segunda-feira, 24 de novembro de 2008
Governo britânico não descarta reduzir imposto para reativar a economia
EFE
24/11/2008
O Governo britânico não descarta reduzir o Imposto ao Valor Agregado (IVA) em 2,5 ponto percentual, a fim de reativar a economia, afirma hoje a imprensa, antes da apresentação na segunda-feira dos orçamentos do Estado.
A redução do IVA, de 17,5% para 15%, é uma das medidas que estariam sendo consideradas pelo ministro da Economia britânico, Alistair Darling, junto com outras destinadas a ajudar as pequenas empresas e os proprietários de casas com hipotecas.
Darling divulgará na segunda-feira à tarde na Câmara dos Comuns os orçamentos preliminares do Estado, muito esperados nesta ocasião devido à deterioração da economia britânica, que pode entrar em recessão antes do fim do ano.
O Governo quer garantir empréstimos às médias e pequenas empresas, já que estas encontraram dificuldades para conseguir crédito depois da crise no sistema bancário.
Entre outras opções, está obrigar as entidades hipotecárias a esperar um tempo antes de iniciar o processo para embargar propriedades dos clientes que não conseguem pagar a hipoteca, seja porque perderam o emprego ou porque seus negócios estão em dificuldades diante da crise financeira global.
Mas estas medidas podem aumentar a dívida pública, por isso os especialistas advertiram que o contribuinte pode ver uma alta dos impostos após superada a crise.
O primeiro-ministro do Reino Unido, Gordon Brown, disse hoje no dominical "News of the World" que o Governo está disposto a ajudar as famílias em dificuldades.
"Se não fizermos nada agora, a desaceleração será mais longa e mais severa", disse o chefe do Governo.
Carga tributária teve alta de 10,3% até outubro
Gazeta Mercantil
24/11/2008
O carga tributária no Brasil teve um crescimento de 10,3% até outubro de 2008, segundo estimativa do especialista em finanças públicas, Amir Khair. Na comparação com o mesmo mês do ano passado, houve um crescimento real de 12,4%. O Imposto sobre Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços (ICMS) estadual registrou até setembro o crescimento acima da inflação medida pelo Índice de Preços ao Consumidor Amplo (IPCA) de 13,2%, superando o crescimento ocorrido no conjunto das receitas da União que foi até setembro de 9,9%.
O aumento da arrecadação, segundo Khair, ocorre em função do crescimento econômico, que eleva o faturamento e o lucro das empresas e a massa salarial acima do crescimento do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB). Além disso, reduz a sonegação e a inadimplência. "O setor público pega carona nos tributos, que são proporcionais a essas elevações", explica. Quanto às alterações na legislação tributária, Khair destaca a extinção da CPMF, o aumento das alíquotas do Imposto sobre IOF, a expansão da alíquota da CSLL, de 9% para 15%, incidente sobre as instituições financeiras e a redução de alíquota da Cide incidente sobre gasolina e o diesel.
"Para efeito de projeções excluímos para a União o mês de janeiro de 2008, que foi atípico, comparando as arrecadações de fevereiro e outubro de 2008 e 2007. Projetando as tendências já registradas para União e estados e as previstas para municípios, a carga tributária se elevaria em 0,6% passando de 35,32% em 2007 para 36,01% em 2008. A União contribuiria com 0,26%, os Estados com 0,40% e os Municípios com 0,03%".
Brasil e México serão 'prioridades' de Obama
BBC Brasil
24/11/2008
O Brasil e o México serão "as prioridades" do governo do presidente Barack Obama na América Latina, de acordo com a edição desta segunda-feira do jornal argentino, La Nación.
O diário diz que isso é o que "afirmam seus (de Obama) assessores para a região", e antecipa que, segundo suas fontes, o atual subsecretário de Estado para as Américas, Tom Shannon, um diplomata de carreira, "tem seu nome nas listas provisórias como embaixador no Brasil ou no México" no governo Obama.
Como evidência da atenção às duas nações latino-americanas, o La Nación diz que "de Chicago, onde passa seus dias junto a sua equipe de transição, Obama conversou por telefone com os presidentes de ambos os países, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva e Felipe Calderón, em sua primeira rodada de contatos com líderes internacionais".
"Dias depois, continuou (os contatos) com Cristina Fernández Kirchner (presidente da Argentina) e o colombiano Álvaro Uribe."
Mas Obama "não falou (...) com (o presidente da Venezuela) Hugo Chávez, a quem criticou durante a campanha e durante seu trabalho como senador, mas que também destacou como exemplo de um antagonista dos Estados Unidos com quem estaria disposto a dialogar, ao contrário de Hillary Clinton, que provavelmente será sua secretária de Estado".
O jornal diz que "a viagem para o Brasil, segundo rumores em Washington, poderia se concretizar numa escala antes ou depois da Cúpula das Américas, que se realiza em Trinidad e Tobago, entre 17 e 19 de abril próximo".
Segundo La Nación, a lista de nomes para a equipe de Obama para a região "inclui vários ex-funcionários de (gestão do presidente) Bill Clinton, como Arturo Valenzuela, Nelson Cunningham, Frank Sánchez e Robert Gelbard, entre muitos outros".
"Além disso, (poderia incluir) especialistas em América Latina como Julia Sweig, e inclusive figuras republicanas como Carl Meacham, que trabalha para o senador Richard Lugar no Comitê de Relações Exteriores."
BID alerta para forte recessão na América Latina em 2009
Para Santiago Levy, mercado de trabalho 'ficará praticamente parado'.
Instituição destinará US$ 6 bilhões para financiar os setores produtivos.
France Presse
24/11/2008
O Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento (BID) previu neste domingo (23) uma forte recessão na América Latina em 2009, com quedas nas arrecadações e aumento do desemprego. Frente a esse cenário a instituição destinará US$ 6 bilhões para financiar os setores produtivos.
"A América Latina enfrentará uma crise muito distinta das do passado (...). Enfrentamos um período de estancamento no crescimento global, pelo menos em todo o ano de 2009 e possivelmente no primeiro trimestre de 2010", explicou Santiago Levy, vice-presidente do BID, em uma reunião em Santo Domingo.
Segundo Levy, neste período o mercado de trabalho "ficará praticamente parado", com o conseqüente aumento do mercado informal.
Diante dessas expectativas, o BID decidiu reorientar 6 bilhões de dólares, previstos para outras operações de assistência neste contexto de crise, para incentivar a produção da região.
"O objetivo é fazer os maiores esforços possíveis para manter o setor produtivo", acrescentou.
Democrats' Stimulus Plan May Reach $700 Billion
Spending Package Would Rival Financial System Bailout
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 24, 2008; Page A01
Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years.
View Only Top Items in This Story
That amount, more than the nation has spent over the past six years in Iraq, would rival the sum Congress committed last month to rescuing the country's financial system. It would also be one of the biggest public spending programs aimed at jolting the economy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
Hints of a hefty new spending program began emerging last week. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D), an Obama adviser, and Harvard economist Lawrence H. Summers, whom Obama has chosen to lead his White House economic team, both raised the possibility of $700 billion in new spending. Yesterday, Obama adviser and former Clinton administration Labor secretary Robert Reich and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also called for spending in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion.
Transition officials would not confirm that they are considering spending of that magnitude, but they made clear that economic conditions are dire, and suggested that Obama might be forced to delay his pledge to repeal President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.
Last week, Goldman Sachs said it expects the economy to shrink even faster by the end of the year, at a 5 percent annualized rate. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 5.3 percent for the week; and the nation's largest bank, Citigroup, sought government assistance to avoid collapse.
While Obama has set a goal of creating or preserving 2.5 million jobs by 2011, his economic team -- whose members are scheduled to be formally introduced at a news conference today in Chicago -- have yet to decide how that would be accomplished or how much it would cost.
Still, Austan Goolsbee, a spokesman for Obama on economic issues who is in line to serve on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, yesterday acknowledged that Obama's jobs plan will cost substantially more than the $175 billion stimulus program he proposed during the campaign.
"This is as big of an economic crisis as we've faced in 75 years. And we've got to do something that's up to the task of confronting that," Goolsbee said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I don't know what the exact number is, but it's going to be a big number."
Republicans quickly criticized the idea of such a vast initiative, saying Congress should instead cut taxes to spur economic growth.
"Democrats can't seem to stop trying to outbid each other -- with the taxpayers' money," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement. "We're in tough economic times. Folks are hurting. But the American people know that more Washington spending isn't the answer."
With financial markets fluctuating wildly and unemployment rising, Democrats want to push a stimulus package through Congress in January and have it ready for Obama's signature when he takes office Jan. 20. Over the weekend, the president-elect announced that he had instructed his advisers to assemble a massive jobs program that also would make a "down payment" on much of his domestic agenda.
The plan would include new funding for public-works projects to repair the nation's crumbling infrastructure, as well as a fresh infusion of cash to promote green technology and alternative-energy sources. It also would include targeted tax cuts for working families, students, the elderly and job-creating businesses that Obama touted on the campaign trail.
It may not, however, include one of Obama's central promises: to repeal Bush's tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," David Axelrod, Obama's chief political strategist, said the president-elect is weighing whether to let the cuts for the wealthy expire on Dec. 31, 2010, as provided in current law. Such a delay would permit Obama to avoid raising taxes during a recession.
"He's committed to getting middle-class tax relief in the pipeline quickly, and there's no doubt that we're going to have to make some hard decisions in order to pay for the things we need, whether it is through repeal of those tax cuts for the very wealthiest or whether we simply allow it to -- allow those cuts to expire in 2010," Axelrod said.
The projected cost of an economic stimulus package has been rising steadily as economic conditions have worsened. Economists who were calling a few months ago for $150 billion in government spending to offset flagging demand elsewhere in the economy are now pushing for $500 billion or more. Adding tax cuts to the package is expected to increase its cost to the Treasury by as much as $200 billion, Democrats said.
Even some conservative economists have endorsed the larger numbers.
Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, the former director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adviser to Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign, said he thinks the government should spend "a minimum of $300 billion a year for at least the next two years."
"The cumulative multi-year deficit would have to be about $700 billion or even more," Feldstein said in an e-mail yesterday.
Reich, speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," said the middle class is being squeezed by mountains of personal debt, plummeting home values and a vast tightening in available credit. As a result, he said, "there's not enough buying power in the economy," forcing the government to step in as "the spender of last resort."
In an interview, Schumer said the nation is on the brink of the same kind of deflationary spiral that pushed down prices, closed businesses and obliterated jobs during the Great Depression.
"The economy is in worse shape than people think," Schumer said. "The safest thing is to do anything you can to avoid deflation."
Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose aides have in recent weeks balked at suggestions that Democrats might spend as much as $300 billion, conceded yesterday on "Face the Nation" that the price of a stimulus package is likely to be "in the several hundred billion dollar category."
There are downsides to such a dramatic increase in government spending, especially at a time when the annual federal budget deficit already is spiraling toward $1 trillion -- about 7 percent of the gross domestic product -- a level not seen since the end of World War II. Increasing the deficit means increasing the national debt, which eventually will have to be repaid, with interest, to largely foreign creditors. It also means the nation will be even less prepared to cover the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Social Security as the baby boomer generation retires.
Washington also could overshoot its target, sparking rampant inflation when the economy recovers. Or the money could be poorly directed and fail to efficiently stimulate the economy.
"The 1930s recession became the Great Depression because policymakers didn't take the necessary actions. Nobody wants to make that mistake this time around," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has been advising Democrats. "Is there a possibility that we could overshoot? Of course. But from what I've seen, the danger is not doing enough."
A British Lesson on Auto Bailouts
The New York Times
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Published: November 17, 2008
PARIS — A faltering auto giant whose brands are synonymous with the open road. Hundreds of thousands of unionized workers with powerful political backers. An urgent plea for the government to write a virtual blank check.
This is not the story of Ford and General Motors, but British Leyland, a car company that went through £11 billion of inflation-adjusted British taxpayer money, or $16.5 billion, in the ’70s and ’80s before going out of business. All that is left of the company now are memories of cars like the Triumph, and a painful lesson in the limited effectiveness of bailouts.
“It’s all too evocative,” said Leon Brittan, a top official in the government of Margaret Thatcher, the free-market-minded prime minister who nevertheless backed the rescue. “I’m not telling the U.S. what to do, but the lessons of the British experience is don’t throw good money after bad. British Leyland carried on for a few more years, but they’re not there now, are they?”
Other experts are sounding the same alarm. “The British Leyland experience is a relevant and cautionary one,” said John Casesa, a principal in the automotive consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group in New York. “The government got in the business of trying to make a winner out of a structurally flawed company. That’s the risk in the U.S. as well.”
Though Continental automakers have fared better than British ones, Mr. Casesa argues that the long history of government support in Europe made companies like Renault and Fiat strong players in their home markets, but not worldwide.
“With the exception of BMW and Mercedes, European automakers haven’t been globally successful,” he said. “Nor have they been hugely profitable.”
That comparative history is receiving new attention as Congress turns its attention this week to the fate of Detroit.
The British Leyland bailout remains the classic example of a futile government intervention. The tight cooperation between governments and automakers on the Continent has produced happier results.
For half a century after World War II, the French government was the majority stakeholder in Renault, and Paris still holds a 15 percent stake in the company. In the 1980s, the company received a bailout equal to nearly 4 billion euros, or $5.1 billion in today’s money. Now it is highly profitable — at least compared with its American counterparts.
Today, G.M.’s German subsidiary, Opel, is appealing to Berlin for help, seeking more than 1 billion euros in credit guarantees, according to Carl-Peter Forster, G.M.’s European chief.
Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said her government would make a decision before Christmas.
“It’s not decided yet whether these loan guarantees will become necessary,” Mrs. Merkel told reporters in Berlin after meeting with Mr. Forster and other management and labor officials.
“If these guarantees become necessary, those funds should remain within Opel” in Germany, she added, echoing a concern some Americans have expressed that any United States bailout money go only to American automakers.
So far, Asian companies have not complained that such a bailout would amount to an anticompetitive subsidy. But José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said last week that he thought an aid package for Detroit could be “illegal” under World Trade Organization rules.
That has not stopped European automakers from seeking 40 billion euros in loans from the European Investment Bank, ostensibly to help develop cleaner cars.
For Garel Rhys, head of the Center for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales, the trajectory of General Motors is reminiscent of British Leyland not only because of the former’s decision to seek aid to avert bankruptcy, but also for its slow, seemingly inexorable loss of market share. “Both had a history of being the biggest in their market but couldn’t adapt as they lost sales,” he said. “They couldn’t get customers back.”
Historically, British Leyland’s roots stretched back further than Henry Ford’s Model T. The company controlled 36 percent of the British market well into the 1970s, with mass-market brands like Austin and Morris and premium lines like MG and Jaguar. But rising competition from Japanese and German automakers, shoddy workmanship and a breakdown in labor relations brought the company to near bankruptcy by 1975, Mr. Rhys said.
Michael Edwardes, who took over as British Leyland’s chief executive in November 1977, recalled that when he joined, no one even knew whether individual brands were profitable. “It was a farce — no one knew what the costs were,” he said.
As it turned out, every MG the company sold in the United States resulted in a loss of $2,000 for British Leyland.
Wildcat strikes consumed more than 32 million worker-hours in 1977, and the company became a symbol of labor strife, with some employees walking out the door with spark plugs in their coat pockets and engines in the trunks of their cars, Mr. Edwardes said.
Mr. Edwardes immediately began reducing the company’s work force of roughly 200,000 — to 104,000 within five years — and closing 19 factories. He appealed to the Thatcher government for aid, arguing the money was needed if British Leyland was going to be able to afford to lay off workers while investing in new models.
Eventually, the government put up £3.6 billion, equal to £11 billion in today’s money. But the rescue did not do much to preserve British Leyland’s labor force or market share in the long term.
By the time it received its last government infusion of cash in 1988, Mr. Rhys said, British Leyland’s market share had slumped to 15 percent. British Leyland evolved into MG Rover, which was eventually acquired by BMW, then spun off, finally going bankrupt in 2005.
According to Mr. Rhys, just 22,000 workers remain at British Leyland’s successor companies, about 10 percent of its work force in the mid-1970s.
“It was a very poor return,” he said. “We felt collectively and nationally that we got our fingers burnt, and this was always used as a reason to avoid bailouts, both by Labor and Conservative governments in Britain.”
Mr. Edwardes still defends the government aid, arguing it preserved parts of the company that remain in business now — like Jaguar and Land Rover, which were bought by Ford.
Jaguar never made a profit for Ford, however, and was sold with Land Rover to Tata Motors of India earlier this year. Ford recouped only about half of what it paid to acquire the two brands, and is estimated to have poured $10 billion into Jaguar.
Despite the British experience, the case of Renault, which combined fresh money and new management in the 1980s, showed that government bailouts can be beneficial.
The French government help for Renault also came amid increasing losses for the company. But Mr. Rhys said that unlike British Leyland, Renault was able to use the financing to create new car models that were ultimately successful. That, along with tough cost-cutting by a newly installed chairman, cleared the road to profitability by the time the government began privatizing Renault in the 1990s.
If Washington does go ahead and help Detroit, Mr. Edwardes said, it is crucial that the government overhaul the management of the Big Three. “Throwing money at them isn’t enough,” he said. “They need money and they need new management. They need both, not one or the other.”
