BRIC to discuss alternative response to crisis

Sun May 31, 2009 11:56am EDT
By Gleb Bryanski
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Brazil, Russia, India and China will seek alternative solutions to the global economic crisis and are dissatisfied with the way developed countries have focused on helping the financial sector, a senior Brazilian official said on Sunday.
The leaders of the four countries, known by the BRIC acronym, are due to meet in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on June 16 for the first summit since the crisis struck their economies, previously seen as immune.
"The tendency among the BRICs is to insist on having an approach to the crisis that focuses primarily not on finance but on the real economy," Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's minister of strategic affairs, told Reuters.
He was one of four BRIC officials who met in Moscow this week to discuss an agenda for the summit, which will also include the role of the dollar, the global trade system and security arrangements.
The BRIC states are trying to strengthen their clout as the producers of 15 percent of global output by building up the grouping into a powerful world player.
Unger said the crisis response has so far focused on rescuing the failed financial institutions, the regulation of financial markets and expansionary monetary policies, describing such a response as "shallow."
"Three much deeper themes have so far been largely suppressed," he said.
The leaders will discuss how to address the trade imbalances between the BRIC countries and the developed world, establish a link between the recovery and income redistribution as well as re-assessing the role of financial markets, he said.
FINANCIAL CASINO
Empirical evidence shows that 80 percent of the world production is still financed through retained and reinvested earnings inside firms, revealing the limited role of the financial markets, Unger said.
"This simple observation arouses a disquieting question - what is the purpose of all this money in the banks and stock markets," he said, adding that emerging countries were ready to use their savings to address the issue.
"We will begin to discuss a series of innovations that would make it possible to better localize long-term savings for production investment rather than allowing the accumulated savings in society to be wasted in the financial casino."
The end of the 20th century saw a "violent" concentration of income in the United States while "the market for consumption goods requires the popularization of purchasing power" and the redistribution of income, he said.
"That leads us to the view that conventional counter-cyclical policies should be taken as simply a starting point for a series of initiatives that broaden the sectoral, regional and social base of economic recovery."
(Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Erica Billingham)