Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
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sexta-feira, 19 de setembro de 2014
Across the Empire, 2014 (21): Detroit, a Paris (falida) do MidWest?
quinta-feira, 22 de maio de 2014
Detroit: uma cidade destruida pela incompetencia politica e pelacorrupcao dos politicos...
The Answer to Detroit's Problems: Rich Guys Calling Each Other to Discuss Their 'Neat' Ideas
sábado, 29 de março de 2014
Detroit arruinada: melhor leiloar todos os seus tesouros artisiticos...
quarta-feira, 2 de outubro de 2013
Companhia de Opera de NY decreta falencia e sai de cena
Ópera de Nova York fecha as portas e declara falência
Companhia não conseguiu levantar recursos suficientes para continuar em atividade
sábado, 10 de agosto de 2013
Divida publica: apenas 17 bi; OK, pode-se viver com isso...
J. ERIC WISE
The City Journal, August 2013
Is Detroit Dead?
Charlie LeDuff says yes.
9 August 2013
Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff (Penguin, 304 pp., $27.95)
“It’s awful here, there is no other way to say it,” Charlie LeDuff writes in Detroit: An American Autopsy. Now that Detroit has filed for municipal bankruptcy, just how awful is a focus of national attention. But not only is Detroit dead, according to LeDuff’s title; the city was “never really that good.” From the moment when Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac—whom LeDuff derides as a “hustler” and “Detroit’s first dope dealer”—established the settlement to the city’s 1863 race riots to the depredations of the modern-day Motor City, LeDuff’s Detroit has been defined by racism, corruption, and greed.
As LeDuff sees it, “Michigan may be geographically one of America’s most northern states, but spiritually, it is one of its most southern”—by which he suggests that it has a long history of racism similar to that of many Southern states. To fit his narrative, LeDuff emphasizes certain episodes in Detroit’s history while wholly overlooking others. For example, discussing the 1943 riots, LeDuff declines to mention that they took place after the federal government designated new public housing, called the Sojourner Truth project, as white public housing (the Federal Housing Administration segregated federal public-housing projects as well as mandating “redlining” lending practices). Mayor Edward Jeffries, a liberal Republican, successfully lobbied Washington to change the project’s racial designation and used a force of 1,100 police officers and 1,600 National Guardsmen to make the project safe for black occupancy. White migrant laborers, many from isolated rural areas, found themselves competing not only for jobs, but also for housing. Resentful of competition, disaffected whites initiated unrest, and the city exploded.
After the riots, Detroit’s politics became more racially polarized, and the divisions worsened through the 1950s, with “white flight” and “blockbusting.” Political realignment, centralized urban planning, the destructive effects of Great Society social programs, and increasing radicalism culminated in even more violent riots in 1967. Coleman Young, a champion of urban race politics, became mayor in 1974. Young once said that “Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke.” Young sought to form ever larger political majorities based on race, and he succeeded. During his 20-year tenure, marked by high crime, middle-class residents fled the city, and Detroit’s population declined by as much as 500,000.
All of this is one part of the record; LeDuff is not terribly interested in the rest. When Michigan became a United States territory, the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery there. Antebellum Detroit was a Whig city, a stop on the Underground Railroad to Canada, and the home of abolitionist luminary Zachariah Chandler, mayor from 1851 to 1852 and then senator and secretary of the interior. Yes, Detroit erupted in riot in 1863, but LeDuff omits context, such as the draft, Copperhead politics, and concurrent rioting in New York and other northern cities. After the Civil War, Michigan led the country in civil rights. In 1867, the state prohibited segregation in education; in 1869, it banned discrimination in life insurance; in 1883, it removed interracial marriage barriers; in 1885, it prohibited discrimination in public accommodations; and in 1890, more than half a century before Brown v. Board of Education, the Michigan Supreme Court rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine. That’s a lot of history to overlook.
LeDuff is dismissive of the city’s civic fathers as well. Of Henry Ford, LeDuff says only that he was “a notorious miser and social ascetic” who despised credit. While not without profound flaws, Ford was also a philanthropist and a pioneer of equal opportunity. Ford’s “welfare industrialism” elevated millions of unskilled laborers from subsistence to abundance, and he didn’t discriminate in hiring and promotion. Herbert Northrup, a Wharton School labor specialist, once observed that at the Ford Motor Company in the twenties and thirties, blacks and whites came “closer to job equality” than at any other large firm in the country.
Fully versed in his city’s horrors, LeDuff has little to say about its past glories. By 1950, 1.85 million people called themselves Detroiters, making their city the fifth-largest in America. They sat on the throne of industrial and consumer innovation, and they enjoyed the highest incomes and home-ownership rates in the nation.
Today, of course, it’s a different story. Ruinous political leadership, demographic change, and economic dislocation have bled Detroit of much of its vitality. The city today has just under 700,000 residents. But even now, the population of the Detroit metropolitan area (as opposed to the city proper) is holding steady at 95 percent of its 1970 peak. The Detroit region (again, as opposed to the city) has a median household income of $49,160, ranking 17th in the nation. Media attention often focuses on the decline of automotive manufacturing, but despite the disappearance of high-paying, unskilled jobs, skilled positions remain available. The drumbeat about Detroit’s economic decline can thus be misleading; while the city itself is moribund, the region is not. The “awful” conditions stop abruptly at the city’s political boundaries. Detroit’s problems are as much political as financial.
LeDuff wonders where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness got lost in Detroit. He is right to wonder, but American Autopsy would be a better book if it did not bury a once-great city.
J. Eric Wise is a partner practicing restructuring and finance at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
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sábado, 20 de julho de 2013
Estados falidos, cidades falidas: onde e como pode acontecer? - Le Monde
Uma cidade, ou um país, que atuasse verdadeiramente por princípios liberais, NUNCA iria à falência, pela simples razão de que a sua capacidade de endividamento estaria imediatamente comprometida pelo estado de suas finanças. Ou seja, o endividamento, num sistema sistema liberal, deve refletir exatamente a capacidade de pagamento, do contrário os juros seriam proibitivos.
Apenas sistemas, ou países (o mesmo se aplica a prefeituras e estados federados) totalmente dirigistas, onde as decisões políticos primam sobre as realidades econômicas, conseguem se endividar acima de suas capacidades respectivas.
Fique claro que cidades como São Paulo, o o próprio estado, foram literalmente à falência por causa de dirigentes políticos irresponsáveis (Quércia, Fleury, Maluf, Pita, Marta Suplicy, etc.), que se endividaram além da conta, sem qualquer atenção ao estado de finanças locais. Só não foram à bancarrota porque o governo federal interveio, privatizou bancos, renegociou a dívida (federalizando os compromissos, que passaram a ser pagos por todo o povo brasileiro), e impôs limites pela Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal (que os companheiros pretenderam destruir).
Que Detroit tenha ido à falência não se deve a qualquer orientação liberal, e sim o contrário: ao dirigismo e à irresponsabilidade dos seus dirigentes. Um sistema legitimamente liberal jamais redundaria nesse tipo de situação, pois seria impossível fazer dívida sem provisão de pagamento.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Une ville peut-elle faire faillite en France ?
Une ville entière qui demande à mettre la clé sous la porte. La scène paraît surréaliste mais vient de se produire à Detroit aux Etats-Unis, où la cité de plus de 700 000 habitants, grevée par une dette de quelque 18 milliards de dollars (13,7 milliards d'euros), s'est déclarée en faillite jeudi 18 juillet. Une commune en France pourrait-elle atteindre ce point critique ? L'hypothèse apparaît improbable et de nombreux garde-fous existent de ce côté-ci de l'Atlantique pour empêcher la descente aux enfers.
quarta-feira, 13 de março de 2013
Krugman: um keynesiano insolvente, 2 - onde a porca torce o rabo...
O keynesianismo, realmente, é uma fraude, e encontra-se insolvente intelectualmente, mas ainda tem muitos adeptos de par le monde, sobretudo no Brasil, onde existem keynesianos até em botequins, ou sobretudo de botequim, onde eles bebem para esquecer que a teoria, na prática, é outra, e onde uma Associação Keynesiana tem menos de dez anos de criação.
O que não deixa de representar uma nova confirmação da teorida de Millor Fernandes que dizia que quando as ideias ficam bem velhinhas elas se mudam para o Brasi...
Gostaram?
Mas essa história da falência do Krugman é muito melhor.
Os austríacos devem estar rolando de rir, o pessoal de Chicago, então, deve estar dizendo:
"Bem feito, bem feito! Que mandou acreditar nas baboseiras do feiticeiro de Cambridge?"
Também acho: Keynes, desde os anos 1920, percebeu que a sua velha Inglaterra estava falida, e começou a conceber -- conspirar seria um verbo mais exato -- uma teoria para que seu país não fosse completamente à falência e tivesse de passar a viver de caridade pública, ou seja, da ajuda dos americanos.
Em Bretton Woods, por exemplo, ele estava desesperado atrás de uma tia rica, que pagasse o cartão de crédito da Inglaterra, e achava ter encontrado nos EUA. Mas, essa tia rica simplesmente cortou o cartão de crédito do sobrinho falimentar, e obrigou-o a passar a pão e água (e limitado unicamente a comida inglesa, argh!). Foi assim que a Inglaterra, desafiando o próprio FMI, desvalorizou a libra ilegalmente, em mais de 25% logo depois.
Pois o Paul Krugman está desesperado atrás de uma tia rica.
Quem será que vai vir em seu soccorro? Não será o Chapolim, com certeza.
Tem de ser alguém capaz de movimentar a máquina de dinheiro, como o Ben Bernanke, os cheiques do petróleo, algum cartel da cocaína...
Enfim, alguma solução tem de ser encontrada.
Vamos ver o que dizem da matéria do Daily Currant.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Paul Krugman’s phony bankruptcy: a history
That’s a slam-dunk post for Straka. “This is the birthplace of Austrian economics,” says Straka. “It was just too good of a story that the prototypical Keynesian follower, Krugman, had declared bankruptcy. That was just too saucy a story for us.”
That’s not to say Straka didn’t check Google. He did, and found not a lot of hits for the story. “They have a scoop,” he concluded, before putting the story on Prudent Investor.
Prudent Investor — “one of the early and few warners about the U.S. housing bubble,” Straka says — has some reach. “I’m being syndicated and aggregated in more feeds than I could remember,” Straka says. One of the feeds that pulls in the Prudent Investor is knit together by a California company named Financial Content, which delivers stock quotes and financial information and news to its clients’ websites. And one of those clients is Boston.com, a portal that presents content from the Boston Globe.
Wing Yu, the CEO of Financial Content, says that his people generate absolutely no news, no content. They merely grab it, wrangle it and push it onto websites. “We’re strictly a tech company,” Yu says. “We don’t have any editorial oversight.”
No editorial oversight, sure. Editorial impact? Absolutely: The Prudent Investor posting on Krugman made its way through the Financial Content feed and onto Boston.com. Once there, it sucked in all the juices of integrity and credibility stored up over the decades by the Boston Globe. So people believed the posting that indicated Krugman had gone bankrupt.
Or, at the very least, Breitbart.com believed the posting that Krugman had gone bankrupt. It swallowed the story and republished it, laughing the whole way. “Apparently this Keynesian thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.” This, from the duped Breitbart.com writer:
Larry O'Connor @LarryOConnor
The notion that some automated news feed, unregulated by local editorial brains, would just filter onto Boston.com appeared to offend Boston Globe Editor Brian McGrory, who earlier today told the Erik Wemple Blog: “The idea that we’d have a partner on our site is actually news to me,” referring to Financial Content. He pledged to “address our relationship with that vendor.”
Is hoodwinking some sap at a media organization the reigning objective at Daily Currant? Nah, says founder Daniel Barkeley. “The goal is to write satire that’s close to the truth,” says Barkeley, noting that he models his stuff after mockumentaries such as “The Office.” “They hew very close to reality yet they’re supposed to be funny.”
Barkeley, 28, produces the Daily Currant with the help of just a single freelancer. Material for his riffs, he says, comes from his reading diet, which consists of the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Economist and the like. “I just try to satirize the things that I read,” says Barkeley, which results in joke-posts that are a bit higher brow than the offerings from The Onion, he says.
The elevated-brow content in the Krugman piece comes right here:
The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth.References to Portuguese wine and English cloth weren’t plucked from a comedic riff. David Ricardo, the great English political economist, cited those two products in laying out the theory of comparative advantage, which would become a philosophical pillar of free trade. Krugman’s bio is thick on the economics of international trade.
“The idea that he would rack up a bill on Portuguese wine and English cloth is the giveaway,” says Barkeley. A giveaway that the folks at Breitbart.com and Prudent Investor somehow failed to spot, to the eternal embarrassment of their university economics professors.
Journos’ failure to pick up on a nicely threaded comparative-advantage joke resulted in all kinds of Internet violence: Straka reports having pulled his piece within an hour of its posting; Boston.com went nuts trying to track down people who could actually take the Krugman thing off of its site; and Breitbart.com took down its piece. And! Format magazine published this stunning notice in red ink at the top of its aggregated story:
Österreich steht noch, den Euro gibt’s auch noch – doch der Ökonom und Euro-Schwarzmaler Paul Krugman schlittert in den Privatkonkurs, nachdem der Versuch, einen Ausweg aus den Schulden zu finden, gescheitert ist, berichtet “The Daily Currant”.UPDATE: It’s the footer of the Format story that actually attempts to correct things. It reads:
Die Quelle dieser “Nachricht” ist das Satire-Magazin “The Daily Currant”, der Wahrheitsgehalt der Meldung entsprechend gering.