Fábio Piperno: Lula errou ao estabelecer falsa simetria entre Rússia e Ucrânia em relação à guerra

Last year, I was discussing with an acquaintance the challenges with the EU and the economy there. My acquaintance is from the UK so he had a bit to say about it all and he is “in the know” if you will. He explained to me that the Eurozone had indeed had a decent run, but there were far too many differences between the different economies and their methodologies. To which I do concur, still, let’s take this conversation to a higher level because not a lot has changed from a year ago, and here we go into 2013 – things still look dicey.

When I was writing on the Internet about the need for some regulations, I was asked where does one draw the line between rightful regulations and wrongful regulations. I believe that this can be computed mathematically. On one side of the equation should be cost of the events that the regulation exists to prevent multiplied by the chance of those events happening.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), better known as the Obama stimulus included many parts that were meant to save American jobs and shore up economic growth. Following standard Keynesian guidelines, the economic stimulus involved the federal government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in order to stimulate economic growth and consumer spending. The stimulus was designed to attack the great recession of 2008 from all sides and since President Obama had the support of a Democratically controlled Senate and House of Representatives, he was able to get much of…

Indeed, I’ve always said that people who are broke, living on bare-bones, or are at their financial end of the rope often make very poor choices for their future, and are apt to make their situation much worse. I’d say the same thing goes for countries faced with the same type of dilemma. They make the wrong short-term decisions, and leave themselves in a worsened situation. A case in point might be the Eurozone as they’ve attempted to emerge from this economic crisis, and yet they continue making one mistake after another culminating in what could be a disastrous decade of deleveraging.

One of the toughest things that happens to fast-growing nations is inflation. It means that people’s money becomes worth less in value over time. With a rapidly growing economy such as that in China where they’ve had 7 to 10% GDP growth year-over-year for over three and a half decades it will be hard for China to escape inflation. They’ve had their bouts with inflation in real estate, commodities, food prices, energy, and just about everything else that someone might buy. These are growing pains, and China has to make sure it’s economy doesn’t overheat, and that it is managed properly.