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.

quinta-feira, 19 de dezembro de 2019

Academia.edu: meus trabalhos mais acessados - Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Acessos a trabalhos de Paulo Roberto de Almeida em Academia.edu


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Funcex: Revista Brasileira de Comércio Exterior

Uma excelente revista para os que se interessam por comércio exterior:


Temos a satisfação de compartilhar com você a versão digital e interativa da nova edição da Revista Brasileira de Comércio Exterior, publicada trimestralmente pela Funcex - Fundação Centro de Estudos do Comércio Exterior.

Você pode acessá-la clicando na imagem ao lado ou copiando no seu navegador este link: http://www.funcex.org.br/rbce/rbce141/
Apresentamos a seguir o sumário desta edição, bem como link para acesso aos artigos individualmente.
Boa leitura!

Equipe Editorial Funcex
Rua Sete de Setembro, 99, 23º andar, Centro
20050-005 / Rio de Janeiro / RJ
Telefones: (21) 2509-7000, 3529-7002


Editorial

Ricardo Markwald
Tributação Indireta

José Augusto Coelho Fernandes
Mercosul

Vera Thorstensen, Mauro Kiithi Arima Júnior e Tiago Matsuoka Megale
Argentina

Guillermo Rozenwurcel
As políticas brasileiras de financiamento às exportações

Constanza Negri Biasutti e Felipe Augusto Torres de Carvalho
Antidumping e concorrência no Brasil

Sérgio Kannebley Júnior e Glauco Avelino Sampaio Oliveira

Um falcão da Guerra Fria quer que os EUA conduzam uma Guerra Fria contra a China: John Pomfret (WP)

A acusação é a de que a própria China já iniciou uma Guerra Fria contra os EUA.
Acho que os chineses não têm essa intenção: eles apenas intentam levar uma guerra fria econômica, que aliás eles já ganharam.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

It’s not all on Trump: China favors confrontation with the U.S.

Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Dec. 13. (Noel Celis/Afp Via Getty Images)
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Dec. 13. (Noel Celis/Afp Via Getty Images)
As the United States and China limp to a truce in the trade war, two very different story lines have played out on opposite sides of the Pacific. In the United States, a series of high-profile American figures — a columnist, a former treasury secretary, a former World Bank president and an expert on foreign relations — have weighed in with laments about the course of America’s ties to China and have criticized the Trump administration for its handling of Beijing.
If current American policies continue, these men warn, China and the United States will descend into a new Cold War that could be more dangerous and far more costly than the old one. All of these writers call for a return to the policies of engagement with China, which have been pursued since 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon first journeyed to Beijing.
In China, however, no such parallel concern has been expressed publicly. There has been no criticism of Xi Jinping for running his country’s relations with the United States into a ditch. Instead, since Nov. 20, there has been a striking upsurge in condemnation of the United States on a level not seen since 1999, when a U.S. missile mistakenly destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese reporters.
For the past several weeks, the main state-run nightly news program, watched by hundreds of millions, has been devoted to disparaging Americans and their government. The United States has been blamed for fomenting the six-month-long demonstrations in Hong Kong and for meddling in China’s internal affairs over criticism of the treatment of the Uighurs.
Carl Minzner, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Fordham University, has watched the newscast every day since Nov. 20 and notes that each night the United States has been attacked not once or twice but in multiple news segments — 13 on Dec. 4 alone, followed by eight the next night. Then on Dec. 13, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, blasted the United States for “almost paranoid” behavior that has seriously damaged “the hard-won foundation of mutual trust between China and the United States.”
Given these jeremiads, reading the pronouncements by the American figures —columnist Thomas Friedman, former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former World Bank president Robert Zoellick and foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria — it’s difficult to grasp what exactly they would have the United States do. It takes two to fight a Cold War; it also takes two to stop one.
So far, China doesn’t seem ready to put down its gloves.
To be sure, some of the criticisms of the Trump administration by these four writers are spot on. To properly deal with China, the Trump administration can’t continue to alienate America’s allies, including South Korea, Japan and Europe. Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership also denied America an important lever to push back against China’s trade practices. But embracing these smarter policies won’t actually improve relations with China or head off a new Cold War, unless China is also ready to compromise. And so far, there’s no evidence of that.
For me, the critical issue is that none of these writers seems to have truly grasped how much China has changed for the worse under Xi, despite the easy availability of insightful books on the subject, such as Elizabeth Economy’s The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State." China began to veer from its market-oriented economic reforms and understated foreign policy in 2008, when the global financial crisis made the United States appear weak. Xi’s rise to Communist Party boss in 2012 added a dose of accelerant.
These experts also soft-pedal another issue that is key to understanding the negative trajectory in U.S.-China relations: decoupling. “Decoupling” is a buzzword used to describe the process by which the United States and China have begun to separate their intensively intertwined economies. All of the authors decry decoupling as a strategic error, but they also assume that if the Trump administration decides to forego decoupling, then China will follow suit.
This ignores China’s role in the issue.
China effectively announced its intention to decouple from its dependence on U.S. technology in 2015 — well before Trump’s election. That was the year when Beijing rolled out its Made in China 2025 program, which aims to replace foreign-made high technology with Chinese products.
China has also “decoupled” from international agreements. It has ignored a major treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, by claiming all of the South China Sea as its territory and ignored the verdict of an international tribunal that ruled against China’s claim. It has also declared invalid the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international understanding made over the future of Hong Kong. And since 2014, when a newspaper in Liaoning province published an article urging students to expose liberal professors, it has intellectually decoupled from the West in a campaign that has led to book burning.
This is a far different country than the China that entered the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In a way, many experts have become unconscious victims of the Chinese Communist system of thought control — where the victim is always at fault. Under this logic, responsibility for the current state of affairs has to be lain at the feet of the United States because the Communist Party never makes a mistake. Our four American commentators seem to have internalized that message. So, they declare, the United States needs to do more. China? Not so much.

O homem que salvou NY, Felix Rohatyn, salvo do Holocausto por Souza Dantas

O sobrevivente do Holocausto que salvou New York da falência devia sua vida ao mais humano dos diplomatas brasileiros, o embaixador Souza Dantas, quem lhe deu o visto para escapar da França ocupada pelos nazistas num dos momentos mais sombrios da história do mundo.

Municipal Master

Felix Rohatyn helped save New York—with some unintended consequences.



The City Journal, December 19, 2019

Felix Rohatyn—Holocaust survivor, investment banker, U.S. military veteran, and ambassador to France—died Saturday at 91. He lived a remarkable life, escaping Austria and then France as a child and rising to the top of New York’s financial world. He’s most remembered, though, for a public role. In 1975, Governor Hugh Carey tapped him to save New York City from municipal bankruptcy. He ably did that—in large part through financial innovation.
Starting in the 1950s, New York spent beyond its means. Beginning in the mid-sixties, the city began borrowing to paper over gaps between day-to-day revenues (taxes) and day-to-day spending (fire, police, sanitation, education, and, increasingly, social services such as welfare). By the spring of 1975, New York projected a billion-dollar “cash-flow interruption” against $5 billion in annual tax revenues, because the city’s banks were nervous about lending money to an insolvent city and were about to cut off the cash. The city didn’t need money just to fund its current-year deficit; it needed money to refinance the $3 billion in short-term debt it had already incurred. Otherwise, it would default— representing the biggest bankruptcy ever in the world of municipal finance, which investors considered nearly as safe as U.S. Treasury bonds.
To avert a default, the standard story goes, New York State and the federal government stepped in. The feds guaranteed state-issued bonds to save the city. In return for this aid, the state appointed a panel of wise men (and one woman) to oversee the city’s spending. The city embarked on a firm path of fiscal responsibility. New York was saved through fiscal discipline, and went on, starting in the 1980s, to thrive again.
This story is partly true. New York did spend beyond its means, and it did need rescue, and the city’s top financiers and businessmen, led by Rohatyn, engineered that rescue after the political class had failed.
Contrary to the accepted narrative, though, New York never cut back its spending on a sustained basis. Starting in the mid-seventies, the city laid off police, sanitation, education, and other workers, and those cuts contributed to an atmosphere of decline, not resurrection, and helped accelerate population loss. In 1975, Rohatyn even mused of a city where volunteers performed necessary clerical work, though this idea was quickly dismissed. Within a year, Rohatyn realized the error of his logic and sought to avoid more layoffs, which he called “counterproductive.”
In mid-1975, Carey appointed Rohatyn to head a new state entity called the Municipal Assistance Corporation. The new entity, chartered by the state legislature, resembled a traditional public authority, such as the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but with no real function. It was a shell corporation to raise debt. Lawmakers allowed MAC to raise billions from bond investors by automatically diverting city sales taxes to the state, which would transfer them to MAC. MAC would use this sales-tax revenue to pay the interest on its debt before handing any money left over back to the city. The city, thus, would lose control over a big portion of its own tax revenues (and, through a separate state panel, its budgeting authority). Because of this mechanism, as well as an eventual federal guarantee, investors considered MAC bonds safer than the city’s general-obligation bonds, still paid out of general tax revenues that the city might squander. Rohatyn bought the city time, which, when it comes to refinancing debt, is as good as gold.
In the early eighties, Wall Street took off, and new residents and tax revenues poured in. In 1975, city tax collections totaled $5 billion; by 1985, they had reached $11 billion. Over that critical decade, revenues kept up with the high inflation of the era—no mean feat. New York City invested in better infrastructure, including rebuilding the subways after decades of neglect, and began to reverse the cuts in public services that had plagued the seventies and early eighties. With more disciplined, data-driven policing, among other things, and the rebuilding of deteriorated bridges, the city began using its tax dollars more wisely.
New York was still a high-tax, high-spending city after Rohatyn, but it became better run. Today’s record revenues—$59 billion in major tax revenues in 2018—are more than twice the 1975 total, after accounting for inflation. Today, New York City owes $90 billion, nearly three times the total owed in 1975. Per capita, that’s nearly $11,000 per person, nearly 60 percent more than the runner-up city, Chicago, and more than twice the average of other large cities, according to city comptroller Scott Stringer.
MAC-style structured finance—and the city’s fantastic wealth—keep this carousel going. Even with a near-record population and historic tax revenues, more than $50 billion of New York’s debt is borrowed through nonprofit shell corporations, not through general-obligation bonds. Borrowing through such special-purpose entities lets New York garner higher bond-credit ratings and lower interest rates than more traditional borrowing would allow.
And what of that short-term debt New York borrowed so long ago—its MAC debt? New York never paid it back. In 2004, the state, through a different shell nonprofit, the Sales Tax Asset Receivable Corporation, borrowed $2.5 billion to refinance its remaining 1970s-bailout debt. Peel off layer upon layer of refinancing, and New York still owes that money that it borrowed to make its payrolls in the early 1970s. The long grace period that Felix Rohatyn helped create for New York may not last forever.

Photo by Chris Kleponis/Getty Images