LET’S MAKE A CLEAR ACCOUNT,
BRAZILIAN TRADE AND PAYMENT BALANCE
One of the great qualities compared to other peoples is that Brazilians do not believe that anything bad can happen. Always optimistic, always humorous, always finding the good side of disgrace. And he hates the realists and, worse, the pessimists. It can almost be said that it is funny, that this cultural component is not a privilege of the less privileged. It is also part of the culture of economic analysts, probably to think that you can always make money in a country where most do not earn anything.
So we are faced with the external accounts. An extraordinary result in the trade balance sheet, see the Central Bank's report. A surplus of the highest in the world, almost 100 billion dollars or trillions of reais. As I am not from the financial market nor an economist, but from the factory floor and raised in the business model with my father, a butcher, I do the math of a baker.
The trade surplus was so large not only because of the favorable prices of commodities, but also because of the brutal fall in imports. It simply exported a lot and imported little. Why imports have fallen is another issue to be discussed.
But the trade balance is one of the items of the external accounts. The simple question is, where did the 100 billion dollars of trade surplus go. Have the foreign exchange reserves increased in the same proportion? No, from one year to the next they increased only 5 billion.
The Central Bank's balance sheet clearly shows that the trade surplus supports other current accounts of international expenses, such as remittance of profits from foreign investors, 45 billion dollars, services, 40 billion. We traveled a lot, the real super valued, and cheap Argentina last year.
In this analytical simplification there is still a question about the quality of the capital that enters, how much it produces to generate well-being, employment in the country, A good part is short-term, speculative capital.
There is still this analysis of the Central Bank, in my butcher account, the question about indebtedness. And indebtedness not only of the Brazilian state, which is what is said to be low, but of Brazilian companies that far exceeds the indebtedness of the country. In fact, the country's foreign exchange reserves are also lower than the total deposits of Brazilian individuals abroad,
These notes, technically ill-founded and easily contested by experts, also recall that we have already had euphoria of spectacular balances in the past, and that we have already entered into default and renegotiation of foreign debt. Do you still remember Dr. Thereza of the IMF and Bill Rhodes of the City, who was in charge and out of order in the Brazilian economy as leader of the group of negotiators?
More recently, in the FHC government, obsessed with monetary stability, they took a look at the external accounts at a moment and got scared. Ambassador Sérgio Amaral came to the MDIC and began to arrange exports and balanced the accounts to be delivered to the government, Lula who lived from the euphoria of good commodity prices in his first term, as now in his first year.
In my view, absolutely in the hand of the most competent analysts, he lit the yellow light. Crisis like vodka, remembers Orloff, tequila, they are like summer storms, sudden and devastating.
It is impressive that almost no one in the Brazilian press analyzed the Central Bank's report on external accounts. News is the 5 cm-sized nugget of a politician arrested and released to manage a billion party fund. But as a surplus of 100 billion dollars that ultimately added 5 billion for foreign exchange reserves, achieved this, no one comments.
