Israel’s bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy - Allister Heath (The Telegraph)

Israel’s bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy

The battle that Jerusalem faces is not just defending the Jewish state.  It is abou upholding civilization itself.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/18/israel-hezbollah-exploding-beepers-devices-war-hamas/

The Telegraph, 18 September 2024

By Allister Heath

“Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil. 

Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group’s walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation worldwide. 

A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman. 

The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration. 

The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing “escalation”, even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain’s help. 

Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following – and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an unforgivable moral inversion. 

Labour has placed Britain on the side of those nihilists masquerading as human rights lawyers who negate the essential distinction between victims and aggressors, between rule-bound, democracies desperate to minimise civilian casualties, and bloodthirsty dictatorships for whom their people are pawns to be sacrificed. 

Hezbollah is funded and controlled by the Iranian regime, an obscurantist, fascistic, millenarian tyranny that persecutes minorities, women and dissidents. Violating human rights and plotting war crimes is Hezbollah’s raison d’être: its 150,000 missiles point towards civilian centres and, like Hamas and Iran itself, it seeks Israel’s liquidation, guaranteeing the massacre, expulsion or subjugation of Jews. Hezbollah has forced some 63,473 Israelis to flee their homes since October 7. This is unsustainable and explains why a major Israeli response is looming; obscenely, this will trigger widespread condemnation of the Jewish state.

Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and contradictions. Iran is a threat to the world; its alliance with Russia is deepening. Turkey, led by the despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Israel with invasion, yet remains part of Nato. Qatar, which puts up senior Hamas terrorists in luxury hotels, is a major non-Nato ally of the US, home to a crucial Western military base and a major investor in London. Egypt, a recipient of US aid, has tolerated myriad tunnels to southern Gaza, refused to let in any Palestinians and, bizarrely, is not held responsible for supplying Gaza with provisions, that task falling to Israel. None of the three latter regimes face sanctions: global ire is reserved for Israel. 

One reason Western elites have become so Israelophobic is that, infected by wokery, they increasingly loathe Europe’s and America’s history and traditions, and view the Jewish state as a standout example of a Western model they reject. 

Winston Churchill would be convicted for crimes against humanity today, as would Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman. D-Day would be ruled illegitimate because so many French civilians died during the Battle of Normandy.

Democracies might as well not bother with nuclear weapons, for detonating one, even in retaliation for an unprovoked attack, would be deemed a war crime. I’m in favour of much stricter rules than those governing World War II, of doing everything possible to protect civilians, but this is madness. 

The Just War is a foundational principle. States have the right to defend themselves. Every civilian life lost as collateral damage is a tragedy, but pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality of the human condition. It is madness to criminalise all warfare, and despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore that advanced by our enemies.

It is equally stupid to entrust so much power to legal activists. Much historic anti-Semitism has been ratified by kangaroo courts, including during the 1930s. The Trial of the Talmud took place in France in 1240, with rabbis forced to defend religious texts against trumped-up accusations of blasphemy and obscenity. 

Other bigot-fests masquerading as ordinary trials include the Disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the Damascus Affair, the Dreyfus affair that prompted Emile Zola’s seminal J’accuse, and the trial of Mendel Beilis in Ukraine in 1913. It is a well-established model that hasn’t gone out of fashion in far-Left quarters. They no longer explicitly single out religious beliefs or individuals but leverage lawfare to delegitimise what just happens to be the only Jewish state. 

The fact that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have the trappings of a legitimate legal setting does not mean they necessarily embody justice. The fact that their rulings are deemed legitimate by Left-wing elites doesn’t automatically make them such. The fact that today’s blood libels take on the language of “human rights” doesn’t make them less monstrous. The fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire system is rotten. The case is backed by Iran, Brazil’s far-Left president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an alternative, Kafkaesque universe. 

Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph. 

The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hezbollah.”

O fracasso do Brics como ideia e como resultados práticos - Jim O'Neill (The Telegraph)

 Will the BRICS Ever Grow Up?

In the two decades since Brazil, Russia, India, and China were recognized for their unique growth potential, they, along with South Africa, have so far proven incapable of uniting as a meaningful global force. This comes at the expense not only of the bloc, but of better global governance as well.

Jim O’Neill

The Telegraph, Londres – 16.9.2021

 

 Having created the BRIC acronym to capture the collective potential of Brazil, Russia, India, and China to influence the world economy, I now must ask a rather awkward question: When is that influence going to show up? Given today’s global challenges and the enormous issues facing the BRICS (which subsequently became a real-world entity and was expanded in 2010 to include South Africa), the bloc’s ongoing failure to develop substantive policies through its annual summitry has become increasingly glaring.

This November will be the 20th anniversary of the BRIC acronym, which I first used in a 2001 Goldman Sachs paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” At the time, I offered four scenarios for how each country could develop over the next decade, and made the case for why global governance needed to become more representative and include these four rising powers.

That paper was followed by a series of others, starting in 2003, which showed how China’s economy could become as large as the US economy (in nominal dollar terms) by 2040; how India could surpass Japan to become the third-largest economy soon thereafter; and how the BRIC economies together could grow larger than the G6 (the G7 minus Canada).

But the bloc’s economic trajectory since 2001 has been a mixed bag. While the first decade was a roaring success for all four countries, with each surpassing all four scenarios that I originally outlined, the second decade was less kind to Brazil and Russia, whose respective shares of global GDP have now fallen back to where they were 20 years ago.

If it weren’t for China – and India, to some degree – there wouldn’t be much of a BRIC story to tell. Yet, notwithstanding the difficulties the BRICs have faced, China’s growth alone is on track to lift the technical aggregate of all four economies to match the size of the G6.

In terms of global governance, the only notable shift over the past two decades has been the rise of the G20 since it took center stage in the response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Representing the world’s 20 largest economies, the organization seemed immensely powerful at the time, and it managed to implement policies of potentially lasting importance. But since then, it has generally been a disappointment, saying much but achieving very little.

With the world on track to reach 1.5°C of planetary warming by 2040, the Paris agreement’s preferred climate scenarios are slipping out of reach. Countries, cities, businesses, and financial institutions must move quickly to address the increasingly urgent climate adaptation and mitigation challenges. At Building the Green Consensus, distinguished speakers will explore how new regulatory frameworks and public finance can be used to accelerate private-sector investment in the green transition. 

For their part, the BRICs held their first annual meeting as a political club in 2009, in Russia (the first to include South Africa took place in China in 2011). And this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted the BRICS leaders (virtually) for their 13th summit. Every leader made bold statements about what they had supposedly achieved together, and all discussed avenues for future cooperation. Yet they have accomplished very little; lofty statements are usually accompanied by only scant policy moves.

Nothing in the bloc’s latest joint declaration suggests that anything has changed. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the attention this year has been on security and terrorism. After all, recent developments in Afghanistan will have serious, direct implications for Russia, India, and China. But this singular focus is disappointing nonetheless, because it highlights the group’s limited joint ambitions.

Modi would seem to agree, saying, “We need to ensure that the BRICS are more productive in the next 15 years.” Beyond creating the BRICS Bank, now known as the New Development Bank, it is difficult to see what the group has done other than meet annually.

Following the bloc’s rather dismal second decade, there are many things that BRICS leaders could do collectively to help revive the kind of economic gains made in the first decade, all of which would be good for the rest of the world, too. In doing so, they could create a much stronger impression of their usefulness alongside the G20, strengthening the case for more substantive reforms to global governance.

For starters, the BRICS need to strengthen trade between themselves. China and India could both gain enormously from a more open and ambitious trading relationship, which would redound to the benefit of the rest of the region, the other BRICS, and the world. In fact, more India-China trade alone would visibly boost global trade.

Moreover, while the BRICS have little in common other than large populations, they also share a significant exposure to infectious diseases. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance that I led in 2014-16 showed that all of the BRICS were worryingly vulnerable to drug-resistant tuberculosis. And as COVID-19 has shown, most have health systems that are poorly equipped to deal with pandemics. Unless they treat global infectious diseases more seriously, they will never be able to reach their economic potential.

Since the fall of 2020, I have had the privilege of serving on the World Health Organization’s independent Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, which is chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. One crucial proposal from our initial Call to Action this past spring, now outlined in detail in our final report, is to establish a Global Health and Finance Board under the auspices of the G20. The reasoning is simple: unless we place global health challenges at the heart of regular economic and financial dialogue, we will remain ill prepared for them. And as the pandemic has shown, global health challenges are also economic and political challenges.

This proposal already has the support of several key governments, notably those of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, and the European Union. Yet for reasons I fail to understand, the BRICS, especially China, seem to be opposed to it. Such resistance makes no sense and will have dire consequences for the rest of the world. It gives me and other longtime champions even more reason to doubt the group’s collective potential. (P.S.)

 

Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, is a member of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development.

Você apostaria o seu futuro numa criptomoeda? O inventor do BRIC não tomaria esse risco: Jim O'Neill (The Telegraph)

Eu não apostaria minha pouquíssima fortuna numa moeda digital, tão voláteis são esses ativos financeiros.

The Bitcoin Lottery

The sudden rise of "special purpose acquisitions companies" and cryptocurrencies speaks less to the virtues of these vehicles than to the excesses of the current bull market. In the long term, these assets will mostly fall into the same category as speculative "growth stocks" today.

Jim O’Neill

The Telegraph, Londres – 10.3.2021

 

 I was recently approached about setting up my own “special purpose acquisition company” (SPAC), which would allow me to secure financial commitments from investors on the expectation that I will eventually acquire some promising business that would prefer to avoid an initial public offering. In picturing myself in this new role, I mused that I could be doubly fashionable by also jumping into the burgeoning field of cryptocurrencies. There have been plenty of headlines about striking it big, quickly, so why not get in on the action?

Being a wizened participant in financial markets, I declined the invitation. The rising popularity of SPACs and cryptocurrencies seems to reflect not their own strengths but rather the excesses of the current moment, with its raging bull market in equities, ultra-low interest rates, and policy-driven rallies after a year of COVID-19 lockdowns.

To be sure, in some cases, pursuing the SPAC route to a healthy return probably makes a lot of sense. But the fact that so many of these entities are being created should raise concerns about looming risks in the surrounding markets.

As for the cryptocurrency phenomenon, I have tried to remain open-minded, but the economist in me struggles to make sense of it. I certainly understand the conventional complaints about the major fiat currencies. Throughout my career as a foreign-exchange analyst, I often found that it was much easier to dislike a given currency than it was to find one with obvious appeal.

I can still remember my thinking during the run-up to the introduction of the euro. Aggregating individual European economies under a shared currency would eliminate a key source of monetary-policy restraint – the much-feared German Bundesbank – and would introduce a new set of risks to the global currency market. This worry led me (briefly) to bet on gold. But by the time the euro was introduced in 1999, I had persuaded myself of its attractions and changed my view (which turned out to be a mistake for the first couple of years, but not in the long term).

Similarly, I have lost count of all the papers I have written and read on the supposed unsustainability of the US balance of payments and the impending decline of the dollar. True, these warnings (and similar portents about Japan’s long-running experiment in monetary-policy largesse) have yet to be borne out. But, given all this inductive evidence, I can see why there is so much excitement behind Bitcoin, the modern version of gold, and its many competitors. Particularly in developing and “emerging” economies, where one often cannot trust the central bank or invest in foreign currencies, the opportunity to stow one’s savings in a digital currency is obviously an inviting one.

By the same token, there has long been a case to be made for creating a new world currency – or upgrading the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset, special drawing rights – to mitigate some of the excesses associated with the dollar, euro, yen, pound, or any other national currency. For its part, China has already introduced a central bank digital currency, in the hopes of laying the foundation for a new, more stable global monetary system.

But these innovations are fundamentally different from a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. The standard economic textbook view is that for a currency to be credible, it must serve as a means of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. It is hard to see how a cryptocurrency could meet all three of these conditions all of the time. True, some cryptocurrencies have demonstrated an ability to perform some of these functions some of the time. But the price of Bitcoin, the canonical cryptocurrency, is so volatile that it is almost impossible to imagine it becoming a reliable store of value or means of exchange.

Moreover, underlying these three functions is the rather important role of monetary policy. Currency management is a key macroeconomic policymaking tool. Why should we surrender this function to some anonymous or amorphous force such as a decentralized ledger, especially one that caps the overall supply of currency, thus guaranteeing perpetual volatility?

At any rate, it will be interesting to see what happens to cryptocurrencies when central banks finally start raising interest rates after years of maintaining ultra-loose monetary policies. We have already seen that the price of Bitcoin tends to fall sharply during “risk-off” episodes, when markets suddenly move into safe assets. In this respect, it exhibits the same behavior as many “growth stocks” and other highly speculative bets.

In the interest of transparency, I did consider buying some Bitcoin a few years ago, when its price had collapsed from $18,000 to below $8,000 in the space of around two months. Friends of mine predicted that it would climb above $50,000 within two years – and so it has.

Ultimately, I decided against it, because I had already taken a lot of risk investing in early-stage companies that at least served some obvious purpose. But even if I had bet on Bitcoin, I would have understood that it was just a speculative punt, not a bet on the future of the monetary system.

Speculative bets do of course sometimes pay off, and I congratulate those who loaded up on Bitcoin early on. But I would offer them the same advice I would offer to a lottery winner: Don’t let your windfall go to your head. (Project Syndicate)

 

Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, is Chair of Chatham House.

The End of Efficiency in Economics - Robert Skidelsky (The Telegraph)

  The End of Efficiency

Economists have been strangely blind to the need to trade off efficiency for longer-term sustainability, largely because their equilibrium models regard the future as simply an extension of the present. But there is no reason to believe that what is efficient today will be efficient tomorrow and always.

Robert Skidelsky

The Telegraph, Londres – 18.12.2020

 

 Economics is the study of economizing, or using the least amount of time and effort to produce the greatest amount of satisfaction. The more we can economize on the use of scarce resources, the more “efficient” we are said to be in getting what we want. Efficiency is a prized goal because it literally cheapens the cost of living. Cheapness in obtaining the goods and services we want is thus the key to a better life.

Efficiency lies at the heart of trade theory. In the early nineteenth century, the economist David Ricardo argued that each country should concentrate on making what it could produce at the lowest relative cost. The late Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson described Ricardo’s theory of “comparative advantage” as the most beautiful in economics, equally applicable to the division of labor between people, businesses, and countries. It remains the underlying theoretical rationale for globalization.

Efficiency is also why economists have been fretting over labor productivity in advanced economies. In the United Kingdom, for example, workers produce, on average, no more output per hour today than they did in 2007, so there has been no gain in efficiency. This means that UK living standards have remained flat for 13 years – the longest period of stagnation since well into the Industrial Revolution. Economists have published hundreds of articles in learned journals trying to explain this “productivity puzzle.”

But the broader mood music has changed. Google’s Ngram Viewer, a tool that uses a database of millions of books and journals to chart the frequency with which words appear, indicates that use of “efficiency” and “productivity” has plummeted since 1982, whereas that of “resilience” and “sustainability” has spiked. We now talk more about the sustainability of economic life, meaning its resilience to shocks. Efficiency-focused economists are well behind the cultural curve.

Three factors seem to account for this shift. The first is growing concern that focusing only on the present cost of using resources will deplete the planetary resources available to continue the human species. Because what is cheap today may become impossibly expensive tomorrow, we need to invest in sustainable technologies that can yield a long-run return to humanity, rather than just short-run gains for businesses and consumers.

Second, COVID-19 has made us much more aware of the fragility of global supply chains. Ricardo’s beautiful theory threatens to spawn a nightmare if countries lose access to essential supplies because they have accepted the logic of procuring from the cheapest markets. During the pandemic, most people in the West were shocked by the extent of their reliance on China for essential medical supplies.

Lastly, it is more widely understood that the quest for efficiency at any cost, whether through globalization or automation, threatens the security and sustainability of employment. “The end of production is consumption,” Adam Smith proclaimed with impeccable logic. But sustainable consumption requires sustainable incomes, which come mainly from wages; and we are far from having a system that allows for consumption without wages. In fact, in the name of efficiency, we have allowed huge wealth and income inequality.

Economists are normally keen to speak of trade-offs. But they have been strangely blind to the need to trade off efficiency for sustainability – that is, to broaden their concept of efficiency to one of efficiency over time. This is largely because contemporary economists’ equilibrium models make no provision for time, and regard the future as simply an extension of the present. What is efficient today will be efficient tomorrow and always.

But, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, the future is uncertain. There is no reason to believe that the conditions that today make free trade, global supply chains, automation, and poverty wages efficient will continue. As Keynes said in a notable response to the econometrician (and future Nobel laureate) Jan Tinbergen: “Is it assumed the future is a determinate function of past statistics? What place is left for expectations and the state of confidence relating to the future? What place is allowed for non-numerical factors, such as inventions, politics, labor troubles, wars, earthquakes, financial crises?” We could compile a similar list of contemporary risks.

It follows that economic policymakers need to pay much more attention to the “precautionary principle,” or the principle of “least risk of harm,” which aims to control risk rather than maximize benefits. The economist Vladimir Masch calls this approach “Risk-Constrained Optimization,” and argues that it “is needed under [the] highly dangerous, uncertain, and complex conditions of this century.” Using mathematical modeling, Masch has constructed a number of risk-constrained candidate strategies.

Such a prudential decision-making rule may lead us to uncomfortable lines of thought. For example, how sustainable is an uncontrolled increase in global population? We continue to put our faith in science and education to restrict population growth in time, but we don’t know how much time is available. There are surely grounds for the Malthusian concern that the increase in the number of people will exceed the resources available to support them, resulting in large-scale plagues, famines, floods, and wars – which traditionally have reduced overpopulation.

Likewise, a sustainable technology is surely one that does not make extreme demands on our power of adaptability, threatening widespread economic and social redundancy and the predictable political backlash. We currently view technological progress exclusively through the lens of efficiency, and allow its pace to be set by cost-cutting market competition. The prudential principle implies adapting technology to people, rather than the other way round.

Finally, how sustainable is a capitalist political economy that must allow its financial system to crash periodically on the grounds that it is “efficient” at managing risks?

So far, we have only started to scratch the surface of such questions. But as the language of efficiency and sustainability shifts, economic thought must catch up with the new disposition.  (P.S.)

 

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords, is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

O fim do "modelo economico" brasileiro (The Telegraph): mas houve algum modelo, alguma vez?

Acho que este articulista, do respeitável jornal inglês The Telegraph, se engana conceitualmente.
Desde 2003 o Brasil não tem qualquer modelo, nenhum, necas de pitibiribas, zero...
Os companheiros primeiro adotaram, sem dizer, todos os grandes mecanismos e ferramentas da política econômica anterior, desavergonhadamente (mas acertadamente, graças ao Palocci, é preciso reconhecer). Roubaram o software dos tucanos, como já disse José Carlos Mendonça de Barros, sem pagar royalties, nenhum direito autoral, e isso mesmo acusando uma "herança maldita" que eles mesmos tinham criado com suas receitas esquizofrênicas de política econômica aprovadas no congresso de Olinda (dezembro de 2001) do seu partido companheiro (e felizmente nunca aplicadas inteiramente).
Depois que o companheiro neoliberal se foi, por outras patifarias que tem mais a ver com seus costumes e vícios degradados do que com a política econômica, esta começou a se deteriorar lentamente, sob as mãos e as patas dos novos responsáveis econômicos, keynesianos de botequim e provavelmente nem isso, pois nunca tiveram uma educação econômica razoável, se contentando com o software alheio e o temor de fazer errado.
Como o Brasil surfou na bonança mundial, e chinesa, tudo andou bem durante algum tempo.
Agora os maus tempos chegaram, e junto a consequência de sua inação irracional em preparar o Brasil para esse fim de bonança: os companheiros não sabem o que fazer e ficam improvisando no puxadinho setorial, sem qualquer ação coerente sobre o conjunto ou no contexto adequado. Uma redução de impostos para os amigos da corte aqui, uma proteção tarifária ali, este crédito subsidiado para os nossos amigos, aquela concessão enviesada acolá, enfim, uma panóplia de medidas desconectadas que só poderiam dar no que deu: em nada.
No final de tudo, as empresas ficam onde estavam: sem horizonte seguro para investir, e com a mesma alta carga tributária de sempre, pois os companheiros são incapazes de fazer uma verdadeira reforma fiscal que desonere a produção e estimule o investimento.
Eles simplesmente não conseguem se libertar de seu vício fundamental que é amar o Estado sobre todas as coisas. Vão ficar com um Estado moribundo e nós, trabalhadores e consumidores, no pior dos mundos possíveis.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brazil faces 1970s stagflation as resource boom wilts

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The Telegraph,  30 May 2013

88 Comments

Brazil has been forced to tighten monetary policy to curb inflation despite a slump in growth and a manufacturing crisis, raising fears that the country’s economic model is breaking down.

The central bank raised interest rates a half point to 8pc, bucking the worldwide trend towards looser money. The surprise move came hours after the release of data showing growth remained stuck at 1.9pc in the first quarter.

This was far short of expectations for the fifth quarter in a row and dashes hopes of a quick return to pre-crisis growth rates. The country grew just 0.9pc last year, a recession in emerging market terms.

“Brazil is stuck in a 1970s 'stagflation’ trap,” said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank. “It has rising inflation and falling long-term growth. There is obviously a structural problem and it is getting worse.

“The country is a very good illustration of why emerging markets have been doing so badly lately. They are trying to manage their problems by fiddling around with wage and price controls and other half-baked measures to treat the symptoms. There is a whiff of Argentina to this."

The Bovespa index of stocks in Sao Paulo is down by more than a third in dollar terms since early 2010, and has entirely missed the roaring global equity rally over the past year. The real has fallen 8pc since March and has broken out of its trading band.

Finance minister Guido Mantega gave a green light on Thursday to a further slide in the currency, saying the authorities were no longer relying on the exchange rate to check inflation, now almost 7pc.

“The sell-off in the real has been particularly violent,” said Benoit Anne from Societe Generale, calling it a symptom of a broader flight from the developing world as the US Federal Reserve prepares to tighten policy. “We think that there is a powerful shift in the thematic drivers of global emerging markets. This is the end of the bull market. It is an absolute bloodbath for rates [fixed income],” he said.

Aloisio Teles from Nomura said Brazil’s apparent abandonment of the strong real policy risks spinning out of control. “The real is having a very bad hair day,” he said.

Brazil has a war chest of €379bn (£325bn) in foreign reserves, and its public debt is no longer in dollars. It is at little risk of an old-fashioned currency crisis, but faces other deep problems.

The economic boom for much of the past decade was driven by exports of iron ore, grains and other raw materials, mostly to China. The commodity bonanza caused a surge in the real and an erosion of the country’s industrial base, a textbook case of the “resource curse”. Brazil’s car exports have been in freefall. Overall manufacturing output is still 3pc below the pre-Lehman peak, a pattern closer to southern Europe than Asia’s tigers.

A 30pc crash in iron prices this year and the broader commodity slide have choked recovery and left the country with a current account deficit of 3pc of GDP. “This should raise a red flag,” said Marcio Garcia from EconoMonitor, predicting a “melancholic ending” to Brazil’s flagging catch-up drive.

“They enjoyed the party while it lasted but they didn’t do their homework on clearing infrastructure bottlenecks,” said David Rees from Capital Economics.

Brazil languishes at 130 in the World Bank’s rankings for ease of doing business, below Bangladesh and Ethiopia. It is at 116 for enforcing contracts, 121 for starting a business and 156 for paying taxes.

The World Economic Forum ranks Brazil 107 for infrastructure, falling to 123 for roads and 135 for ports. It is 118 for wage flexibility, 123 for tariffs, 129 for customs red-tape and 132 for maths and science education. The overall picture falls far short of what is needed for a country hoping to break out of the “middle income trap”.

The Left-leaning government of Dilma Rousseff has resorted to industrial subsidies and trade barriers to protect jobs, a return to practices that have blighted Latin America for decades. The contrast with Mexico is becoming stark.

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Maquiavel: teje preso (ok, nao foi assim, mas quase...) - The Telegraph

Seria assim, se tivesse sido no Brasil. Por sorte de Maquiavel não foi; acho que ele não sobreviviria a uma cadeia brasileira, que segundo o ministro da Justiça (justiça?) são medievais.
O Maquiavel teve sorte de já viver no Renascimento (embora isso não tivesse a mínima importância) e de estar na Toscana, onde parece que ainda não existia o Primeiro Comando da Capital, só ratos, pulgas e percevejos.
Embora ele tenha sido torturado, parece que não arrancaram suas unhas, tanto é que terminou de escrever O Príncipe.
Tive a oportunidade de ajudá-lo a reescrever essa obra (vejam no meu site), adaptando aos nossos tempos, muito mais bárbaros (pelo menos politicamente) do que os dele.
Em todo caso, divirtam-se...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Briton finds 500-year-old arrest warrant for Machiavelli

A British academic has stumbled upon a 500-year-old "most wanted" notice for the arrest of Niccolo Machiavelli, the infamous Renaissance political operator who wrote The Prince.

Drawing of the trumpet used by the town crier, left, was found together with the proclamation calling for the arrest of Machiavelli Photo: University of Manchester

By Nick Squires, Rome

The Telegraph, 15 Feb 2013

Prof Stephen Milner from Manchester University discovered the historic document by accident while researching town criers and the proclamations they read out in archives in Florence.

The 1513 proclamation, which called for the arrest of Machiavelli, eventually led to his downfall and death.

"When I saw it I knew exactly what it was and it was pretty exciting," said Prof Milner.

"When you realise this document marked the fall from grace of one the world's most influential political writers, it's quite a feeling.

"The Prince is a seminal work, with a lasting influence on political thought and culture. The term 'Machiavellian' and the naming of the Devil as 'Old Nick' all derive from this single work, but the circumstances of its composition have often been overlooked."

When the Medici family returned to power in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in the city's chancery because of his association with the head of a rival faction.
His name was then linked with a conspiracy to overthrow the Medici. They issued the proclamation found by Prof Milner for his arrest.
"On the same day, he was imprisoned, tortured and later released and placed under house arrest outside the city," said the historian, an authority on Renaissance Italy.
Machiavelli, known as the Prince of Darkness, then wrote The Prince in the hope of regaining the approval of the Medicis.
"But there's no evidence to suggest they even read it," said Prof Milner, who is Visiting Professor at the Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.
Machiavelli's fortunes spiralled downwards and he died in abject poverty 14 years later.
The academic found the document while studying hundreds of town crier proclamations issued between 1470 and 1530.
He also found documents relating to the payment of four horsemen who scoured the streets of the Tuscan city for Machiavelli.
Florence is this year celebrating the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's writing of The Prince, a political treatise which argues that the pursuit of power can justify the use of immoral means.
The celebrations include, on February 19, a reconstruction of the events surrounding his arrest and imprisonment.