Moisés Naím / El País
Who do you feel most mistreated by? Your telephone company? Your bank? The airlines? Relationships between companies and their customers are inevitably fraught with conflicts of interest. Companies seek to extract from customers the most money for the longest possible time, while the latter aim to pay the least, get the best possible quality and have the widest freedom of choice. We know that. But it is easy to forget, as companies go to great lengths to bury their clashing interests with their customers under massive marketing and advertising efforts. Companies insist on persuading us that they are our friends and trusted allies — indeed, part of our family — and that their decisions on price, quality and services are guided by our interests and their ethics.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
It’s not easy being a former president. The old joke is that ex-presidents are like Chinese vases: everyone says they are very valuable but no one knows what to do with them. Some, like Bill Clinton, continue with a frenetic flurry of activity, others such as Vladimir Putin, do not actually relinquish power while those such as Silvio Berlusconi seem to treat their post-presidential time as a hiatus before running for office again.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Ambrose Bierce once said that war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. This quip can be updated to note that there is nothing like an economic crash to spur popular interest on the workings of markets and finance. As a result, while some economies are crashing, the celebrity of some economists is booming. One of these celebrated economists is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times and surely one of the world's most influential columnists. A few days ago I spoke with him at a conference in Istanbul.
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Moisés Naím / El País
It was one of those turning points that just go unnoticed in the media. According to the Australian Treasury Department, on March 28 of this year the economies of the world’s less developed countries, taken as a whole, surpassed in size those of the richer ones. “We can now see it for what it was -- a historical aberration that lasted about 1½ centuries," wrote the Australian columnist Peter Hartcher, referring to the fact that, until 1840, China had been the world’s largest economy. “The Chinese look at this and they say, 'We just had a couple of bad centuries’,” wryly remarked Ken Courtiss, a renowned expert also quoted by Hartcher. Courtiss adds: "In the blink of a generation, global power has shifted. Over time, this will not just be an economic and financial shift but a political, cultural and ideological one.”
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Peter Andreas & Moisés Naím / Foreign Affairs
According to Moisés Naím's essay "Mafia States" (May/June 2012), the world now faces a grave "new threat": governments that have been taken over by organized crime. These "mafia states" are so dangerous, Naím argues, that they are no longer merely a law enforcement challenge but a full-blown national security threat.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Spain and Italy: which one is worse off? Economically, Spain; politically, Italy. But since a bad political situation tends to hurt the economy, and a sick economy always poisons politics, the answer could easily be reversed. The political situation in Spain may deteriorate, and the economic edge that Italy now enjoys over Spain may quickly vanish. In any case, what matters is that both nations are doing poorly, and their situation is highly volatile. Now the emergency is to bail out Spanish banks, but not long ago it was the real possibility that Italy might lose its access to international financing -- a threat that had previously alarmed Spain. Before that was the political crisis in Italy, which paralyzed the government and eventually led to the replacement of Silvio Berlusconi by Mario Monti. So the emergencies hop from one country to the other in fits and starts that make predictability and stability remote memories. It is prudent to assume that the emergencies and surprises will continue, as long as no Europe-wide economic policy framework appears that would be socially tolerable, financially credible and sustainable in time.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Why does the economic crisis in Europe keep getting broader and deeper? Ignorance? Too much power concentrated in too few hands? Or perhaps just the contrary: that those who ought to be making the necessary decisions lack the power to do so? I think it is a diabolical combination of these three factors.
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Moisés Naím / El País
ExxonMobil -- with revenues of about $450 billion (yes, $450 billion) – displaced WalMart as the world’s largest company. Most countries do not have annual incomes of that magnitude. Steve Coll, an elegant writer and dogged investigative reporter just published a book on which he had been working for years: Private Empire. The book shows how in the 1990s, ExxonMobil – which already was a huge company – laid the foundations that enabled it to becoming the dominant giant that it now is.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Two of today’s main trends are the dizzying growth of people’s access to the internet, and the deepening of economic inequalities. These two trends are converging. There will be one internet for the haves, and another for the have-nots. This does not mean there will be two different webs, or that internet for less affluent users will cease to offer the great opportunities it has brought to all, regardless of age, income level or nationality. Indeed, the popularization of internet has, in many positive ways, served to counteract the concentration of wealth, income and power.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Argentina has more psychologists per capita than any other country in the world. This fact came to mind when president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the nationalization of Repsol YPF, the country’s main oil company. Argentina has a long and calamitous history of forced nationalizations and wasteful public sector management. And here it was, repeating the same mistakes, oblivious to history and experience.
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Moisés Naím / El País
I have just interviewed Álvaro Uribe, the controversial ex-president of Colombia. My first question was: “President, the authorities have arrested your agriculture minister, the secretary of the president’s office, and the director of your intelligence services. There are also proceedings against your interior minister and your press secretary. This can only mean one of two things: either you have poor judgment in selecting your senior staff, or a process of judicial hounding is going on against you and your team.” Uribe answered that one can’t generalize, and that each of these cases had to be discussed separately, which he proceeded to do. He is convinced that his colleagues are worthy public servants, innocent of the charges against them (corruption, illegal telephone wiretaps, etc.). The implication is obvious: if so many of his close associates are facing prosecution, and the ex-president thinks they are innocent, then he must think that something strange and ominous is going on.
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Moisés Naím / Foreign Affairs
The global economic crisis has been a boon for transnational criminals. Thanks to the weak economy, cash-rich criminal organizations can acquire financially distressed but potentially valuable companies at bargain prices. Fiscal austerity is forcing governments everywhere to cut the budgets of law enforcement agencies and court systems. Millions of people have been laid off and are thus more easily tempted to break the law. Large numbers of unemployed experts in finance, accounting, information technology, law, and logistics have boosted the supply of world-class talent available to criminal cartels. Meanwhile, philanthropists all over the world have curtailed their giving, creating funding shortfalls in the arts, education, health care, and other areas, which criminals are all too happy to fill in exchange for political access, social legitimacy, and popular support. International criminals could hardly ask for a more favorable business environment. Their activities are typically high margin and cash-based, which means they often enjoy a high degree of liquidity -- not a bad position to be in during a global credit crunch.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
Repsol “pursued a policy of pillage, not of production, not of exploration”, the Argentine president thundered on Monday. “They practically made the country unviable with their business policies, not resource policies.” Such was Cristina Fernández’s sulphurous stance as she announced her government was renationalising YPF, the country’s largest oil group.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
The White House should propose a bilateral economic treaty that Brazil’s leader cannot refuse. Such a deal would, of course, be a huge political gamble for a US president facing plenty of difficulties elsewhere. But the benefits for the two countries and the rest of the region would be considerable …”
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Moisés Naím / El País
What is it that we are never short of? What is it that always seems to be available in abundance — even in the poorest, remotest parts of the world?
Arms.
When was the last time that we heard of a war, an insurgency or a guerrilla movement that ceased or abated because one of the sides in the conflict ran short of bullets?
Never.
Where there is war money always appears, and where there is money, arms always appear. And they don’t just appear where there is war and money. Arms abound even in the most miserable parts of the planet. In ghettos where there is a shortage of everything — where babies don’t have milk, students don’t have books, and hunger is a daily experience — arms are never in short supply. Pistols, revolvers, rifles, submachine guns, grenade launchers and other small arms are tragically common in the slums of the world.
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Moisés Naím and Uri Dadush / The Huffington Post
Economic growth or income redistribution? To alleviate poverty, which of the two should be given priority? Should governments invest in expanding the electricity grid to power new, job-producing private companies or use the money to subsidize health and education for the poor? It is an old, sterile, and ideologically charged debate -- one too often immune to evidence.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Forbes magazine recently published its annual list of the world’s richest people. This coincided with another event, the meeting of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) which is formally one of the supreme organs of the Chinese state, representing the legislative branch. Surprisingly, there is a connection between the two events. The list of the delegates to the NPC includes many of the country’s richest people. Some of them also appear on the Forbes list.
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Moisés Naím and Uri Dadush / The Washington Post
The scandal over the repellent way the World Bank president is appointed has obscured an equally scandalous situation: the appointment process of the rest of the senior managers at the bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They too are selected through opaque, quota-driven negotiations that are a far cry from the meritocracy these two institutions claim to value and preach to others.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Will Israel bomb Iran’s nuclear plants? If Greece goes under, will Europe slip into economic chaos and destabilize the global economy ? Will China go off the rails? The list of grim prophecies is long, and easy to draw up. It is surprising, then, that good news doesn’t get more attention. And lately, the world has got some good news. World poverty in 2010 was half of what it was in 1990, and the number of people living in poverty has fallen throughout the globe.
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Moisés Naím / El País
War and new technologies that boost the power of armies have been with us since the dawn of history. Firearms relegated the sword to museums, in World War I tanks replaced cavalry and in 1945 the atomic bomb inaugurated the age of mass destruction. In this new century another artifact has appeared which has forced generals to rethink their tactics. Nothing very sophisticated: an old bomb buried on a dusty road or placed in a bag of rubbish on the roadside, set off remotely with a cellphone or a garage-opener when enemy troops are passing. The improvised explosive devices (IEDs) popularized by the insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are as cheap as they are lethal.
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