Tag Archives: Latin America

In 2009 I wrote that: "a progressive U.S. policy agenda toward Latin America should express support of and solidarity with the region’s left-of-center governments themselves." And central to that agenda was the need for: "would be reversing the corporate bias of the free trade agreements (FTAs) that have been signed over the past decade and a half." How well has Obama done in his almost 8 years by that yardstick, you ask. Not very well.Obama never cozied up to the left of center governments...

Tom Jobim said that Brazil was not for beginners, and he was right. The Brazilian economy is in free fall. As I noted before the causes are strictly internal, and not related to any fiscal problem. Inflation was low, even if closer to the top margin of the inflation target. Devaluation of the currency has led to higher inflation, on the low two digit level, just slightly above 10%. At the same time, fiscal contraction has led to a collapse of about 3.5% of GDP last year. There is little need...

From the presentation with Esteban Pérez. The graph shows that growth in the region is increasingly tied to terms of trade changes and financial flows. This was something we discussed a few years ago here.

Keynes reading (not the same) New paper just published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics. From the abstract: Keynes had a profound influence on Prebisch in terms of the diagnosis about the main failures of market economies and the need to pursue pro-active and anti-cyclical policies. However, Prebisch was critical of some aspects of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in particular on the theory of interest and the multi- plier. His attitude can be explained by...