2013, the Year Has Yet to End

12/27/2013 - 08h38

Some years come to an end giving the analyst a feeling that it will not end on December 31.

The impression I have is that the main events we are living - in the world and Brazil - have not yet reached their climax and more time is needed so that it can definitely become a part of history.

Thus, the accumulated merits in these long days could not be passed to a new year that people know only as a bureaucratic imposition.

This is s what I feel when I write to Folha readers about the most important events in the world economy in 2013.

For instance, no one will take the merit from 2013 as it was the year the severe financial crisis, started at Wall Street in 2007 and 2008, ended and when the world's largest economy regained the path to economic growth, which it follow its natural course.

Many analysts still doubt the recovery, though in recent months U.S. economic data has made the task much harder for pessimists.

Cultivating the idea that the American capitalism failure was an inevitable fate has vanished from the world press.

But I have no doubts that 2013 will be a milestone in history and, this time, we will not have the Second World War to make less clear the the victory of the Keynesian thought in a fight against an economic depression in the works.

In this sense, Fed (Federal Reserve) Chairman, Ben Bernanke, leaves the scene as the greatest hero of those difficult and painful times.

In Brazil I also have a feeling that 2013 will not end on December 31 and that we will live the first months of the new year as if we were still in the past.

The main event in this old extended year is the change of a few important principles in Dilma's economic policy.

Two striking recent examples are the construction of a more ambitious agenda for highway concessions and an increase on the IPI in automobiles at the turn of the year.

They represent two faces of the same coin: on one side, the recognition that it will not be through the fiscal stimulus to consumption - and also not from credit - that the government will accelerate economic growth; and, on the other, the late recognition that the government must restore a policy of good relations with the markets, whether domestic or foreign, so that investment becomes a major force in the coming years, pulling GDP.

Restarting a partnership that worked efficiently during the Lula years, after having the government sentiment, for more than two years, towards the private sector at best tolerant, it is not a difficult task.

What the private leadership present as a basic agenda, to settle it with more trust and confidence in the future, is very simple to be agreed by the government, because there are few more important issues.

It will not be necessary to tighten wages and credit availability as many fear, but only recognize that we need a break in the "fixing" of fiscal spending and consumption stimulus.

Some of these measures are already in place every day at the government. The change in the direction of the monetary policy of the Central Bank - clearly expressed in the last inflation report of the year - and the terms written in the last highway auctions are evidence of that.

But there is still an important ingredient to cement a more constructive position of the private sector towards the future: confidence in a more austere and predictable fiscal policy. IPI's return, in the automotive sector, given its importance in the aggregate value, in the Brazilian industry is a good sign.

But, because of the back and forth of the fiscal policy this year, with the use of legitimate and illegitimate instruments to finance government spending, the return of confidence will require much more than that.

A few analysts have identified this new attitude in government recent decisions that have been made still in 2013. But the markets will expect the first months of 2014 to maybe change the assessment they have from Dilma's government and then, yes, we could truly have a new year begin.

Translated by SIMONE PALMA

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