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Lula da Silva and Brazilian financialization: Learning from Dilma and the Limits of Confronting Finance

October 7, 2025October 1, 2025 sergiomartinpaezLeave a comment

The year 2025 will be the third consecutive year in which the Brazilian economy experiences sustained growth. During the first two years of his administration, economic expansion was above 3% annually, while the outlook for 2025 is for a slowdown: 2.4%, according to IPEA, one of Brazil’s leading state economic analysis agencies.

Since June-July 2024, during the U.S. presidential election and with the possibility of Trump being re-elected, Brazil, like other emerging economies, faced devaluation pressures. This led to higher inflation due to rising exchange rates and supply shocks caused by climate issues. These issues have reduced the food supply (mainly coffee, eggs, and beans), causing prices to rise.

This macroeconomic instability scenario was reloaded by the Trump-driven trade war, particularly when the 50% tariff on purchases from Brazil was announced under a mix of arguments between commercial (trade deficit), political (preventing Bolsonaro from being judged for an attempted coup d’茅tat and US bigtech鈥檚 regulation), and geopolitical (the advance of the BRICS on a possible replacement of the dollar in commercial relationships).

What was the response in terms of economic policy? The institutionalization of the inflation target led to an increase in the SELIC interest rate from 10.75% in September 2024 to 15% in June 2025, the highest level since 2006. The orthodox argument suggests that raising interest rates reduces the money supply, curbing aggregate demand and reducing inflation. From another perspective, raising interest rates promotes carry trade, which attracts foreign capital through the capital account and allows the exchange rate to appreciate. In this way, the economy partially protects itself from speculative capital outflows and reduces the prices of imports and exports, thus decreasing the inflation.

In contrast, a sharp rise in interest rates deepens the pernicious effects of financialization: it impoverishes indebted families and concentrates income. Are there any other alternatives available? The economic toolbox offers other options. Many observers have noted a striking characteristic of Lula鈥檚 third administration: the absence of open confrontation with Brazil’s powerful financial sector. This is no coincidence. The painful lessons of Dilma Rousseff’s presidency (2011-2016) and her impeachment weigh heavily on current political calculations.

To understand this, we need to analyze the historical lesson of Rousseff’s removal, its macroeconomic causes, and how this experience has limited economic policy options.

Jorge Lobo Miglioli (1935-2025): Marx, Kalecki and the desenvolvimentistas dream in Brazil

September 24, 2025 Carolina AlvesLeave a comment

I met Professor Jorge Miglioli in 2000, the year I started my undergraduate studies in Economics at UNESP, Araraquara 鈥� Brazil, fully convinced it was the right path if you wanted to change the world. I did briefly consider Sociology too, but my mum (like any another mum who dreams of their children doing better than they did) put her foot down: I didn鈥檛 work this hard to give you a good education just so you could become a schoolteacher! That settled it.

Just a little over a month into the course, I found myself in the middle of one of the longest national university strikes in Brazil. For context: Brazilian universities are publicly funded by both national and state governments, and higher education is tuition-free. That strike, so early in my academic journey, made me question whether I had chosen the right course. Most of my peers simply returned to their hometowns instead of staying and engaging with what was happening. It wouldn鈥檛 be fair to say they were against the strike; they just didn鈥檛 care. Many of them came from the Brazilian middle class or up, which reflects the schizophrenia of our tuition-free higher education system. They were on a clear path to join the elite, working in banks, big corporations, and so on, and the strike had simply disrupted that trajectory. They just wanted to get back to their normal lives. Things were even worse in my department, the Department of Economics, where only two, maybe three professors supported the strike. The majority made it clear they were against it and disappeared for the entire duration, which lasted nearly four months

On the bright side, that moment introduced me to fellow Economics students who stayed, supported the strike, and opened the door to an economics that actually mattered 鈥� they would also become dear friends. It was through them that I first encountered Karl Marx. I also met Renata Belzunces, the student leading the strike in my campus, admired by many, including Professor Jorge Miglioli, and who went to become one of the most inspiring role models I鈥檝e ever had.[1] And it was in this moment that I met Professor Jorge Miglioli too.

Miglioli, who eventually became 鈥淢iglis鈥� to me, a nickname he never fully liked but accepted nonetheless (I鈥檓 not sure I ever gave him much choice!), was different. There were no 鈥榖uts鈥� with Miglioli when it came to the strike. I remember him saying something like How else do you expect capitalists and the government to hear us? But it wasn鈥檛 just what he said, it was how he said it. There was no attempt to convince, no rhetorical flourish. It was more like: why are we even debating this? His tone carried a kind of quiet certainty, and beneath it, a deep frustration and disillusionment with the fact that this even needed to be explained.

G20 Summit, Global Policy, and Internal Issues: The Economic Situation in Brazil During Lula’s Third Term

November 19, 2024November 19, 2024 sergiomartinpaezLeave a comment

In January 2023, Luiz In谩cio “Lula” da Silva, leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), began his third term as the president of Brazil, the largest economy in Latin America. The economic outlook is promising, with steady growth, controlled inflation, and declining unemployment rate. Despite challenges from a difficult Congress, Lula aimed to revive social and economic policies from his earlier terms (2002-2010). Simultaneously, he is pursuing an active international agenda focused on peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, environmental protection, and reforms in global governance. Brazil’s G20 presidency will conclude in November with a meeting in Rio de Janeiro that is expected to introduce new tax measures on billionaires and initiatives to boost environmental conservation. A Global Alliance Against Hunger will also be launched to tackle global issues.

This article explores the potential for necessary changes to meet Brazilian demands, concerns about the macroeconomic trajectory’s sustainability, and political tensions leading to the 2026 elections. The central argument is that Lula’s external strategy is closely tied to strengthening the internal disputes affected by neoliberal institutions. Success in this approach is vital not only for achieving structural improvements, but also for safeguarding the democratic regime, which faced threats just eight days after Lula took office.

Dependence and ecology in contemporary Latin America, part 2: Limits to sub-imperial autonomy

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 georgeshepherd1867Leave a comment

Brazilian agribusiness鈥檚 fervour for Soybean cultivation has manifested itself domestically as much, if not more so, than externally, with deforestation accelerating as plantations abound with similar velocity in both the Brazilian Amazon and the Paraguayan Chaco. The domestic intensification of Soybean cultivation can, in large part, be attributed to growing demand from China, the world鈥檚 primary soybean consumer (Song et al, 2009). China is the largest market for both Paraguayan and Brazilian soy, with both nations essentially relying on continued Chinese imports to balance their trade deficits (Giraudo, 2020). Accordingly, the impact of Chinese demand on Brazilian agriculture, and on other resource sectors across the region (Ganchev, 2020; Oviedo, 2015), replicates many of the dynamics previously mentioned with regards to Brazilian 鈥楽ubimperialism鈥� in Paraguay.

As soybeans are typically exported with minimal processing, and monocrop agriculture generates comparatively little employment (Giraudo, 2020), few of the benefits of the soybean supply-chain are appropriated within Brazil. Meanwhile, cheap Brazilian soybeans indirectly support the Chinese labour system by lowering the price of staple foods, especially pork, allowing Chinese manufacturers to keep wages low, thereby maintaining the competitiveness of Chinese exports (Wise & Veltmeyer, 2018). With Chinese demand likely to remain high, it seems inconceivable that either the Brazilian or the Paraguayan economies will wean themselves off of soy and will instead remain conditioned by, and dependent on, the whims of the Chinese industrial system

Furthermore, this integration of soybeans into the Chinese industrial economy exacerbates the existing China-Brazil trade imbalance. 98.4% of Chinese exports to Brazil are manufactures, whilst the majority of Brazilian exports to China are primary-resources, with soybeans representing the single most valuable export-commodity (Jenkins, 2012). Low-price Brazilian commodities thereby fuel an industrial system which exports value-added goods back to Brazil, creating a trade-deficit which entrenches the nation鈥檚 dependence on the industrialised core, reproducing the fundamental dynamics observed by dependency theorists in the mid-twentieth century (Frank; 1966; Prebisch, 1962).

Dependence and ecology in contemporary Latin America, Part 1: The colonization of Paraguayan soy cultivation by Brazilian business

December 5, 2022November 25, 2022 georgeshepherd18671 Comment

Though its influence may have waned in recent decades, dependency theory remains an indispensable prism through which to regard the bifurcated, or polarized, development of national economies within the capitalist world-system. This framework, in which the persistence of uneven development is attributable to the interrelation between the industrialised core and the underdeveloped periphery, admits both the geographic and historical scope to adequately tackle the hard problems of political economy and to accurately trace the chains of dependency which inhibit peripheral economies. Through two blog posts, I wish to explore how dependency theory can help us understand various ecologies of dependence in Latin America, including Brazilian agribusiness in Paraguayan soy (this blog post) and the role Chinese industrial demand plays in constraining Brazilian subimperial autonomy in soy cultivation (in the second blog post). In this post, the colonization of Paraguayan soy cultivation by Brazilian agribusiness is used to demonstrate that Sub-imperialist powers can achieve relative autonomy within the periphery by making dependent weaker states in their vicinity.

Constructing a Global History of Human Rights and Development

December 13, 2021December 8, 2021 annagrimaldiLeave a comment

The history of global human rights has been, as Joseph Slaughter puts it: 鈥渉ijacked鈥� by Euro-American narratives (Slaughter, 2018). It has been claimed, through history books and the institutional memory of bodies such as the United Nations or Amnesty International, that human rights can be traced back to documents such as the Magna Carta, that they were intellectually developed and promoted globally through the ages of Enlightenment and Imperialism, and that they were enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Even in recent decades, attempts to frame and conceptualise the latest milestone of human rights, which took place at the height of globalisation in the 1970s, was a Western 鈥榬evival鈥� or 鈥榬ediscovery鈥� of human rights as a transnational tool through which states could be held accountable for their violation of rights. Crucial reference points for scholars today include the so-called 鈥楬uman Rights Utopia鈥� of the 1970s (see Moyn, 2010) or the development of 鈥楴ew鈥� Human Rights two decades later (see Nelson & Dorsey, 2008). To reconstruct the past, scholars often seek changes in the discourse of global institutions; they analyse the most widely reported human rights movements; they call upon the emergence and establishment of organisations such as Amnesty International; they run keyword searches of major international newspapers; and they look to the political discourse of major global players, all of which are largely based in the Global North.

No wonder, then, that the major turning point of the transnational human rights movement is so precisely associated with the year of 1977, when Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize and US President Jimmy Carter incorporated human rights into the country鈥檚 foreign policy. The so-called utopia that was set forth during this transformative moment in history was that human rights came to represent an alternative to anti-establishment movements against US imperialism and consumerism. It also represented an alternative to socialist states, which for many of the Left was proving to be a disappointing avenue for meaningful change. A transnational social movement of solidarity was also imagined as the key to holding states accountable for the human rights violations of their own citizens.

The result of this revisionist history is not only an incomplete picture, but what Walden Bello calls “the [structural] resubordination of the [Global] South within a US-dominated global economy鈥� (Bello, 1994 cited in Slaughter, 2018). As the agency of Global South-identifying actors is denied, so is their role in shaping what today are known as rights of self-determination, sustainable development, peace, minority, and rights to natural resources and the environment, among other things.

Yet there exists an alternative history to human rights that has been obscured through attempts to narrate the past. This history has been prevented from entering the debate, I would argue, for three key reasons: first, dominant historical narratives emphasise actors and institutions of the Global North as the leading protagonists in the process of the construction of human rights. Second, and as a result of the first, methodological approaches have been limited by what is perceived as the spaces within and through which concepts and practices of human rights are constructed and diffused globally. Third, potential alternative sources of ideas surrounding human rights and their global diffusion are and have almost always been brushed aside as anything but potential sources of human rights: they have been labelled as socialist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and even terrorist, none of which could possibly be compatible with human rights.

But the issue does not stop at asking the right questions. The problem cannot be solved simply by asking whether and if so what Global South actors and organisations contributed to human rights norms, concepts, and practices, but also how they did so. And this requires returning to the drawing board methodologically. If potential contributions do not take place within dominant institutions, state-to-state dialogue, and major international organisations, then we need to look beyond these spheres for our evidence.

Does financialization provoke increasing prices? The case of Brazilian private health insurance聽

September 24, 2021September 14, 2021 carlosockLeave a comment

Since the Brazilian Regulatory Agency for Supplementary Health鈥檚 (ANS) creation in 2000, health insurance inflation has grown at a much greater pace than general inflation. Indeed, after eighteen years the private health insurance price index was close to double the official inflation index, with its 382% (see ).

The upward course of prices can be interpreted as a response to the problems arising from the escalating costs. Baumol (2012) calls this phenomenon 鈥渃ost disease鈥�, designating that labor relates differently to production: in the case of the goods, work would be incorporated into the product; in the case of services, labor would be the product being exchanged, making difficult to substitute factors.

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