Thursday 26 January 2012

More European!

"Do we dare to be more European?"

Chancellor Angela Merkel, World Economic Forum, Davos, Jan 25th 2011

Sounds a bit like Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what can you do for your country.", only classier!
Angela Merkel - German Chancellor


Davos lake from the air

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Portuguese Public TV licks the boots of corrupt and blood stained Angolan kleptocrats

Fatima Campos Ferreira and some Angolan "rich clowns" in leopard chairs - Portuguese Public TV (RTP 1)  live from Luanda - Sana Hotel

Pedro Rosa Mendes' chronicle about about a Portuguese public TV (RTP 1) show licking the boots of the corrupt and blood stained Angolan kleptocrats cost him his job with the same company.

The show illustrates how Angolan low-lives are willing to do anything to buy respectability, and worst, how the current Portuguese business pack and politicians are willing to abdicate dignity.

Shame on them all, the dignity of a proud European Colonial nation cannot be given up by such worms!

The full text is included below (first in Portuguese, the Google translation is included after the original).

Transcription of the chronicle "Este Tempo" (This Time), broadcast on RDP Antena 1 on January 18th: 
“Em directo de Luanda, a RTP serviu nesta segunda-feira aos portugueses e ao mundo – eu vi aqui em Paris – uma emissão a que chamou ‘Reencontro’ e na qual desfilaram, durante duas horas, responsáveis políticos, empresários e comentadores de Portugal  e de Angola, entre alguns palhaços ricos e figuras grotescas do folclore local.
O serviço público de televisão tem estômago para muito, alguns dirão para tudo, mas o Reencontro a que assistimos desta vez foi um dos mais nauseantes e grosseiros exercícios de propaganda e mistificação a que alguma vez assisti. Há até propaganda comestível, quando feita com inteligência, mas nem sequer essa bitola foi conseguida, foi permitida, à emissão. A nossa televisão, a televisão paga por todos e que, de certo modo, é um pouco de cada um de nós, afectiva mas também politicamente,  foi a Luanda socializar com os apparatchik do regime, nos quais deveríamos reencontrar uma Angola irmã, uma Angola feliz, uma Angola nova.
Aconteceu o contrário. Reencontrei nesta emissão a falta de vergonha de uma elite que sabe o poder que tem e o exibe em cada palavra que diz. Não no conteúdo, mas no tom, seguro, simpático, veladamente sobranceiro. Aquela gente –  as divas, os engravatados, os socialites – são. ao mesmo tempo, a couraça e as lantejoulas de uma clique produzida pela história recente de um país que combinou uma guerra de 30 anos e uma riqueza concentrada, basicamente, no petróleo.
Oleocracia, chamou-lhe a socióloga francesa Christine Messiant, falecida faz agora anos, e que identificou como ninguém a natureza do poder de José Eduardo dos Santos, do MPLA, da Grande Família e das suas clientelas. Em poucas linhas, a clique angolana, em torno do Presidente, privatizou o Estado, numa teia de clientes da ‘economia política’ angolana e num aparelho que controla, por um lado, a segurança e o uso da força, e, por outro, as contas vitais da República, como a do petróleo, dos diamantes, do Banco Nacional e do Tesouro.
Os generais e barões da economia política fizeram ganhos astronómicos nas comissões dos contratos de armamento, do petróleo, da manutenção militar, por aí fora, e depois usaram esses recursos  em todos os negócios sensíveis, estratrégicos – as empresas de segurança, as companhias de aviação, os sectores das empresas públicas colocados em leasing, as companhias ligadas às forças armadas e à polícia. Um lucro incalculável e, o melhor, legal!
Como bem explicou Christine Messiant, o controlo da economia pelo topo do poder político (juntando as altas patentes e o politburo informal do Partido) usou e geriu a concorrência internacional, beneficiando a conivência, a colaboração ou a assistência de grupos estrangeiros na banca, no sector energético.
É esta, resumindo, a face verdadeira da nova Angola: o novo poder económico é apenas a nova máscara do velho poder político. Uma maquilhagem sofisticada mas óbvia, o bâton da ditadura, parafraseando o grande jornalista Rafael Marques.
Num reencontro digno para ambos os povos e ambas as audiências, teria havido por exemplo Rafael Marques, ou alguém que chamasse à corrupção, corrupção, e não, quase a medo, numa única pergunta, ‘um certo tipo de corrupção’, como fez Fátima Campos Ferreira.
Quem se encontra com a realidade de Angola, encontra a violência brutal nas Lundas diamantíferas, os despojos da guerra civil no tecido social e produtivo, a conflitualidade social latente entre quem tem o mundo e quem não é sequer dono da sua vida, ou a pobreza dos musseques de Luanda, que não desaparecem com o cair do cetim vermelho de um banco como na publicidade que embrulhou a emissão da RTP. Já agora, gostaria de ter reencontrado outros portugueses: os milhares que vão para Angola em fuga de um país sem esperança, o nosso, como se ia nos anos 50, e, como então, enfiados como semi-escravos e semi-reféns à mercê dos seus patrões – agora angolanos – num estaleiro, numa pedreira ou numa fazenda algures fora do alcance das visitas oficiais que chegam a Luanda.
Nesta emissão, enfim, Portugal confirmou que, como antes os nossos colonos, apenas temos a subserviência quando a situação não nos permite o abuso. É no que estamos. ‘Qual o objectivo do investimento angolano no estrangeiro?’, perguntava a jornalista. A resposta foi dada pela própria emissão: respeitabilidade. Luanda apenas compra aquilo que sabe que não tem.”

Pedro Rosa Mendes

English version, using Google translation (may be a bit crude!):


"Live from Luanda, RTP served Monday to the Portuguese and the world - I've seen here in Paris - an show it called 'Reunion', in which for two hours paraded politicians, businessmen and commentators in Portugal and Angola, among some rich clowns and grotesque figures of the local folklore.


Public service television has the stomach for a lot, some will say to all, but the Reunion we saw this time was one of the most gross and nauseating propaganda exercises and mystification that has ever seen. There's even edible advertising, when done with intelligence, but even that gauge was achieved, was allowed to issue. Our television, pay television and for all that, somehow, is a bit of each one of us, emotional but also politically, was socializing with the Luanda regime apparatchik, in which we rediscover a sister Angola, Angola a happy, a new Angola.


The opposite happened. I rediscovered in this show the shamelessness of an elite that knows the power it has and displays it in every word it says. Not in content but in tone, safe, friendly, overlooking covertly. Those people - the divas, the suits, socialites - are. at the same time, the breastplate and spangles click produced by a recent history of a country that has combined a 30-year war and a wealth concentrated primarily in the oil.


Oilcracy, called it the French sociologist Christine Messiant, who died years ago now, and that anyone identified as the nature of the power of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, the MPLA, the Great Family and their clienteles. In a few lines, click the Angolan around the President, privatized the state, in a web of clients 'political economy' in Angola and an apparatus that controls the one hand, security and use of force, and secondly, the critical accounts of the Republic, such as oil, diamonds, the National Bank and the Treasury.


The generals and barons of political economy made astronomical gains in commissions from arms deals, oil, maintenance of military out there, and then used these resources in all business sensitive estratrégicos - security companies, the airlines the sectors of public enterprises placed in leasing, companies linked to the armed forces and police. An untold amount of profit and, above all, legal!


As well explained Christine Messiant, control of the economy at the top of political power (and joining the upper echelons and the Party's informal Politburo ) used and managed the international competition, benefiting collusion, collaboration or assistance from foreign banking groups in the sector energy.


This, in short, the true face of the new Angola: the new economic power is just another mask of the old political power. A sophisticated but obvious makeup, the lipstick of the dictatorship, to paraphrase the great journalist Rafael Marques.


A reunion worthy of both peoples and both audiences, there would have been for example Rafael Marques, or someone to call corruption, corruption, and not, almost fear, a single question, 'a certain kind of corruption', as did Fatima Campos Ferreira.


Who meets the reality of Angola, meets the brutal violence in the Lunda diamond, the spoils of the civil war in the social and productive fabric, the latent social conflict between those who have the world and who is not even master of his life, or poverty the slums of Luanda, which do not disappear with the fall of a bank of red satin and wrapped in advertising that the issuance of the RTP. By the way, I have rediscovered other Portuguese: the thousands who go to Angola on the run from a country without hope, ours, as people would go in the 1950s, and since then, stuck as semi-slaves and semi-hostages at the mercy of their employers - now Angola - a construction site, a quarry or on a farm somewhere out of reach of official visitors arriving in Luanda.


In this show, finally, Portugal has confirmed that, as our colonists before, we have only subservience when the situation does not allow the abuse. It's what we are. 'What is the purpose of the Angolan investment abroad?', Asked the journalist. The answer was given by the very issue: respectability. Luanda just buys what it knows it does not have. "

Pedro Rosa Mendes

About Pedro Rosa Mendes:

Pedro Rosa Mendes - Portuguese journalist
Pedro Rosa Mendes is a journalist and fiction writer. He began his journalistic career in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1988 and joined the founders of Público the following year, going on to become the newspaper’s Luanda, Angola, correspondent. 


As a reporter he covered conflicts in Angola, Rwanda, Zaire/DRC, Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, winning Portugal’s Bordalo Prize for Print Journalism in 2000. 


Between 2007 and 2009 he was posted in East Timor as Dili correspondent for the Agência Lusa de Notícias (the official news agency of Portugal), before becoming the agency’s correspondent in Paris, where he currently lives. 


Mendes’s works of fiction include Baía dos Tigres (Bay of Tigers: A Journey Through War-torn Angola), which won the PEN Club Fiction prize; Atlântico (Atlantic); and Lenin Oil, which was a collaboration with illustrator Alain Corbel. His books of reportage include Ilhas de Fogo (Islands of Fire), Madre Cacau–Timor (Mother Cacau–Timor), and Schwarz Licht, Passagen durch Westafrika (Black Light–Journey through Western Africa) with photographs by Wolf Böwig.

RTP logo - Rádio e Televisão de Portugal - Portuguese Public TV and Radio

Monday 23 January 2012

Debt: Portugal's Minsky Moment?

PORTUGUESE GOVERNMENT BONDS 10YR NOTE PORTUGAL PL (GSPT10YR:IND) - graph source: Bloomberg
Same may think that ECB's 3-year longer term refinancing operation (LTRO) has taken the Euro a step back from the cliff's edge. However in a scenario where sovereign debt borrowing costs have fallen across Europe, Portugal's 10 year bond yields rose steady, to all-time highs, despite the issuance of 2.5 billion euros of short-term treasury bills on January 18th at lower yields.

The country's 10-year yields are now close to 15%. Reuters notes that Five-year credit default swap prices implied the market was pricing in a 66.8% chance of default.

In the Euro crisis time frame, Austerity and Growth seem to be at odds with each-other and the 'confidence fairy' is nowhere to be seen! As Paul Krugman said in 2010, "somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed". For a small, open economy of the periphery, expansionary austerity cannot be expected to work in a period when the few countries with current account surplus and a trade surplus are reducing consumption. By the time the country is globally competitive, it may be too late. In the worst scenario we could be heading for a Heinrich Brüning style deflation.

Has Portugal's Minsky Moment arrived at last?

Friday 13 January 2012

Inequality in America (and Britain)


Dr. Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, spoke yesterday at the Center for American Progress about how inequality threatens both the middle class and the economy at large.

The chart below, from his Powerpoint presentation, illustrates how America became the Western World champion of Income Inequality and more surprisingly of lack of intergenerational mobility. The children of the poor stay poor. The American Dream is dead. 

Furthermore, it is not a shock to see that the former colonial power, Britain, now the most American part of Europe, comes a close second to the US.

“The Great Gatsby Curve” - Higher income inequality associated with lower intergenerational mobility
Economist Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and his boss, a certain Hussein Obama
Note on the graph:
Originally from a paper by Miles Corak,  professor of economics with the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa’s, it shows a negative relationship between the Gini coefficient and intergenerational earnings elasticity.

The Gini coefficient is a standard way of measuring inequality. It is an index between 0 and 1, based on the Lorenz curve, which is the proportion of the total income earned by each percent of the population. The larger the number, the less equal the society.

Intergenerational earnings elasticity is the relationship between parents’ earnings and those of their children. In a way, it shows if children can escape their parents’ poverty. According to the 1921 song by Van & Schenck, immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby", they can’t: “The rich get richer and the poor get children.” 

Therefore the title of the graph!
Cover of  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby"
Inequality in America

Wednesday 11 January 2012

European and American Elites united

The interesting Republican primary continues to produce pearls of speech:


"American elites are guided by their desire to emulate the European elites," says presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. "As a result, anti-religious values and principles are coming to dominate the academic, news media and judicial class in America."


Praise the GOP's troglodytes, for acknowledging the continental elites some merit!


I hate Europe - Newt Gingrich cartoon

Der Spiegel summarizes de GOP posture well: "Europe is socialist, bloated and a threat to the global economy. That appears to be the message from the ongoing presidential campaign in the US. Republicans in particular have discovered Europe as a convenient punching bag -- and have even begun accusing each other of being too 'European.'"