Tuesday, May 20, 2003
(05-20) 18:47 PDT (AP) -- NY194

CARACAS, Venezuela (<a href=www.sfgate.com>AP) -- After claiming it couldn't afford to participate in the Miss Universe contest, the Miss Venezuela organization confirmed Tuesday its contestant will take the stage after all.

Venezuelan media magnate Gustavo Cisneros, head of the Cisneros Group, will pay for Mariangel Ruiz to attend the June 3 event in Panama, the organization confirmed in a statement on its Web site.

"Venezuela will participate in the annual Miss Universe pageant," the organization said. Officials couldn't immediately be reached by telephone late Tuesday.

Venezuela has one of the world's best records at international beauty competitions. Since 1979, Venezuelan women have won four Miss Universe titles, five Miss Worlds and three Miss Internationals.

The organization claimed last week that Venezuela's strict foreign exchange controls, imposed by President Hugo Chavez during a general strike in January, prevented it from obtaining $80,000 needed to send Miss Ruiz, a tall, 23-year-old brunette, to the pageant.

Miss Venezuela President Osmel Sousa said the organization had the funds in the local bolivar currency but could not exchange them for dollars.

Edgar Hernandez, president of the government agency in charge of authorizing dollar sales, said last week he wasn't aware that the organization had applied for the dollars. He said the agency would consider granting the funds if the organization asked for them.

Officials at Miss Venezuela sponsor Venevision television -- owned by the Cisneros Group -- declined to comment last week. On its Web site Tuesday, Venevision stood by its original claim that Venezuela's economic woes threatened Miss Ruiz's candidacy.

Cisneros and Chavez have long been at odds. Cisneros claims Chavez's government is cracking down on press freedom; Chavez claims Cisneros has been involved in efforts to destabilize his government.

On the Net:

www.missvenezuela.com

noticiero.venevision.net

In the second of our series on global institutions, we see how the Iraq conflict accelerated the crisis in the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO

Larry Elliott Wednesday May 21, 2003 The Guardian

Last autumn, Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers told the International Monetary Fund to draw up a plan that would give bankruptcy protection to countries. The idea was to give states the same rights as companies if they went belly-up, avoiding the expensive bail-outs that have accompanied the big financial crises of the past decade.

The IMF was given six months to come up with a blueprint, but when it reported back last month the idea was dead in the water. Billions of dollars from the bail-outs ended up in the coffers of the big finance houses of New York and George Bush was told not to meddle with welfare for Wall Street. The message was understood: the US used its voting power at the IMF to strangle the bankruptcy code at birth.

So much, so familiar. The US has wielded clout at the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, since they were created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Add in the World Trade Organisation, seen by its critics as the epitome ofUS corporate capitalism and you have the unholy trinity of globalisation.

The reality is somewhat more complex than this caricature would suggest. There is indeed a crisis looming in the global economic institutions but the problem is less that the Bush administration is seeking to carpet bomb the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO with neo-liberal ideas - rather that the US shows signs of giving up on multilateralism in favour of cutting bilateral deals with willing (and weaker) partners.

First, some background. The Bretton Woods institutions were the economic arm of the new world order designed to ensure there was no repetition of the Great Depression. Collective action at the economic level was seen as just as important as collective action in the political sphere. But over the years, the IMF changed. Set up to combat global market failure, it saw free markets as the solution to every problem in every country, every time. The IMF (and the World Bank) reflected the economic orthodoxy, championing privatisation, liberalisation and tough anti-inflation strategies when they became fashionable in the west.

Europe has more votes than the US, but has rarely dissented from Washington's world view. To complete the picture of a rich-country stitch-up, a European was always appointed to head the IMF, while the US picked the president of the World Bank.

The WTO is a different beast. Created in 1995, it has two safeguards to protect the interests of smaller countries: a one-member, one-vote decision-making structure and an arbitration system under which countries such as Costa Rica, Venezuela and Chile have been able to force the US to change its trade practices or pay sanctions in compensation. Bill Clinton saw this as a price worth paying for opening up global trade to American companies.

If anything, US control-freakery was more in evidence under Clinton than it has been under his successor, because Bush is more of a neo-conservative. In the late 1990s, Larry Summers, Clinton's treasury secretary, was in day-to-day contact with the IMF, letting it know what the administration wanted, and arranged for Joseph Stiglitz to be ousted as the World Bank's chief economist after he criticised the US treasury and the IMF's handling of financial crises.

Bush, by contrast, has pursued much more of an overt America-first policy, using the multilateral system only when it suits the administration. US aid is being channelled into poor countries through the Millennium Challenge Account. The money comes with strings attached: to liberalise service sectors and accept US intellectual property laws. Similarly, the White House does not support the World Bank's fast-track initiative under which rich countries would guarantee the resources to help developing countries implement improvements in education.

In trade policy, the US has been following a twin-tracked strategy, putting forward ambitious proposals for liberalisation at the WTO, but also cutting bilateral deals with Singapore and Chile that provide more favourable terms for US firms than could be negotiated multilaterally.

Although many in the US strongly oppose the neo-conservative agenda, there are two problems for those seeking change. The first is that the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are largely friendless bodies. Under its president, James Wolfensohn, the Bank has gone the furthest in reaching out to its critics, but those on the free-market right who see the Bretton Woods institutions as expensive, statist bureaucracies are mirrored by those on the left who view them as agents of neo-liberal oppression. "The truth is that you can't defend what these institutions currently are", says Kevin Watkins of Oxfam, "but they were part of a Keynesian political project, and it is up to the left to make them into something better."

Something better would include an open and meritocratic system for the top jobs at the World Bank, IMF and WTO, rather than the unseemly horse-trading that currently takes place. It would include stopping the IMF and the Bank colonising the territory of other UN organisations. It would involve the Bretton Woods recognising that in a deflationary world there is a need to return to their original pro-growth mandate. And it would involve the other big shareholders - the Europeans - acting in concert to put pressure on Washington.

Alex Wilkes, who runs the Bretton Woods project, a watchdog body set up by aid agencies to monitor the IMF and the World Bank, says there are few signs of this happening. There is too much grandstanding, he says, too much of a tendency to take up symbolic positions.

Watkins of Oxfam says the one arena where the EU flexes its muscles is the WTO, but only to put European corporate demands on the global agenda. Meanwhile, he believes the US is marginalising and downgrading the Bretton Woods institutions just as it is the UN. "This is a critical juncture. Iraq is accelerating the demise of multilateralism."

larry.elliott@guardian.co.uk

Reuters, 05.20.03, 9:31 PM ET

TOKYO, May 21 (Reuters) - NYMEX crude futures ticked up in electronic ACCESS trading on Wednesday following gains in New York, but trade was light with traders awaiting U.S. petroleum stock data.

New front-month July crude stood at $28.50 per barrel at 0110 GMT, up nine cents from Tuesday's close in New York, where it rose 12 cents to $28.41.

Volume for the contract was a modest 724 lots.

The market is supported by expectations that petroleum figures due out later in the day would show just a small increase in fuel supplies.

"The market is seeking direction. Until the U.S. petroleum data is out, traders are unwilling to take positions," a Tokyo-based broker said.

Analysts surveyed by Reuters forecast that the data would show that crude increased by 1.00 million barrels in the week that ended May 16.

Gasoline stocks were expected to post an average increase of 900,000 barrels, the survey showed.

Fears of more attacks following a spate of suicide bombings across the Middle East provided support to the market.

The United States ordered increased vigilance on Tuesday in case suicide bombings that killed 75 people in Morocco and Saudi Arabia presaged attempts to strike on American soil.

In other news, Venezuela expects to cut its oil output in June to comply with a new OPEC quota of 2.923 million barrels per day (bpd) agreed in late April, the president of state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela told Reuters.

Ali Rodriguez said Venezuela, recovering from an oil strike in December and January, was currently pumping about 3.09 million bpd of crude and exporting 2.91 million bpd of oil.

In products trade, June gasoline was at 85.05 cents per gallon, up 0.03 cent, while June heating oil was at 73.40 cents a gallon, up 0.09 cent.

On the Tokyo Commodity Exchange, benchmark October crude was up 20 yen at 17,250 yen.

New benchmark December gasoline was at 24,090 yen after opening at 24,160 yen, while new benchmark December kerosene was at 27,100 yen after opening at 27,200 yen.

On the Singapore Exchange (SGX), front-month May Middle East crude futures were untraded.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 By: Jose Gregorio Pineda & Jose Gabriel Angarita

VenAmCham's Jose Gregorio Pineda (chief economist) and Jose Gabriel Angarita (economist) write: A controversy has recently sprung up about whether a foreign reserve recovery to the US$18-20 billion range might lead to a lifting of exchange controls, or at least a relaxation of them. But economic analysts consider such a scenario very difficult to achieve, in view of the economic conditions currently prevailing in Venezuela.

Central Bank officials have made it clear that the suspension of the exchange controls will occur at some time in the future and that the current system will be replaced by something else. One of the most important constraints on the adoption of any new foreign exchange system is a normalization of the foreign exchange inflow from oil exports, and that depends entirely on the behavior of international oil prices.

Though this could happen in the second half of the year, it will still be necessary to overcome a variety of problems, including excessive macroeconomic and political volatility which encourage capital flight, and the impact a lifting of the exchange and price controls could have on the economic variables, especially when those effects gain strength the longer the controls remain in place.

One of the options the authorities are examining is the introduction of a tax on foreign exchange transactions and a determination of which transactions would be subject thereto, on the understanding that imports of goods needed by national industry to operate would not be taxes; this arrangement would be accompanied by a monitoring of all transactions taking place in the foreign exchange market.

The feasibility of implementing a system of this kind is directly contingent on the favorable expectations it could generate. And expectations would surely improve if the supply of foreign exchange to the private sector in significant amounts and on a steady basis gets under way, and if the political and social conflict is overcome. All that would make it possible to stimulate national production, which is now deeply depressed by the controls, while minimizing their negative impact and speeding up the control system's relaxation or complete elimination.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 By: David Coleman

Spokane (Washington) USA-based Gold Reserve Inc says it has engaged a mining contractor to extract a bulk sample from the Las Brisas goldmine project in southeastern Bolivar State for a large scale test to be conducted by Cominco Engineering Services (CESL) over the next 10-12 weeks,  sinking exploratory shafts into hardrock mineralization to extract some 750 tonnes to be processed into a gold-copper concentrate at SGS Lakefield Research Limited in Canada.

• A GLDR press release claims that the CESL test will provide final feasibility level data for metal recovery, sizing, engineering and design of the CESL plant and will provide data for predictable reagent consumption and operating and capital cost estimates for the bankable feasibility study.

Behre Dolbear & Co Inc of Denver, Colorado (USA) is said to be advancing with a mine reserve analysis and long-term production schedule for the Las Brisas gold/copper project ... the study was due in May, but GLDR expanded the study's scope to include separate reserve analysis for the CESL process as well as incorporating a conventional smelter process case.  Preliminary pit designs are scheduled to be completed in June with a final report in Q3 2003.

Gold Reserve issued their press release earlier today on Canada's business wire with the usual disclaimer that the release may include both historical information and "forward-looking statements" relating to future results, which involve risks and uncertainties.  VHeadline.com is accustomed to treating GLDR press releases with due care, attention and skepticism as a result of their somewhat erratic operating history in Venezuela.