Despite all the ideological outcry and mockery from the lords of capital over former President Dilma Rousseff’s tenure at the NBD, the “Brics bank”, there is behind Lula’s choice a strategic and well-calculated move to catapult Brazil into another dimension in terms of the international financial system. Besides, of course, assisting in the Institution’s necessary disbursements for national projects. Lula wants the NBD to lead and orchestrate a development of trade backed by the bloc’s members’ own currencies, outside the dollar standard — an idea that he is determined to take forward and that he had already expressed on his trip to China last week. Even the alternative of a single currency for the Brics group has not been ruled out, and China itself likes the proposal. At Dilma’s inauguration, Lula complained: “Who decided it was the dollar? Why can’t we trade backed by our currency?”. For the president, the world is not used to and, in a way, a hostage of American dictates in global transactions. He aims to pilot a different financing formula in multilateral relations, having the NBD as a starting point and guided Dilma to work on this hypothesis. Likewise, preliminary estimates indicate that the NDB with Dilma should lend something in the order of R$ 5 billion still this year for projects of the Emergency Program for Access to Credit, to be executed by the BNDES. This inter-relationship between the two development agencies should become closer from now on. Until then, the NBD, although commanded by a Brazilian, the diplomat Marcos Troyjo, had been playing a subdued, almost marginal role, not only in the disbursement of loans to Brazil but also in terms of its performance with the other partners. A recurring complaint was that of its insignificance in terms of the financial system as a lever of support for the Brics. In total, the institution currently has around US$ 32 billion in loans granted. Created in 2015, based in Shanghai, the NBD has not even remotely managed to compete, on an equal footing, in the relevance and weight of disbursements, with entities such as the World Bank (Bird) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Many critics complain about Dilma Rousseff’s lack of technical experience and capacity to carry out such an undertaking, but everyone is bald to know that this is not exactly what counts in the command chair of an organism of such magnitude. Political savvy is worth a lot. The former president’s close relationship with Lula will be the key point for a greater projection of the NBD. For example, in the social field. The demiurge of Garanhuns wants the bank to act more firmly to eradicate the plague of poverty, concentrating financing on infrastructure in the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. For him, the NBD will be a vital instrument in this sense, organizing the efforts and efforts of the rich members of the bloc in the right direction. In one way or another, what can be noticed is that Lula saw in the NBD a tool for his global plans and the institution, certainly, should also benefit from it.
Carlos Jose Marques
editorial director
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