and piecemeal political reform didn’t protect France’s pre-revolutionary regime from violent overthrow.

About Pankaj Mishra»

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond," ... MORE

More from Pankaj Mishra:

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The mass energies unleashed by large-scale industrialization and urbanization have exposed China’s existing political institutions as weak and inadequate. In Wang’s reading of Tocqueville, Chinese leaders must prepare for more upheaval ahead.

It is easy to see in Tocqueville’s subtle opinions, which can’t be pigeonholed in the contemporary way as “left-wing” or “right-wing,” what you want to see. John Stuart Mill claimed to be inspired by his writings. British conservatives in the 19th century also deployed his criticisms of American democracy to argue against the extension of adult franchise.

Unlikely Gurus

Understandably, Chinese leaders are eager to learn from European thinkers and Europe’s early and immense experience of socioeconomic change. Visiting India two weeks ago, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang quoted both Max Weber and Georg Hegel.

But Tocqueville, an aristocrat, seems an unlikely guru for Chinese leaders, even the “princelings” among them, who may find that 19th-century German philosophers and economists offer more practical instruction than French or English ones.

Germany under Otto von Bismarck came relatively late to industrialization; its leaders were determined to avoid the traumas and upheavals of England and France. The country’s influential economists, mostly opposed to Adam Smith’s laissez-faire individualism, enshrined a major role for the state in running and regulating the modern economy; the state was also supposed to alleviate the class antagonisms and hardships that the great shift from agrarian to industrial societies made inevitable.

Accordingly, Bismarck’s Germany pioneered social welfare guarantees of health insurance, disability and old age pensions; it was also ahead of European nations in enacting legislation aimed at protecting the laboring classes from exploitation and degraded working conditions.

People in other late industrializing societies, including the U.S., took careful note. As the historian Daniel T. Rodgers showed in his study of the Germanic roots of American progressivism, the experience of studying economics in Germany in the 1890s “knocked the provincial blinkers off a cadre of young Americans,” liberating them from “the tightly, syllogistically packaged intellectual paradigms of laissez-faire.”

The American economy has gone through many refinements since the age of robber barons. We no longer remember well “the disordered, violent camping expedition that was the U.S.,” in its early phase of industrialization in the late 19th century.

It was, as Rodgers wrote, “a country on the run, too busy with its private affairs to bother knitting its pieces together, tossing its cast-off goods wherever they might land, scamping public life in its drive to release individual energy.” It was the German-educated Americans who “brought back an acute sense of a missing ‘social’ strand in American politics and a new sense, as unnerving as it was attractive, of the social possibilities of the state.”

Tender Mercies

The Japanese, as the historian Kenneth B. Pyle and others have shown, were even keener students of the German example. Kanai Noburo, Japan’s most influential economist for three decades, studied in Germany about the same time as many American proto-progressives and New Dealers.

Traveling through England, he witnessed the very inadequate protection for the country’s poorest people; he became convinced that the state had a duty to intervene on their behalf. They couldn’t be left to the tender mercies of free marketeers (whose quasi-religious faith in the invisible hand had condemned millions to death in unrelieved famines in British-ruled Ireland and India).

But Kanai, a strong critic of free-market individualism, was no socialist. On the contrary: His ideas were aimed at diminishing class antagonisms, averting violent revolution and maintaining the power of the Japanese bureaucratic state, which alone promised to guarantee national unity and strength.

“If workers are treated like animals,” he wrote, “then after several decades unions and socialism will appear.” And that, he was convinced, would be a very bad thing for a country that was still very weak compared with European nation-states. For Japanese leaders seeking to justify their power, mobilize a sense of nationality and avoid social unrest, this was just the thing they wanted to hear.

Having tasked an agrarian people to build an industrial society through quasi-traditional notions of loyalty and obligation, Japanese leaders faced in the early 20th century fresh problems resulting from their success: widening disparities of income, class cleavages, and the loss of old values of family and community.

Laissez-faire liberalism was no good to them; and it was also in retreat around the world. Fortunately, the Germans had proposed an attractive new identity for the technocratic state: one that, in the words of the German economist Gustav von Schmoller, “legislates above the egoistic class interests, administers with justice, protects the weak and elevates the lower classes.”

That is the persona that the Chinese leadership now seeks for itself as it cracks down ostentatiously on corruption, and enacts progressive legislation aimed at the rural poor. This fresh search for an appealing self-image largely explains its broadening intellectual references, particularly the vogue for Tocqueville.

Ego Boost

For, as the shrewd China-watcher Rebecca Liao writes, “Tocqueville’s conservative admiration of a learned aristocracy with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige is ultimately a validation of the party’s pride in (still maturing) modern Chinese governance.”

Reading Tocqueville, in other words, can be good for the ego. Still, Chinese leaders navigating the global traffic of ideas will find more familiar landmarks in some late 19th century German and Japanese policies -- those meant, as Weber wrote, “to unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development.”

It remains to be seen whether they -- and the rest of us -- will avoid the perils of yet another big and overly centralized state tasked with both economic growth and social cohesion. The young Max Weber, after all, was an ardent imperialist, convinced, like many of his German peers, that his country’s economic development depended on the acquisition of foreign territories and resources.

Trying to sustain their power both domestically and internationally, Japanese groups controlling the state erected too many ideological defenses against healthy dissent and debate, finally taking their country into an unwinnable war.

In any case, Chinese leaders boning up on Bismarckian and Meiji conservatism or Tocqueville outline a piquant irony: that the Chinese revolution of 1949 -- one of the pivotal events of the 20th century -- has become a deeply conservative project, designed to forestall social fragmentation and unrest and perpetuate the Communist Party’s long monopoly over power.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,” and a Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Pankaj Mishra at pmashobra@gmail.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net.

Google desvaloriza os BRICS: Brasil com cotacao baixa...

Como a sigla foi criada por um economista, e implementada artificialmente por políticos ambiciosos, nada demais contra os ups and downs do movimento das bolsas. A cotação dos Brics (antes Bric) já foi mais alta, e a do Brasil sempre foi supervalorizada artificialmente, pela propaganda do governo, pelo superativismo ministerial, pela exuberância diplomática e a egolatria do presidente anterior. Nada errado, portanto, com o debunk atual, que é sempre bem vindo, pois melhor atuar com base em perspectivas realistas do que infladas por impulsos artificiais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

BRICs Fall From Google Favor as Searches Drop With Brazil

By Michael Patterson & Victoria Stilwell 

Bloomberg News, Feb 8, 2013 1:38 AM ET

The BRICs are falling off the investment map.
The term for Brazil, Russia, India and China, where stocks gained 424 percent during the decade ended 2010, appeared in the fewest news stories last month since November 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BRIC searches on Google Inc.’s website fell to a seven-year low in December, while mutual funds that invest in the biggest emerging markets had outflows in 46 of the past 47 weeks.

Enlarge image

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, from left, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, Hu Jintao, China's president, and Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president, stand and present the Delhi Declaration at the BRICS Summit in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, March 29, 2012. Photographer: Graham Crouch/Bloomberg

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Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Zeb Eckert reports on today's top headlines. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)

Investor euphoria has turned into apathy after the four economies grew at the slowest pace since 2009 and the MSCI BRIC Index trailed world markets for a third straight year. The man who came up with the BRIC moniker -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jim O’Neill -- announced his retirement this week.
“It looks like investors, certainly the trend-following types, have lost interest,” O’Neill, who will step down as chairman of Goldman Sachs’ asset management unit this year after about 18 years at the New York-based bank, said in a Feb. 5 phone interview.
O’Neill, 55, introduced the BRIC concept in a 2001 research report predicting that the countries’ share of the global economy would increase. His colleagues at Goldman Sachs estimated two years later that the nations may join the U.S. and Japan as the world’s biggest economies by 2050.

‘Like a Brick’

The bullish outlook proved prescient as the BRIC countries grew at an average annual pace of 6.6 percent from 2001 to 2010, almost twice as fast as the global economy, according to the International Monetary Fund in Washington. China is now the world’s second-largest economy in dollar terms, while Brazil is No. 7, Russia is No. 9 and India is No. 10, IMF estimates for 2012 showed in October.
Goldman Sachs’ prediction helped unleash a flood of money into the BRIC countries. Investors poured about $15 billion into mutual funds that buy stocks in all four nations, along with another $52 billion into funds dedicated to individual members of the group, from 2001 through 2010, according to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research firm EPFR Global.
The name stuck. Investors “wanted something that was simple,” Christopher Palmer, who oversees about $2.5 billion as the London-based director of global emerging markets at Henderson Global Investors Ltd., said by phone Feb. 5. “BRIC is a nice marketing concept, and it sounds quite solid, like a brick.”

Slowing Growth

The MSCI BRIC index’s 424 percent return through 2010, including dividends, compares with a 44 percent gain for the MSCI All-Country World Index and 350 percent for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. That means $10,000 invested in the BRICs grew to about $52,400 during the period.
Now, the nations’ shares are lagging behind as their economic growth advantage shrinks and investors shift money to smaller emerging markets, including Turkey and the Philippines. Gross domestic product in the BRICs probably increased 4.2 percent on average in 2012, versus 3.2 percent for the world economy, according to the IMF. The 1 percentage point gap would be the smallest since 1998.
The MSCI BRIC index lost 9.2 percent from the end of 2010 through yesterday, compared with a 2.4 percent slide in MSCI’s emerging-market index and a 13 percent advance in the MSCI All- Country gauge. The four-nation measure is up about 2.2 percent this year, versus a 4.3 percent increase in the global index.

O’Neill Bullish

The BRIC gauge slipped 0.1 percent at 6:07 a.m. in London, heading for a fifth day of declines, the longest stretch since Nov. 16. The measure is down 2.3 percent this week.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and BRIC funds have recorded combined outflows of about $8.3 billion since 2010 even as those investing in global emerging markets had inflows of $70 billion, EPFR Global data show.
The BRICs have “now become unfashionable,” John-Paul Smith, an emerging markets strategist at Deutsche Bank AG in London who predicted the underperformance of BRIC shares in 2011, said in a report e-mailed Jan. 24.
O’Neill disagrees. Fading interest in the countries is a contrarian indicator that may foreshadow world-beating equity returns this year as China’s economy recovers, he said.
“It’s my hunch, because of China, that the BRIC index will outperform,” O’Neill said by phone from London.

Relative Value

The Shanghai Composite Index has climbed 6.6 percent this year as consumer purchases support a rebound in economic growth. China’s expansion accelerated in the fourth quarter for the first time in two years, with GDP increasing 7.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing. Retail sales climbed 15.2 percent in December.
Low valuations are another reason to be bullish, O’Neill said. The MSCI BRIC index trades for 10 times reported earnings, versus 16 times for the MSCI All-Country gauge. The 36 percent discount for the BRIC measure compares with an average gap of 24 percent since Bloomberg began compiling the data in July 2009.
“They trade at a significant discount, certainly to their own past,” O’Neill said. “The key part of the BRIC story, the C, which is the same size as the other three put together, seems to me to be even stronger than ever.”
The BRICs risk undoing their achievements of the past decade by increasing the state’s role in markets, Nouriel Roubini, the chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC in New York who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Jan. 25 interview at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The countries “have been hyped up too much,” Roubini said.

Petrobras Tumbles

In Brazil, the government fixes energy prices to rein in inflation, which has exceeded the 4.5 percent midpoint of the central bank’s target range for more than two years. That means fuel imports have curbed earnings at Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil’s state-run oil producer, as it pays more for gasoline and diesel bought abroad than it charges distributors.
While the government authorized a fuel price increase Jan. 29, the adjustment trailed analysts’ estimates and voting shares of the Rio de Janeiro-based company dropped 5.1 percent the next day. Petrobras tumbled 8.3 percent Feb. 5 to the lowest level since August 2005 after saying that it will reduce dividends.
Brazil’s benchmark Bovespa Index has declined 4.2 percent this year through Feb. 7 and is down 16 percent since the end of 2010. The BSE India Sensitive Index has gained 0.8 percent in 2013 and Russia’s Micex Index has increased 3.5 percent.

Fading Links

The number of news stories containing the term BRIC fell to 317 in January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from more than 100 news sources. That’s 87 percent less than the record high in March 2011, a week before the MSCI BRIC index reached an almost three-year peak.
Google, operator of the world’s most-popular search engine, had the fewest queries on BRIC in December since February 2005. While the level of interest has since increased, it’s still about 17 percent lower than a year ago and 48 percent below the June 2009 high, according to Google’s Trends website.
Equity gauges in Shanghai, Mumbai, Moscow and Sao Paulo that once moved in lockstep with the MSCI BRIC index are losing their links to the benchmark.
The Shanghai Composite’s 30-day correlation with the MSCI gauge dropped to 0.2 on Jan. 9, the lowest level since January 2012, from as high as 0.8 in September, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A reading of 1 means two markets move in tandem, while a level of -1 means they move in opposite directions.
The relationship for India’s Sensex declined to the lowest level since November 2009 this month, while the reading for the Micex reached a four-year nadir. The Bovespa had the weakest correlation since March 2008 in October.
“People aren’t talking about them as a group any more, but talking about the countries separately,” Timothy Ghriskey, the chief investment officer at Solaris Group LLC in New York, which manages about $2 billion and has equity holdings in India and Brazil, said by phone Feb. 5. “Each one has a different investment climate, different issues.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Patterson in Hong Kong at mpatterson10@bloomberg.net; Victoria Stilwell in New York at vstilwell1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Emma O’Brien at eobrien6@bloomberg.net; Darren Boey at dboey@bloomberg.net

Brics: discussao na Columbia University (27/11)

Universidade Columbia, NY, discute papel dos BRICs no crescimento global

Liderado pelo brasileiro Marcos Troyjo e o francês Christian Deseglise, BRICLab reúne empresários, políticos e acadêmicos em 27 de novembro

Diário da Rússia, 20/11/2012



A Universidade Columbia, de Nova York, através de de seu BRICLab – Fórum sobre Brasil, Rússia, Índia e China –, em parceria com o jornal “Financial Times”, vai realizar a Conferência “BRICS: The Quest for Global Growth”, no dia 27 de novembro.

Acadêmicos, empresários e políticos debaterão, a partir de uma perspectiva dos BRICs, temas como inovação e sustentabilidade, recuperação da economia americana, crise das dívidas soberanas na Europa e novos rumos da economia chinesa.

Professor Marcos Troyjo: "Mais do que criativos, os BRICs têm de ser inovadores"

O Professor Marcos Troyjo, codiretor do BRICLab da Columbia, entende que os BRICs tiveram suas ascensão econômica num cenário que já não existe mais. Troyjo afirma: “Os BRICs haverão de passar por uma metamorfose e se converter em pólos dinâmicos de tecnologia, ou perderão relevância. Mais do que criativos, os BRICs têm de ser inovadores. É a necessidade dessa mudança de DNA que debateremos. Todos querem saber para onde vão o Brasil e os BRICs. Mais do que expectativa, há muita esperança quanto à performance desses gigantes econômicos.”
Já Christian Deseglise, também codiretor do BRICLab e diretor de Global Asset Management do HSBC, lembra que de 1992 a 1995 o crescimento global era dividido por Japão, Europa e Estados Unidos, com fatias de 40%, 30% e 20%, respectivamente. Mas, de 2005 a 2010, os emergentes responderam por cerca de 60% do crescimento mundial; a Europa, por 30%; e os Estados Unidos, por 15%. Para Deseglise, o Fundo Monetário Internacional projeta que, em 2012, 80% do crescimento virão dos BRICs.
Os conferencistas de “BRICS: The Quest for Global Growth” também examinarão o quadro de fragilidades e potencialidades de cada um dos BRICs e o papel que podem desempenhar na promoção dos fluxos internacionais de comércio e investimentos.
Em dois painéis, serão debatidos a conjuntura global e seus impactos empresariais nos BRICs. O quadro de palestrantes é composto por: Liam Casey, CEO da PCH International; James Crombie, editor da “Bloomberg Brief”; Christian Deseglise, codiretor do BRICLab; Timothy Frye, especialista em Rússia e diretor do Harriman Institute, Columbia University; Mark Gyetvay, CFO da Novatek; Stephen King, economista-chefe do HSBC; Robert C. Lieberman, reitor, interino, da Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs; Xiaobo Lu, professor do Barnard College e pesquisador sobre China no Council on Foreign Affairs; Marcelo Lyra, vice-presidente da Braskem; Marco Maia, presidente da Câmara dos Deputados do Brasil; Arvind Panagariya, especialista em Índia e professor da Columbia University; Gregory Stoupnitzky, especialista em Energia e diretor da CIS Capital LLC; Jan Svejnar, diretor do Centro sobre Governança Econômica Global da Columbia University; Alessandro Teixeira, secretário-executivo do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio do Brasil; Thomas J. Trebat, diretor, Columbia Global Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; Marcos Troyjo, codiretor do BRICLab, Columbia University; Jonathan Wheatley, editor-adjunto de Mercados Emergentes do “Financial Times”; e Mark Zeffiro, CFO da TriMas Corporation.
Fundada em 1754, a Columbia University é uma das mais antigas instituições de ensino superior dos Estados Unidos e já abrigou quatro presidentes americanos e 82 agraciados com o Prêmio Nobel, buscando continuamente ampliar as fronteiras do conhecimento e promover a compreensão e o direcionamento dos temas globais.
O BRICLab da Columbia University, fundado em 2011, é um centro voltado à ascensão de Brasil, Rússia, Índia e China nas relações internacionais contemporâneas. Promove um curso oferecido em nível de pós-graduação intitulado “The Rise of BRIC”, além de séries com palestrantes convidados, programas de Educação Executiva e conferências anuais realizadas em Nova York e em cada um dos BRICs.