Por LINGLING WEI

BEIJING—Los bancos estatales chinos buscan expandir sus créditos a países latinoamericanos ricos en materias primas usando el yuan en vez del dólar. La iniciativa es parte de un esfuerzo más amplio del gobierno para promover el uso internacional de su divisa, según fuentes al tanto.

Desde principios del año pasado, el Banco de Exportaciones-Importaciones de China ha estado en negociaciones con el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo para crear un fondo que provea hasta US$1.000 millones en financiación en yuanes para proyectos de infraestructura en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, los cuales ya son proveedores claves de minerales y cultivos para China, dijeron las fuentes. El fondo podría ser lanzado este año, manifestaron.

Los entidades firmaron un acuerdo en septiembre bajo el cual el banco China Exim se comprometió a ofrecer hasta US$200 millones para financiar el comercio entre China y la región. Al menos parte de ese financiamiento será provisto en yuanes.

El Banco de Desarrollo de China, por su parte, ha recaudado fondos en su divisa en el floreciente mercado de deuda en yuanes de Hong Kong, para financiar una parte de su préstamo de 70.000 millones de yuanes (US$11.100 millones) a Venezuela, el cual forma parte de una serie de créditos a largo plazo a cambio de petróleo acordados en 2010. Desde mediados de ese año, el banco ha colocad cerca de US$2.000 millones en deuda en yuanes en Hong Kong, según el proveedor de datos Dealogic.

China busca para darle al yuan un papel más amplio en el comercio y las inversiones. En su calidad de segunda economía del mundo, aspira a ser una potencia global con una divisa global. Se espera que, con el correr de los años, el yuan emerja como un depósito de valor a la par del dólar, el euro y el yen.

Sin embargo, debido a que Beijing aún controla de cerca el valor del yuan y los flujos de capital, los bancos estatales de China han encontrado pocos receptores para sus préstamos denominados en yuanes fuera del país, especialmente en mercados desarrollados como Estados Unidos y Europa. “

Los bancos estatales chinos están enfocando sus esfuerzos en América Latina, donde China ve una oportunidad para elevar el perfil de la divisa en una región que depende de la demanda china para impulsar su economía en momentos en que Europa podría caer en recesión y la recuperación de EE.UU. sigue siendo débil.

“La debilidad el dólar ha elevado el costo de los commodities importados por China, así que conseguir que el yuan tenga un papel en las cotizaciones de los commodities podría ayudar a estabilizar sus precios y reducir la presión inflacionaria”, dijo Ye Xiang, ex funcionario del Banco Popular de China quien ahora se desempeña como director gerente de VisionGain Capital, una firma de inversión de Hong Kong.

El interés de China en Latinoamérica ha crecido en forma exponencial en la última década, abarcando compras de petróleo, cobre, soya y otras materias primas y ayudando a desarrollar la infraestructura en el hemisferio para producir y transportar esos productos.

El comercio entre China y Latinoamérica y el Caribe ascendió a más de US$188.000 millones el año pasado frente a apenas US$12.000 millones en 2000, según el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, el cual ofrece financiamiento para 26 países de la región. En 2008, China se convirtió en miembro del BID, con sede en Washington, el cual históricamente ha estado bajo el control de EE.UU.

Muchos analistas creen que a medida que el yuan se vuelva más disponible en los mercados extranjeros a través de los préstamos de los bancos chinos, comenzará a representar un porcentaje más alto de las transacciones internacionales. Beijing comenzó a permitir que el comercio transfronterizo fuera cobrado y pagado en su moneda hace más dos años y desde entonces, el comercio en yuanes ha crecido a cerca de 10% del intercambio total de China. Los analistas de Deutsche Bank AG predicen que el comercio en yuanes sumará este año 3,7 billones (millones de millones) o 15% del total del país.

La iniciativa de Beijing también se presenta en un momento oportuno: muchos bancos europeos que tradicionalmente habían dominado el mercado latinoamericano podrían replegarse en medio de la crisis de deuda de la euro zona, aseguran los analistas, lo cual le dará a los prestamistas chinos la posibilidad de entrar.

By LETTIE TEAGUE

What would happen if an unattractive, middle-age man opened a wine bar in Manhattan? Probably not much—at least in terms of press coverage. But if a young woman with serious drinking credentials and a closet full of cute dresses did the same thing? If you’ve followed the buzz around Corkbuzz, you already know the answer. Laura Maniec, the 32-year-old Corkbuzz proprietor, has become the putative “It Girl” of the New York wine scene since she opened her wine bar on East 13th Street some three months ago.

Ms. Maniec first won fame at age 29 by becoming the youngest woman in the world ever to be named a Master Sommelier. She was also the wine director of BR Guest restaurant group, a position she held for 10 years before deciding to open a place of her own with a small group of investors, all family and friends.

I asked Ms. Maniec how it feels to be the “It Girl.” She took off her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her dress as she settled into one of the sofas at the front of the wine bar. “I hate making statements about myself,” replied Ms. Maniec, looking uncomfortable enough to suggest this was true. “But humbly, humbly, humbly I think it’ s because I’ve formed relationships with people over the years. For example, when Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon of Champagne Louis Roederer wanted to hold a tasting of off-vintage Cristal, he called me.” Off vintages? That didn’t sound like the sort of thing an “It Girl” of wine would be offered, I said. “We also tasted some great vintages,” Ms. Maniec conceded.

The Corkbuzz wine bar is open seven days a week and Ms. Maniec has yet to miss a single day. She’s on premises about 12 hours every day, which often includes teaching classes in the back of wine bar. The classes started in January and so far topics have ranged from introductory (Wine 101) to Pairing Wine with Takeout Food. Her most recent class, How to Choose a Wine for a Date, took place on Valentine’s Day. “Wines that are easy to find and to enjoy,” she explained.

I suggested trying a glass of wine from the list. What did Ms. Maniec like—or, in her words, what was she ‘crushing on’ these days? The 2009 Clos Cibonne Tibouren rosé from Cotes de Provence, she said decisively. “I’m surprised by how much rosé we’re selling in the dead of winter. I’ve ordered nine cases so far.” The wine was slightly oxidative, less like a classical rosé than a real cross between red and white in texture and aroma. It was a tad esoteric, like much of the wine list. “This list suggests to me that you really want the drinkers to talk with the staff,” I observed, looking over listings such as Botani Moscatel Seco and Ascheri Pelaverga Verduno.

Ms. Maniec looked alarmed. “That’s not good. That’s not what I want. I don’t want someone to have to talk to us if they don’t want to. I need to do something about that,” she said, picking up a copy of the list for further examination. “I want at least 40% of the wines to be recognizable names,” she said, pointing out Chardonnay and Muscadet. “But maybe that’s not enough. Maybe it should be 50%.”

She related a story about the recent visit by her sister, who lives in Chicago (where the next Corkbuzz may open as early as next year). “My sister loves New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, but I didn’t have any. I felt bad about that.” Her sister had to settle for an Albarino, a white wine from northern Spain. “But I could find some good wines,” mused Ms. Maniec. “It wouldn’t have to be something obvious like a Marlborough Sauvignon—maybe a wine from Nelson. I have a lot of notes somewhere on some New Zealand Sauvignons that I tasted.”

Never mind the credentials or the cute dresses: It’s the fact that she truly wants people to be happy when they’re drinking wine—whether it’s a Spanish Moscatel or a Santa Barbara Chardonnay—that makes Laura Maniec the “It Girl” of wine in New York.

By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS

Malibu, Calif.

A number of recent scholars and scholarly exhibitions have studied the rebirth of classicism in European modernist art produced in the years and wake of World War I. Many have argued that the radical figurative art of this period, marked by monumental forms, fluid line, ordered compositions and frequent evocations of a mythic, Mediterranean arcadia, can be aligned with the era’s bourgeois conservatism, reactionary politics and, at its darkest, the rising specter of totalitarian regimes.

In a provocative and demanding new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Villa, itself a pristine reproduction of an ancient artifact and ideal setting in which to contemplate the relevance of classical art in the modern world, Christopher Green of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Jens M. Daehner, a Getty curator of antiquities, have revisited and crucially revamped this well-trodden critical terrain. By juxtaposing the work of four profoundly disparate artists—Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia—with a selection of ancient artworks, all but one of the latter from the Getty’s collection, they compel us to reconsider in the broadest possible terms the appeal of classicism in an age when it was not only an abiding aesthetic and political force but a living phenomenon that demanded modern reinvention.

The exhibition is organized by theme, rather than chronologically, and studiously avoids pedantic pairings that might suggest definitive sources or direct comparisons between old and new. Instead, galleries such as that devoted to “Myths and Stories” brilliantly capture the dialogue across centuries that allowed modern artists to imagine redolent new contexts for classical art. In such dreamlike, revelatory images as “The Soothsayer’s Recompense” (1913), for example, de Chirico creates a haunting, modern locale for his painted evocation of the “Sleeping Ariadne,” one of the most renowned sculptural remnants of antiquity (de Chirico knew life-size depictions in Italy of the mythic, abandoned nymph, not the smaller figure here on view). Betraying none of the original narrative and only the most streamlined, modern vision of a classical arcade and deserted, raking piazza, de Chirico’s painting and especially his Ariadne, frozen in stony silence, powerfully convey the wistful, elegiac aura that the memory of the antique could summon in a contemporary setting.

Picasso, too, evoked the presence of classical sculpture in his painting, though usually in more emphatic and accessible terms. In such monumental, immobile figures as “The Source” (1921), a massively conceived and thickly painted reclining river goddess, the artist stages, as Mr. Green astutely argues, a sculpture vivante against a scrimlike landscape, and, in her far-from-elegant form and overtly theatrical space, exploits the artifice and inauthenticity of a static, classical ideal as reimagined in his work.

Any hint of parodic critique disappears, however, in Picasso’s lyrical, neoclassical drawings from the 1920s that explore the timeless virtues of classical line and form. In a connecting corridor in the exhibition, entitled “Graphic Mythologies,” his “Nessus and Dejanira” (1920), for example, is aligned with painted red-figured and white-ground Greek funerary jars and an incised, bronze Etruscan mirror to show how the subtle economy of means that marked Picasso’s invigorated and elegant new linear style owed as much to the classical past as did his painted evocations of ancient sculptures.

Picabia’s strange, decorative paintings, known as “transparencies,” hang in several of the exhibition’s galleries, and offer far more literal quotations from a past the artist refused to reinvent. With large, overlaid outlines of recognizable ancient and renaissance forms and stubbornly opaque subjects, they critique, as Picabia himself suggested, what he saw as the counterfeit classicism of his peers. One of them, the “Adam and Eve” of 1931, is exhibited near ancient Greek drinking vessels. Known as “eye cups,” they feature, as does the later painting, large staring eyes, and perhaps, the curators venture, an uncanny shared fascination with the mesmerizing power of the gaze.

Throughout the exhibition, the thoughtful array of selected antiquities and early-20th-century works also makes clear how indelibly our vision of ancient art has been shaped by modern artists. The missing limbs and head of the unrestored, Roman “Torso of a Draped Female” seem utterly dispensable when the sculpture is seen in the company of “The Poet’s Anguish” (1914-15), one of many enigmatic paintings in which de Chirico crowns an armless classical statue with a metaphysical mannequin’s head. To modern eyes, the focus on the beautifully articulated classical “Torso” is thoroughly of a piece not only with de Chirico but, as Mr. Daehner has suggested, with the most forceful, fragmentary sculptures of Auguste Rodin.

In far more legible fashion, Léger’s “Nude on a Red Background” (1927) celebrates its modern antiquity as it seamlessly merges past and present. Painted on a saturated, blank background the artist appropriated from modern advertising, his nude, an ancient Aphrodite type transfigured by Léger’s gleaming industrial aesthetic, is thrust into our space and compels us to see the beauty and also the modernity of classical form. For Léger, as for Picasso, de Chirico and many of their vanguard peers, “the art of antiquity had meaning only if,” as Mr. Green writes, “it spoke in the present tense.”

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.