Russia & The BRICS creating Alternatives to the IMF & The World Bank | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Russia & The BRICS creating Alternatives to the IMF & The World Bank

Recent events have further weakened market-oriented, Western-leaning factions in Russia and strengthened the state-capitalist, nationalist factions, who are now pushing for faster establishment of the EAU. In particular, the tension with Europe and the United States over Ukraine will shift Russia’s energy and raw-material exports – and the related pipelines – toward Asia and China.

Likewise, Russia and its BRICS partners (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) are creating a development bank that is to serve as an alternative to the Western-controlled International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Revelations of electronic surveillance by the US may lead Russia – and other illiberal states – to restrict Internet access and create their own nationally controlled data networks. There is even talk of Russia and China creating an alternative international payment system to replace the SWIFT system, which the US and Europe can use to impose financial sanctions against Russia.

Creating a full EAU – one that is gradually less tied to the West by trade, financial, economic, payments, communications, and political links – may be a pipe dream. Russia’s lack of reform and adverse demographic trends imply low potential growth and insufficient financial resources to create the fiscal and transfer union that is needed to bring other countries in.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/nouriel-roubini-maps-out-the-kremlin-s-plan-for-a-re-divided-world#3Xff8x7HWkzrV1c2.99

Nouriel Roubini is an American professor of Economics at New York University`s Stern School of Business and chairman of RGE Roubini Global Economics

Nouriel Roubini, (born March 29, 1958, Istanbul, Turkey), Turkish-born American economist and educator who was best known for predicting the 2007–08 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and the subsequent global financial crisis.

Born to Iranian Jewish parents, Roubini moved with his family to Iran and Israel before they settled in Italy in 1962. After a year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he studied economics at Bocconi University in Milan (B.A., 1982) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1988), where he specialized in macroeconomics and international economics. He joined the economics faculty at Yale University in 1988 and taught there until 1995, when he moved to New York University. He also served as a visiting scholar to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), held single-year terms on the White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–99) and at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1999–2000), and cofounded (2004) the consulting firm Roubini Global Economics. Roubini spent much of his early career studying countries that experienced extreme economic failures, such as Mexico (in 1994), Thailand and other countries associated with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Russia (1998), and Argentina (2000). He determined that each shared one common element: a massive current account deficit.(www.britannica.com)

Nouriel Roubini is the Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, LLC, his own global macroeconomic consultancy firm. He is also a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises, among other issues. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.