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All things considered, Alexis Tsipras is wrong on Ukraine. The fact that EU policies have had such a destabilising effect on the country, and that even today the EU is not offering anything like adequate aid, are not sufficient to justify Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its support for separatists in the East.

Whatever one’s take on dependency theory, it should be self-evident that no democratic country can support running primary surpluses of up to 5% of GDP over decades, as called for by the Memorandum, when over 25% of its population is unemployed, poverty is endemic and the productive base of the country has been ravaged. Given similarities to economic conditions during the Great Depression, the EU should consider the victory of a democratic party like SYRIZA a relief. Still, it remains a source of surprise that the EU did not move to link debt reduction to GDP growth before April of 2014, in other words before the Euro elections, when such a move might more easily have been coupled with accelerating the pace of the structural reforms that are needed to strengthen Greece’s private and public sectors. 

It is already exposing Greece to criticism. But can Greece’s economy – in particular its banking sector – survive such brinkmanship on all fronts for even a short period of time?

it is a bit geographically challenging to describe it as the development bank of the ‘South,’ given that Russia is one of the founding members; the largest founding member is entirely north of the Tropic of Cancer except for a tiny sliver (China); and a third was entirely north of the Equator the last time I checked a world map (India).

Many predict or at least hope that the new lending institution will improve the access of middle and low-income countries to financing for infrastructure.

 If the BRICS bank can operate less bureaucratically than the World Bank, that would be a substantial gain in itself.

why is it necessary for countries to borrow to build, for example a new airport? The problem is never ‘money.’  Any government of a country that has its own currency can borrow from the central bank (this would not apply to the 14 members of the West and Central African currency zones). Only one reason comes to mind about borrowing from abroad: that the project may require substantial imports of materials. Thus, the purpose of the borrowing is to obtain US dollars, yen, renminbi, etc.  

is this Gang of Five likely to shift international lending in a more humane and flexible direction as Oxfam hopes?  We should note that the voting proposal for the BRICS bank follows the IMF/World Bank model – money votes with shares, reflecting each government's financial contribution. The largest voting share goes to China, whose record on investments in Africa is nothing short of appalling (see my discussion of Chinese capital in Zambia).

Much better than a project bank for the ‘South’ would be an institution providing long-term loans in foreign currencies. This would have several major advantages over the BRICS bank as envisaged. First, the loans could be made on the basis of a judgment about the ability of the government to repay, not a narrow assessment of a specific project. This rather difficult judgment is the de facto basis of all loan repayment – can the country's export sectors generate the foreign exchange to service the debt? Second, the borrowing country's external debt would increase by the foreign currency component of the project; the rest would be financed domestically. This arrangement would be in line with the famous advice of John Maynard Keynes in 1933, ‘let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national’ (emphasis added). 

The suspicion uppermost in my mind is that the purpose of the BRICS bank, as a project funding bank, is to link the finance offered, to the construction firms and materials suppliers located in the BRICS themselves. Certainly, the Chinese Government is notorious for doing this (see 'China insists on "tied aid" in Africa').